Jane Eyre: an icon for feminism

Hello every one. This is my first post in english. As I am not a native you will probably find mistakes when you read it. If so feel free to correct them. I  will appreciate it because if you correct me  I  won't repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately yesterday  I  have finished reading Jane Eyre. I really enjoyed reading  the novel, so much that I am thinking to reread it and this would be the first time as I have never reread novels.  Generally speaking I enjoyed the novel but there is one point which attracted my attention in a particular manner and I will focus my review on it: Jane's nature, her passionate temper represented, for example, in the following lines:

 "I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I."

"I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty."

"How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?"

"How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth . You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back — roughly and violently thrust me back — into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, 'Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!' And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me — knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!"   Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped- for liberty.

I can't tell you how much  I enjoyed these lines, ones of the best  I have ever read. Charlotte Bronte managed to represent with  a great skill Jane's open act of rebellion against Mrs Reed after she accused her of  being a liar.

Jane was an orphan. Her parents died before she could remember them and after their death her uncle, her mother's brother, decided to take care of her. Unfortunately her uncle died but before dying, in his  death-bed, he made her wife promise she would take care of the child. Mrs Reed didn’t love Jane. On the contrary she hated her until her death.  Nobody  (except for, perhaps, Bessy) in that house loved Jane. In her own words she was:

  

a discord in Gateshead Hall; I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them.

Her cousin John abused her, he threw her a book, making her strike her head against the door and cut it.  When Jane rebelled against him, he bellowed out. His mother came and ordered to take Jane away to the red-room. Here we have another sample of Jane’s passionate nature when she rightly pointed out that the punishment was:

Unjust! - unjust!' said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power; and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression - as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.

After another quarrel  with Mrs Reel (Jane, in an other outburst of passion, told her that her children weren’t  fit to associate with her) she was sent out to school, to Lowood.  In this school Jane knew a girl who would become her close friend,  Helen. Helen had a very different nature from Jane as she keeps her composture every time she was punished. She calmly accepted the punishment. Jane disagreed with  this attitude as she thought that if:

If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again. I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.

Helen and Miss Temple were Jane's only friends at Lowood. Unfortunately Helen died of consumption and when Miss Temple left the school after her marriage with Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, Jane wanted to leave the school too. She had passed  six years as  a student and two years as  a teacher in that strict school which suddenly became a prison:  

I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the two wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits.

Her struggle for liberty is evident in the following lines in which another character trait  emerges which will reappear later on, her restlessness:

I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer

So she advertised for a situation as a governess in a  private family. An old woman, a certain Mrs Fairfax answered her advertisement and, after a tedious delay necessary to obtain a formal leave, she left  Lowood for Thornfield Hall. There she was received by Mrs Fairfax an old and kind woman who lived in the house with Adela,  Jane's pupil, a seven or eight years old child. Adela was a coquette,  docile, even if disinclined to apply, child and Jane get on well both with her and Mrs Fairfax. Nevertheless before long she get bored again:  

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold. 

The following lines show, in my opinion, how much Charlotte was ahead of her time and definitively make Jane an icon for feminism:  

 It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Her struggle for freedom, indipendence (including economic indipendence) continued during her relationship with Mr Rochester. During their second conversation she proved to Mr Rochester that she wasn't a submissive woman by her blunt answer about his plainness and by refusing his right to be a little masterful:

I don't think sir you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have- your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience. 

During the nocturnal encounter in which Mr Rochester proposed to her, Jane proved him that she was also a  passionate woman by giving a vehement answer to his order to stay with him:

"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you, — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; — it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal, — as we are!"

The day after his proposal Mr Rochester took Jane shopping. While he enjoyed doing shopping, she  get annoyed. She thought that that hour was an harassing one. The following lines show in my opinion how modern an heroine Jane was, much more modern than Pretty Woman whose social advancement can be attributed only to her marriage with a rich man:

Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a jewellers shop: the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation. As we re-entered the carriage, and I sat back feverish and fagged, I remembered what, in the hurry of events, dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten — the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to Mrs. Reed: his intention to adopt me and make me his legatee. "It would, indeed, be a relief," I thought, "if I had ever so small an independency; I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden shower falling daily round me.

At the end of the novel Jane took possession of her inheritance and as rich, indipendent woman she got back with Mr Rochester  who need her help. She was very willing to help him because as she pointed out:  

"I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud indipendence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector." 

And I  loved this couple, her stubbornness, and his skill to stand up to her   which converts him in a perfect match.