Construção de gênero, formação feminina e loucura em Jane Eyre: uma leitura feminista

Abstract

Women’s fight for equal rights throughout history is well known. In Victorian England, a time when women’s education was aimed at the domestic sphere, one could see the evidence of a beginning movement towards women’s equality in social, political, and everyday life. Based on this premise, we chose to analyze in this research the novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, in order to observe the female characters’ development within the work and the possible influences of the Victorian Age, thus verifying the way the characters question certain traditional values of that time period imposed by patriarchy, and seek to advance opportunities for that period in terms of women's rights. For this work, we will use as theoretical background the studies of Beauvoir (1949), Foucault (1977) and the feminist contributions of Deveaux (1994) and Gilbert and Gubar (1980). In addition, we question the female representation through a perspective of gender construction, seeking to analyze the patterns of femininity that are imposed on women in literature.