Jane Eyre As The Reformed Pamela: A Contrastive Analysis of the Courtship Patterns in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Samuel Richardson's Pamela.

This paper investigates the questions of Charlotte Bronte's gothic romance novel, Jane Eyre (1847) and its underlying references to Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). The paper focuses on comparing the courtship narrative of the stated novels in terms of author's gender authority, interest of the period in which the work is written and the impact of these factors have on the final product. After Jane Eyre was published, critics accused Bronte of creating a heroine that does not properly represent the nineteenth century image of a governess. Additionally, Jane Eyre was compared to Pamela in terms of being an unrealistic heroine who marries a reformed rake, but uses passionate expressions that are improper for her time. This kind of review helps one analyze the relationship between the stated novels and dissect their differences. The paper uses a historic feminist approach to identify the role of gender authority in delivering a realistic romance novel. The result adds to the evidence of female writer's contribution to rewriting history, in this case-the history of the courtship novel. Bronte exposes the flaws in Richardson's famous model of courtship through resetting the sequence of the shared courtship patterns based on importance: communication, mutual understanding and passion. The importance of the study is that it shows a novel's, and other media's, ability to redefine certain concepts, such as love, through rewriting the model to suit the goal of its creator. These mediums of thought can eventually change the ideals on love and marriage that were previously known to their audience. These shifts can be seen through studying the models of romance displayed in various forms of modern literature