Serving two masters. Or the dialectics of romantic victorian literature

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate the strategies used by Charlotte Brontë, in the novel Jane Eyre, so as to solve the protagonist’s dilemma of choosing between what she considers to be morally right, or to follow her intuition and her heart. This impasse is referred to, here, as the “Victorian Predicament,” the clash between two conflicting aspects of Victorianism. On the one hand, there is the rigid code of morality, represented by the Evangelical Movement, proposing an ideal of respectability suitable for the new emerging middle classes. On the other hand, we have the influence of the Romantic Movement, which poses a new ethics and a new aesthetics. The idea suggested is that the use of symbolic imagery solves this difficulty of coping with the simultaneous commitments to morality and passion, and forges the style characterized by the use of poetic prose that is the mark of Brontë’s writing.