France In Cultural Imagination

This paper studies the image of Paris in the two Victorian novels Jane Eyre and The Return of the Native. In Jane Eyre, the Parisian woman Varens is described as a lascivious emotional cheat with characteristic of Paris, the dark morals such as being frivolous , shallow , coquettish are regarded as the signs of Paris. But in The Return of the Native, Paris becomes the bright home that the heroine yearns for, because there is no moral constraint and has spirit freedom, and she can bring vigor and passion to her. Therefore, in the British imagination, there are two Paris: one is the moral hell which is full of all sorts of crime, the other one is the heaven in human world which represents the advanced civilization, freedom and passion.However, the scorn to French moral in Jane Eyre is not based on British noble moral. In fact, Britain is far more dissolute and hypocritical than France. The molding of the image of France in Jane Eyre is a kind of imagination with tendentiousness, the text has used some striking and cautious strategies ,which affirm the British value while debasing French one, for the purpose of expansion of national character in the colonial fighting. While in The Return of the Native, the yearning for France really stems from the constraint in Britain. Here Paris appears as the symbol of the free world, which reflects Englishmen's discontent to the reality in the period the kingdom's decline, and their yearn for freedom and harmonious life.The two different attitudes of national culture in Jane Eyre and The Return of the Native reflect two kinds of nationalism views. One is passive, it emphasizes the superiority of own nation's culture simply, and repels other nation's blindly. The molding of France image in Jane Eyre comes from such psychology. The other kind is the positive one. It emphasizes the characteristic of own nation's culture, but does not repel others'. It acknowledges different national cultures, and values the differences, through which it hopes to understand and introspect oneself better. The image of France in The Return of the Native exactly reflects such positive nationalism.