The Language of Slavery in Jane Eyre Essays -- Jane Eyre Bronte Papers

While Brontes invigorated is a story of one womans rise from dependant, antique oppression to financial stability and emotional liberation, the narration of that story is a lot turns to the figurative representation of slavery. Bronte applies the metaphor of slavery to the domestic trials facing British women at the time. Time and again her narrative language turns to this device in order to draw parallels between slavery and other vehicles of oppression, namely grammatical gender and class. Just as the majority of issues in the novel ar two-sided, the implications of these parallels are two-sided as well. Carl Plasa, Lecturer in English at the University of Wales College of Cardiff, all the way explains the dichotomy in his essay dull Revolt The deployment of a metaphorics of slavery as a way of representing forms of domestic oppression is, from one perspective, twain rhetorically powerful and a politically radical maneuver. Yet from another(prenominal) perspective--that pre cisely of those who are or have been enslaved, experienced the metaphor, as it were--such a strategy can only be viewed as deeply problematic. (67-8)If Bronte had cancelled to these metaphors solely as a way of representing forms of domestic oppression the opinion would have been positive. Her references to slavery would have come across as rhetorically powerful and politically radical. Unfortunately, Bronte goes too far. She creates a narrator, Jane, who exploits images of slavery, using them to invite personal gain and dismissing them when convenient. It is obvious that Bronte makes use of the experiences of the British colonies throughout the text of Jane Eyre. In an effort to make her readers more comfortable Bronte chooses not to denotation the issue of British dom... ...hough her troping of the language of slavery is problematic, she creates through her novel, as Meyers says in her essay, a fascinating example of the associations-- and dissociations-- between a resistance to the ideology of male subordination and a resistance to the ideology of colonial domination (162). Works Cited Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1848. Ed. Beth Newman. Boston Bedford/St. Martins, 1996. Burns, Sir Alan. History of the British West Indies. capital of the United Kingdom Allen & Unwin, 1965. Meyer, Susan. From Colonialism and the poetic Strategy of Jane Eyre. Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature A Reader. Ed. Peter Childs. Edinburgh Edinburgh UP, 1999. 149-163. Plasa, Carl. Silent Revolt Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre. The Discourse of Slavery. Ed. Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring. London Routledge, 1994. 64-93.