Dramaticidade, subjetividade e sacralidade em Jane Eyre, o romance de formação de Charlotte Brontë.

Abstract

Jane Eyre, the most applauded novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë, has been investigated by the literary critics from the last decades from many different perspectives, due to the complex and unsettling quality of this classic formation novel (bildungsroman). Among the most visible critical tendencies, we can emphasize the feminist reading of this Brontë‟s narrative, which, in the 1970‟s, meaningfully contributed to the insertion of this work in the canon of the western feminine writing. Nevertheless, more recently, some authors have been inclined to study the religiosity of the novel, connecting this issue with other elements of the narrative, without presenting, however, a deeper reflection about the manifestations of sacredness in the novel. We believe that these manifestations are mainly linked to the modern notion of subjectivity, a concept which was improved and exalted by the romantic movement, an influential aesthetic movement, originated and developed during the decades preceding the publication of Brontë‟s novel. Therefore, the present thesis aims at promoting an interpretation of Jane Eyre from the sacred perspective, related to the romantic notion of subjectivity, and also to the concept of drama, which permeates the protagonist‟s formation process. In this process, the opposition social / natural symbolically corresponds to the opposition profane / sacred. Society and nature are the places where the heroine transits, experiencing conflicts and sufferings, which are indispensable for her formation process and for the maturation of her character. We attempt to demonstrate, thus, that although the protagonist‟s formation trajectory marked by dramatic events occurs in the direction of a preparation to the practical, profane and social world, this trajectory does not prescind of a symbolical relation with sacredness, which is mainly expressed through the mystical relation established between the subjectivity and nature. In this way, we hope our research contributes to the interdisciplinary literary studies, generally, and to the critical studies of this important novel by Charlotte Brontë, more specifically.