“How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back- roughly and violently thrust me back into the red-room, and locked me up there- to my dying day; though I was an agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy Aunt Reed!’ And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me- knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you are a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!”
Brontë, Jane Eyre (Ch. 4)
In the first eight chapters of Jane Eyre, we see Jane as a girl who, despite how young she is, is strong-willed and rejects the thought that she ought to be quiet and indifferent. In this scene, Jane is confronting her aunt, who has treated her poorly for her entire life. Striking back in this sense was unheard of, and the fact that a woman wrote of this was controversial. According to some at the time, “if the book was by a woman ‘she had long forfeited the society of her own sex’” (Shuttleworth). The act of writing the character of Jane behaving as she does goes against how women were told they should act. Coming from Brontë, Jane Eyre may be seen as a commentary on the overbearing nature of authority on women in her time period.
