“Clearing the Sill of the World”: Jane Eyre and the Power of Education in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

The idea of education in nineteenth-century women‟s writing revolves around social class, social mores, and the subtleties of the writer‟s imagination. Nowhere can this be seen more vividly and thoroughly than in Charlotte Bronte‟s novel, Jane Eyre. The book‟s opening scene, striking in its symbolic detail, highlights and foreshadows the aforementioned criteria for women‟s education of the era. Although doors to education were opening wider both in the United States and England due to the Suffragist Movement and other influences, specifically, America‟s Civil War and the West‟s Industrial Revolution, the majority of women were as constricted in their educational goals as the claustrophobic space in which the young Jane sequesters herself inside the breakfast-room of the Reed home at the opening chapter of Bronte‟s novel. Four images made clearly apparent in this first chapter become critical motifs in the book, notably the window out of which Jane gazes; the books surrounding her in the library; birds, as highlighted in Bewick’s History of British Birds, which she is studying; and the red curtains behind which she takes sanctuary from the Reed family