Role Models for the Future: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver as Feminist Heroines

The heroines of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver, can be considered to be ground breaking feminist heroines of Victorian literature. They are complete opposites to what Victorian society expected women to be and rebel against the patriarchal ideas of their society. This essay begins by exploring how Victorian society viewed women, demonstrating how the Victorian era was male dominated and how women were not equal to men by explaining what the woman’s main goals in life were and how limited her rights were. Further, by introducing the female writers Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot the essay explores how female writers during the Victorian era faced oppositions because women were not supposed to enter the male dominated field of publishing novels. It discusses the rebel in these two authors by showing how unique they were and how they went about their lives in a very different fashion from what Victorian society expected of women. It also demonstrates how Brontë and Eliot were trying to influence society in hope for more equality by writing Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss. The essay goes on to analyse the heroines Jane and Maggie, how they struggle in the patriarchal society, their desire for the education they are not allowed to have, their need for more freedom than society is able to give women and the ways in which they are able to rebel against the constraints imposed on them. The essay explains how they fight for their rights and do not give up in their battle no matter how lost the cause sometimes appears to be. Finally, the essay goes on to compare the heroines Jane and Maggie, examining what they have in common and how they are different, concluding by examining how Brontë and Eliot both influenced future literature by presenting these feminist heroines