The Effects of Imperialism on Women in News from Nowhere and Jane Eyre

Authors

  • Cheery Huang

Keywords:

Imperialism, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, News from Nowhere, Colonization, Feminism

Abstract

During the Victorian era, the rise of imperialism inspired writers such as William Morris to examine capitalism’s domination and Victorian ideals by representing a utopian idealization of socialism. Charlotte Brontë depicts the complex results of situating a proto-feminist individual in a Victorian society that undermined these ideas. Through analysis of William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, this paper elaborates on how imperialism prevailed in Britain during the Victorian period. Through an analysis of gender, I explore how these novels contribute to a new vision of the status of women, and how they look forward to new forms of female independence.

References

Boos, Florence S., and William Boos. "News from Nowhere and Victorian Socialist Feminism." Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 14.1, 1990, pp. 3-32. Web.

Freedgood, Elaine. "Souvenirs of Sadism." The Ideas in Things, 2010, pp. 30-54. Web.

Latham, David. "Hope and Change: Teachings News from Nowhere." JWMS, 2007, pp. 6-24. Web.

Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. "William Morris, Extraction Capitalism, and the Aesthetics of Surface." Victorian Studies, 57.3, 2015, p. 395. Web.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Feminisms, 12.1, 1991, pp. 798-814. Web.

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Published

2017-05-29

Issue

Making Nineteenth-Century Literary Environments - English 435 (Spring 2017)

Section

Environmental and Social Activism: Wordsworth, Morris, Bronte, Schreiner

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Cheery Huang

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.