1. The novel was written in the 19th century and in those time people was divided into three different groups. They were either in the upper class where they inherited money and were really wealthy, or they were part of being in the middle class who were at that stage the relatively smaller group, and then there was the working class people, who were associated with the people with diseases and had criminal records, they were seen as the people being a charity and the other groups pitied them.
Women and men were also divided into two separate groups. The woman were supposed to be and stereotyped to be passive, emotional and nursing to their husbands. Woman didn’t need to work; if they did work they were seen as not being a real woman. The men on the other hand were the ones with the aggression and to be rational, and they had to be muscular.
As the time passed the roles of the men and women changed, woman became more public and in that order they became more masculine and more independent. The men stopped working as hard and eventually became the feminine figure. This caused a weakness amongst the upper class but luckily over tome it changed again.
People were put in their certain groups and even though it wasn’t always that way people always had the set of beliefs and the “ideal” idea for certain people.
2. 1. Motivation for her to write this Preface was to show response to all the people’s criticism she received after publishing the first addition. She wanted people to stop with their critics and insults; she corrected them by publishing the Preface and ended up by making them to look stupid.
2. Currer Bell corrected the criticism she got by repeating their ideas and made them look stupid at the end. By writing it she found why they criticised her, not for the novel itself but because she was a woman, and in the proses she urged woman to stand behind her and made their voices count.
3. She wrote under a scale name, a name appropriate for both the sexes. By doing this she could write about what she wanted to, without people jumping on her case and giving her grieve about it.
3.
The sex of the writer was definitely an issue to the people. “Name and sex of the writer is still a mystery”. They looked deeper into the type of writing there was used and found that certain quotes looked as if it had to be a man who wrote it, “Throughout there is masculine power, breadth and shrewdness, combined with masculine hardness, coarse and freedom of expression”. The other quotes showed the opposite and it looked as if it was written by a woman, “the love scenes glows with fire” woman get so emotional and passionate about these things.
There has been discriminating as soon as they realized it was a woman who wrote it, they realized that she had the power to write this good novel, and then instead they criticized her to get at her, “Such genuine power with such horrible taste”. She was a lower class woman in her book as well as she as a woman, and was at the bottom of the human life form, “Making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader” even though the woman was the lowest form of human life these woman still had soles.
The readers felt offended and embarrassed and so they ended up criticising her, and her novel. “She has inherited in fullest measure the greatest sin of our time- the sin of pride. Jane Eyre is proud and therefore she is ungrateful too.” This showed how things worked in those years.
The readers were so offended when they discovered it was a woman who wrote such a brilliant piece of work. They criticised instead of giving her the credit, they were so scared that other woman would also take the opportunity to start writing and doing the same as she did. In those times they also couldn’t give too much credit to a woman in order to keep the men better as a woman for them not to lose their authority. The other thing that was a problem to the readers was the fact that she was a lower class woman, and that made them think, that she might be cleverer than the learned and well educated people. They felt it necessary to not let this be and let a woman with lower standard influence other people, for than they criticised the book and made it sound as if it was the worst book ever.
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