Jane Eyre Obstacles

1042 Words5 Pages
During the Victorian era, people were concerned with wealth and status, but did not care much for morality. They were more concerned with what society thought is right than what they believed to be right. When faced with obstacles in life, people would choose the immoral path instead of the harder yet moral path. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the title character faces many social and emotional obstacles throughout which she tries to remain moral and true to herself. Jane Eyre struggles with the social class system from a young age. Since she is an orphan, she is seen as lower class and is often mistreated, even though she is one through no fault of her own. Jane lives in Gateshead with her aunt, cousins, and their servants who mistreat…show more content…
Once she becomes a governess, she is offered a teaching job in a place called Thornfield. Thornfield is the home of her boss, Rochester, and Adele Varens, the girl she is employed to teach. She later falls in love with Rochester, and they are engaged to be married. This could be problematic seeing that Jane was just a governess and Rochester was of a higher class. Early in the nineteenth century the labels "working classes" and "middle class" were already coming into common usage. The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce, industry, and the professions, evolved into an "upper class"”(www.victorianweb.org Oct 10th). Society would look down on their marriage because they both come from different social classes. When she finds out on the day of their wedding that he is already married she has a choice to make: should she marry Rochester even though she knows its wrong, or should she do the right thing and not get…show more content…
Jane also didn’t want to marry Rochester because even though she was his equal intellectually, she wasn’t his equal economically: “In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte implies that people, especially women, marry for cash, property, and social status, but this rarely brings personal happiness”(www.scientificjournals.org Oct 10th). This shows that Jane has strong morals and values because she doesn’t want to marry Rochester for the money or to raise her social status. Jane didn’t want Rochester to “own” her; she wanted to stay her own person and felt as if he was trying to own her through buying her dresses and jewelry before they were even
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