Why Bronte Chose Byron. "Jane Eyre" and her Byronic Lover

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, printed single-sided, 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 physiognomy (cf. Wootton 231), the second part of this paper draws comparisons between Rochester s character and the main features of a Byronic hero, as Peter L. Thorslev Jr. framed him in depth in his study The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes from 1962. In the third and last part of this paper, the social context of women in ge-neral and governesses in particular with due regard to love, marriage and legal rights will be taken into account. It will be argued that a marriage despite gender and social borders is enabled between the governess Jane and her master Rochester by making the latter Byronic, whereby Rochester becomes the epitome of a desirable husband for a governess in nineteenth-century England.