by Honi A.

Created on: October 18, 2009

From the three Bronte sisters, Charlotte is certainly the most creative ad productive writer. She writes a number of novels which are to transform the social and cultural perception of the woman in a patriarchal world. To some extent, we may consider her not only a precursor of feminism, but also of psychoanalysis, because she frequently deals - in her novels - with the individual's inner conflicts between his/her true self identity and what is usually acceptable in society. One may say that she anticipates a trend in the European literature that is going to fascinate many artists of the twentieth century - the psychoanalytic novel. Therefore she can be considered a feminist and a psychoanalytic writer avant la lettre.

Her masterpiece, "Jane Eyre", announces the author's "feminist" and "psychoanalytic" intentions from the very beginning, more precisely in the "Preface" to the second edition of the book. Responding to a group of critics who disagreed with the moral conduct (quite rebellious) of the protagonist of the novel - Jane Eyre -, Charlotte Bronte reminds everybody that "conventionality is not morality" and "to attack the first is not to assail the last". Metaphorically, she makes here a distinction between nature and society or what is everlasting and what is transitory in life. In Freud's later terms this would be a distinction between id and super-ego, the actual unmodified identity of the individual and the dissembled social self.

Jane Eyre is only in appearance "immoral", since she does not always accept the social convention (she rebels against her evil aunt as a child, she rebels against oppression in the charity school, refusing to adopt Helen Burn's spiritual Christian submission, although she admires it, she rebels against Rochester, and his overwhelming personality and, finally, she refuses to marry St. John just for the sake of a convention), because in reality she is true to herself. Her freedom issues out from this honesty with herself (it is not accidental that the novel is dedicated to Thackeray, the creator of "Vanity Fair", since Jane Eyre is an upside down image of Becky Sharp; she refuses to feign herself in order to be accepted by the patriarchal order, preferring to rebel against conventions and remain true to her id).

In psychoanalytic terms, Jane's "rebellion" overcomes repression and makes her independent from conventions. In feminist terms, Jame belongs (already) to the second stage of evolution described by Showalther (the feminist stage), dominated by the attitude of rejection/rebellion and the state of autonomy. Jane Eyre moves from the margin of the system ti its center, by expressing - sometimes aggressively - her self, her id.

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