Gender Rules: Jane Eyre

The peak of socialist ideology dawned during the industrial revolution when class divisions were constructed to rule the labor force. Charlotte Bronte places the protagonist, Jane Eyre, in the position between lower and upper class to critique social injustices. This world Bronte has created for her is polluted with tyranny, disease, deception, and a false sense of the afterlife. Bestowing Jane Eyre such hardships to overcome does well to scrutinize the oppression of a capitalist world. And what better way to forge such a thought than to structure the center of this capitalistic corruption in the one nation that spawned the industrial revolution itself? The novel Jane Eyre exposes the tyranny of a capitalist society as the young woman meets with a variety of characters from a number of backgrounds and classes. These characters are doomed by their environments established by class division. It is very reasonable to interpret a Marxist reading of this book for that very fact. Though, Marxism was not a political ideology at the time, the oppression by the wealthy still remained. Throughout history, oppression has been upheld with a ruling social class over a lower class by religious devices to deceive the masses. Many characters in this story represent those religious devices as well as economic tyrants and the victims they exploit. That is why a Marxist can use this novel to uncover the true nature of class division. Jane Eyre is also often referred to as an animal, a rat, or less than a servant, having no purpose. She is an orphan. A charity case. Any family relations she may have are of poor wealth, thus she represents the epitome of the lower class, the lowest of the low.