Jane Eyre Research Paper
LACK OF MOTHER AND METAPHORS OF REUNION IN OLIVER TWIST AND JANE EYRE
The aim of this paper is to discuss the psychological effects of being motherless and orphanhood and metaphors of reunion under social class distinction observation on the characters of two well known Victorian novels; Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist.
Orphanhood means having no parents but in Victorian society this term also refers to “one who has deprived of only one parent” as Laura Peters states. As a result of this, motherlessness and orphanhood were considered the same in the Victorian Era.
“To write a life, in the Victorian period , is to write the story of the loss of mother” says Caroline Dever. In other words, Victorian fiction mostly …show more content…
Profound changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, religious uncertainty, scientific advancement, and political and social upheaval caused many Victorians to reexamine many aspects of their society and culture.
Industrialization drove many farmworkers into the cities, where poor labor conditions and inadequate housing condemned most of them to poverty. The unprecedented increase in urban population fostered new and overwhelming problems of sanitation, overcrowding, poverty, disease, and crime in the huge slums occupied by impoverished workers, the unemployed, and the unfortunate. London slums bred the sort of crime Dickens portrays in Oliver Twist.
The novel is set against the background of the New Poor Law of 1834, which established a system of workhouses for those who, because of poverty, sickness, mental disorder, or age, could not provide for themselves. Young Oliver Twist, an orphan, spends his first nine years in a “baby farm,” a workhouse for children in which only the hardiest survive. When Oliver goes to London, he innocently falls in with a gang of youthful thieves and pickpockets headed by a vile criminal named Fagin. Dickens renders a powerful and generally realistic portrait of this criminal underworld, with all its sordidness and sin. He later contrasts the squalor and cruelty of the workhouse and the city slums with …show more content…
Leeford states in his will that, if his child were a son, he would inherit his estate “only on the stipulation that in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonor, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.” It seems strange that a father would consign his child to lifelong poverty as well as the stigma of illegitimacy if the son ever committed a single wrong in childhood. In the same way that the court is willing to punish Oliver for crimes committed by another, Leeford is ready to punish Oliver for any small misdeed merely because he hated his first son, Monks, so
The aim of this paper is to discuss the psychological effects of being motherless and orphanhood and metaphors of reunion under social class distinction observation on the characters of two well known Victorian novels; Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist.
Orphanhood means having no parents but in Victorian society this term also refers to “one who has deprived of only one parent” as Laura Peters states. As a result of this, motherlessness and orphanhood were considered the same in the Victorian Era.
“To write a life, in the Victorian period , is to write the story of the loss of mother” says Caroline Dever. In other words, Victorian fiction mostly …show more content…
Profound changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, religious uncertainty, scientific advancement, and political and social upheaval caused many Victorians to reexamine many aspects of their society and culture.
Industrialization drove many farmworkers into the cities, where poor labor conditions and inadequate housing condemned most of them to poverty. The unprecedented increase in urban population fostered new and overwhelming problems of sanitation, overcrowding, poverty, disease, and crime in the huge slums occupied by impoverished workers, the unemployed, and the unfortunate. London slums bred the sort of crime Dickens portrays in Oliver Twist.
The novel is set against the background of the New Poor Law of 1834, which established a system of workhouses for those who, because of poverty, sickness, mental disorder, or age, could not provide for themselves. Young Oliver Twist, an orphan, spends his first nine years in a “baby farm,” a workhouse for children in which only the hardiest survive. When Oliver goes to London, he innocently falls in with a gang of youthful thieves and pickpockets headed by a vile criminal named Fagin. Dickens renders a powerful and generally realistic portrait of this criminal underworld, with all its sordidness and sin. He later contrasts the squalor and cruelty of the workhouse and the city slums with …show more content…
Leeford states in his will that, if his child were a son, he would inherit his estate “only on the stipulation that in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonor, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.” It seems strange that a father would consign his child to lifelong poverty as well as the stigma of illegitimacy if the son ever committed a single wrong in childhood. In the same way that the court is willing to punish Oliver for crimes committed by another, Leeford is ready to punish Oliver for any small misdeed merely because he hated his first son, Monks, so