Jane Eyre: Unfolding the Unbeaten

Many critics feel that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) lends a voice to gender equality and liberated femininity. At the same time, they do not perceive Jane in the role of a detective, who through her curiosity, is able to interrogate the patriarchal dominance of Mr. Rochester, and also to design herself as a lady who sees life at Thornfield logically which puts into consideration man's supposed prerogative to dominate truth. Jane discovers male criminality, and parallel to that her curiosity takes her towards knowing her own self. Her flowering personality is molded by an expressive, extrovert and questioning self which seemed against the law to the middle-class concepts of the age. Jane stresses upon her feminine identity via her detective task, making use of her anxiety to authorize her and represent the liberated thinking for which Mr. Rochester loves her. Charlotte Bronte forms a concept of selfhood for her heroine that succeeds in questioning male concepts of standards providing Jane a false-legal power to recognize not only Mr. Rochester's, but even the crime of women. Jane is a victim of her faith in Rochester. The so-called search for the truth is only a search for fulfillment and self-discovery, thereafter brought about by overcoming her suppressed anger. Jane's success in unfolding the mystery of Grace and Rochester would have entitled her to be her employer's superior. Jane Eyre is a realistic novel with improbable and gothic components, of which the vampire motif is a part. Jane avoids possession by any negative typification. If she is overtaken by an archetype, it is the ideal of love, and this possession empowers her to become her own self---a complete woman. The present study struggles to unfold the unbeaten. In Jane Eyre, the experience of a woman's gazing on the freak body is portrayed as no less problematic; staring on is also staring in and being stared upon.