Publisher's Synopsis
Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), course: Proseminar I: Reading the Novel, language: English, abstract: 165 years after its first publication in England, Charlotte Brontë's "female Bildungsroman" (Gilbert and Gubar 339) "Jane Eyre" still prompts questions for both its readership and the literary scholars of today. Depicting the protagonist's development from a poor orphan girl to a young governess who "yearns for true liberty" (Gilbert and Gubar 347), Brontë evokes a utopian ideal of a strong-minded heroine who defies social customs by marrying her master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. When pondering over Brontë's comment to her publisher in 1848, "[t]he standard hero[e]s and heroines of novels are personages in whom I could never . . . take an interest, believe to be natural or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply not write at all" (qtd. in Brennan 16), one can draw conclusions about Brontë's intention to reward her heroine with Rochester, who is widely accepted as the epitome of a Byronic hero (cf. Wootton 231, Gilbert and Gubar 337) - a "unique" (Thorslev 12) hero whose name re-fers to its real-life impersonator, the English Romantic poet George Gordon "Lord" Byron. As this paper is concerned with the question whether the Byronic hero embo-dies the desirable husband for a governess in nineteenth-century England, a brief overview of the reception of Byron and his works as a "cultural phenomenon" (Elfenbein 47) during Brontë's time seems necessary and will be dealt with in the first part of this pa-per. Andrew Elfenbein's study Byron and the Victorians from 1995 serves as a valuable source which particularly considers Byron's female readership and offers reasons for his popularity among them. Since most scholars view Rochester as a Byronic hero while merely focussing on his physi
