Essay: Characterization in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

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Essay: Characterization in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles D…

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저자 : 이풍호 Paul Lee     시집명 : Collected Essays
출판(발표)연도 : 1991. 7. 19     출판사 : Eastwind Press, Los Angeles, California
Paul Lee
Professor Carroll
English 320
July 29, 1991
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Characterization in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations


Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations clearly reflect the influence of the moral and social station of the nineteenth-century society in England. The use of characterization in Jane Eyre and Great Expectations of Victorian literature is applied to male and female relationships, justice and injustice. The workings of justice profoundly influenced the characters of Bronte and Dickens.
In Jane Eyre's character development, Jane is the orphaned daughter of a poor person and his disinherited wife. From the beginning, Jane demonstrates a strong need to be artistically talented, individually responsible, matured and developed sense of morality. At a Lowood boarding school for orphaned girls, Jane, who distinguishes insensitivity and hardship, is tested to

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the limit, climaxing in a terrible loss, the pathetic death of Helen Burns. Helen characterizes the paradox of Jane's weakness and strength when she accuses Jane of caring too much about human relationships and lacking self-control: "... Jane! you think much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement..." (70).
Characterizing Jane, Bronte describes that life in her society, is to lived in intellectual pursuits and in human society. After schooling at Lowood, Jane eventually takes a position as governess to a little French girl, Adele Varens, of the Rochester family. There, Jane meets Rochester and she develops a mutual admiration and love with him. After year's separation before their eventual marriage, she establishes her independence. Jane and Rochester finally marry and find happiness together. Bronte shows us that Jane has metamorphosed from the frustrated, lonely orphan among unfeeling relatives to an independent, self-confident woman and through her humbling, trying experiences, she has become a whole person.
Bronte, who was a writer echoing an aspect of the Victorian literature, obviously respects for the family in her characters. For example, On the night of Jane's return from her visit to Gatehead, Rochester takes

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pleasure in the warm family grouping near his hearth, where Mrs. Fairfax works at her knitting, Jane sits nearby, and Adele nestles close to Jane (130-131). In contrast to the Reed household of mean-spirited widow of Jane Eyre's uncle, Bronte makes a strong case of a loving family which accepts and nurtures its individual members.
Bronte's characters pay for their sins: the bully, John Reed, dies a sordid, violent death; Sarah Reed rejects Jane's forgiveness for her early cruelty and dies alone; Awaring Rochester's plan to marry Jane, Bertha sets fire to Jane's bed, then leaps from the roof to her death. Of characters in Bronte's Jayne Eyre, the most significant punishment is Edward Rochester's loss of eyes and hand, home and prospective wife. But Bronte justifies Rochester's suffering as a necessary awakening which gives him renewed relationship with God, marriage with Jane, and recovering his partial vision.
In Pip's character development of Dickens' Great Expectations, the complexity of the struggle between good and evil is continuously demonstrated. Pip, who is the narrator and chief character of the novel, has been an orphan since infancy. In characterization of Pip, Dickens makes a serious effort to present the ambivalence of the problem of good and evil. Pip is not simply a young man

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of native goodness who is thrown on adversity but finally rising above it. He is a complicated mixture of good and bad such as considerate and selfish, loving and unkind, humble and ambitious, honest and self-deceiving.
Dickens was known as a master of quick characterization through appearance, but he doesn't describe what Pip looks like. We can see that his concern is the changes that takes place inside Pip. The external facts of Pip's life are very simple, despite the series of dramatic episodes he engages in. From the beginning of Dickens' Great Expectations, as an orphan who never saw his parents, Pip is raised "by hand" by his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery of wife of the blacksmith. Pip begins his career by finding a convict, Abel Magwitch, on the marshes one morning when he has gone out to visit his parents' graves.
Pip's association with Miss Havisham and fascination by Estella, his great expectations, which he finally learns, have been provided by Magwitch, and after Magwitch's capture and death, his eventual discovery that his convict was one of the five genuinely good people he has ever known is significant relationship of Dickens' characters. The others are Biddy, Joe Gargery, Herbert

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Pocket, and John Wemmick. The point of the novel is that Pip himself finally becomes a good man.
Dickens was a genius for creating such an infinite variety characters. And the characters are generally outlined with very clear characteristics. At the time Pip first meets Miss Havisham, Dickens describes her like she is a gaunt white-haired woman with wild eyes. And he also describes Miss Havisham that "she has not quite finished dressing, for she has but one shoe on - the other is on the table near her hand - her veil is but half arranged, her watch and chain are not put on, and some lace for her bosom lies with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaps about the looking-glass" (87).
Dickens' use of characterization effectively supports his novel's basic theme that true goodness does not come from social station or wealth but it comes from inner worth. Dickens illustrates Joe, Biddy, and Abel Magwitch for an explanation of the use of characterization. Dickens declares that Pip has to learn "true goodness" in the hard way and for all his ignorance during the days when he is a gentleman with great expectations, his salvation is that he finally does learn. We can also accept Estella learns "true goodness"

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in the hard way, too, in both of Dickens' endings for this novel.
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre tells us the romantic conventions of the Victorian era and also recreates many incidents of Bronte's own life like suffering of young girls in love. Jane Eyre narrates her life - from the age of ten through the first ten years of her marriage. Bronte characterizes Jane Eyre as a strong, readily identifiable character, rich in individuality and determination and fortified by religious faith. Bronte also makes Jane never loses her sense of self, nor she compromise her values throughout her struggle for independence and love.
In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens tries to say about the characters that the good people are for the most part the working people and the rebels like Joe Gargery, the blacksmith and Abel Magwitch, the convict. In Dickens' characterization, we can see an interesting character - Magwitch, the convict and rebel, spends and loses his life trying to make Pip a gentleman. The point is that Dickens wrote about people, some of them good, some of them bad. We can understand that his sympathies fall into every characters - good or bad. Dickens shows

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his strong moral feelings in Great Expectations as he has passionate convictions about many social questions and a passionate hatred of such institutions as courts, jails, and the law in general.
These enormous skillful use of characterization in Bronte's Jane Eyre and Dickens' Great Expectations supports the plot structures and themes, and makes the readers understand the moral structure in the life of the common people in the nineteenth-century English society.

- Paul Lee 이풍호 시인
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