an analysis of gothic features as a success element in jane eyre论文 定稿.doc

Chapter1 Introduction Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is written in the first person, and told from the viewpoint of its main character, Jane Eyre. As part of her first-person narrative, Bronte uses one of the oldest conventions in English fiction: this novel is allegedly a memoir written by a real woman named Jane Eyre and edited by Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontes pseudonym). (Indeed, the full title of the book is Jane Eyre: an Autobiography. As part of this convention, the narrator occasionally addresses the reader directly with the word reader.) Jane Eyre was published in the middle of the nineteenth century. Charlotte was greatly influenced by the gothic novels that were in fashion before the time of Jane Eyre. The gothic novel was popularized in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was defined by its use of suspense, supernatural elements and desolated locations to generate a gloomy or chilling mood. The protagonist of the novel would generally be female and often face distressing or morbid circumstance. 1.1 Gothic background of Bronte sisters real life Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816, as the third child in a curate family of Haworth in West Yorkshire on the moor. The harsh weather on the wild moor is always full of violent wind, thrilling rain and snow, which is the prototype of the settings in Jane Eyre. While growing up in the lonely stone house on the moor, the six children’s (5 sisters and 1 brother) only communicators were their father, aunt and the books. The family members (their mother and all the 5 children), were all died of the familial disease—pulmonary tuberculosis (in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights it is called “consumption”), except that Charlotte died of septicemia. Though the family was pervaded with the doomed disease, the children never stopped their enthusiasm in reading and writing. In 1824, Charlotte with her sisters was sent by her wealthy godmother to the Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, which she described it as the Lowood Sch