feminist individualism

In its deployment of a variety of generic forms and strategies—romance, gothic, bildungsroman—Jane Eyre is representative of numerous eighteenth and nineteenth-century textual traditions, and as Gilbert and Gubar have remarked, also accessible to readers, as “we tend today to think of Jane Eyre as…the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floor plan)” (337). Yet, despite a growing interest in how didacticism shaped the reading public of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the acknowledged pervasiveness of advice books specifically addressed to female audiences, there has been no attempt to explore how didactic traditions influenced mid- nineteenth-century novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.(1) Scenes of women teaching and learning comprise a substantial portion of Jane Eyre’s action and function to shape the terms of its discourse, but these scenes are generally overlooked in the interests of emphasizing Jane’s escape from this servitude, an escape associated with the novel’s influential portrayal of feminist individualism

http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue53/hanley.htm