From Poetic Life To True Life

Charlotte Bronte is one of the most remarkable English women writers of the nineteenth century. Among her novels Jane Eyre is undoubtedly best known and most warmly welcome. At present most of the researches on Charlotte still focus on Jane Eyre. Although Villette has interested and impressed many literary critics in English–speaking countries, it doesn't catch much attention in China. In addition, these researches mostly make an isolated study on one novel, Jane Eyre or Villette. Little research has been done to explore the hidden relevance between the two novels.This paper tries to use a comparative approach to illustrate the similarities and differences between the two novels, with the emphasis on their differences and relevant factors. The author of this paper focuses her research on the comparative study of Jane Eyre and Villette, in the hope of shedding some light, however feeble it may be, upon the whole issue of Charlotte Bronte and women's status.This thesis is divided into five parts.Chapter One briefly introduces Charlotte Bronte's life, literature reviews of these two novels and significance of this study.Chapter two touches on the poetic features in Jane Eyre from two aspects: heroine and plot. In Jane Eyre Charlotte mainly depicts her poetic life. The heroine Jane Eyre is an ideal woman in her imagination. And the romantic happy ending and mysterious Gothic Structure also make the novel imbued in a romantic supernatural atmosphere.Chapter Three explores the realistic features in Villette also from the same two aspects. In this novel Charlotte describes her true life. By means of the realistic heroine and ending, and modified Gothic structure she tells us how she has looked at life, what she has thought and felt, and not what others expect her to have thought and felt. This is exactly what makes Villette more realistic than her other writings.Of course,"poetic"and"true"are relative words. The poetic features discussed in Jane Eyre as well as the realistic ones talked about in Villette both refer to the main features in each novel and in different periods of Charlotte's writing. Chapter Four makes a comparative study of Jane Eyre and Villette, deals with the shift from poetic life of Charlotte to her true life, and discusses the factors that influenced such shift. The last chapter makes a conclusion of the whole paper.Actually, nowadays women still face serious obstacles though their political and social status has risen steadily over the past decades. So to some extent, the comparative study of these two novels Jane Eyre and Villette may be helpful to awake women's self-awareness and advocate their economic independence and freedom, and thus it may help women to build up their healthy view on love and marriage and find a way out in the society.