What She is Not: Jane Eyre and the Female Desirability

In the Victorian era appropriate behaviour was dictated by gender-based social norms. Not only the law was judging female actions, but the law was also judged according to the idealized conception of womanhood. This paper traces the transformation of Jane Eyre from the Victorian woman to a desirable woman in the light of the new ideal of female desirability by Nancy Armstrong (1990). She states that the female as the object of desire, attains a sense of power over the male, and is defined not by the extrinsic influences of political and social status but by the intrinsic workings of her mind. The paper will explain why and how Jane Eyre asserts her own autonomy to make controversial decisions and behaves according to individual codes of desire to battle the expectations of Victorian society and brings change into the female desirability to show what she is not. The paper concludes that Jane Eyre has established the new female ideal - a woman more confident in her own intrinsic desirability. She was a rebel, to a great extent, against the Nineteenth-Century domestic feminine ideal which the Victorians were busy building up. In other words, she makes great effort to shape her life with energy and vigor. She struggles against conventions and aspires for liberty to breathe according to her own will in a world dominated by power of tradition and conventions. She explicitly challenges and condemns the conventions of the domestic feminine ideal and becomes the source to empower the middle class woman with an ability to make autonomous decisions, and a sense of desirability who, nevertheless, to fulfill her emotional and physical role of mother and wife, sacrificed her personal desires