Humans as Geological Forces of Nature: How Jane Eyre Establishes a Common Ground between the Natural and Social

Abstract

This essay applies ecocriticism to Charlotte Bronte’s presentation of landscape and society in Jane Eyre in order to address Victorian society’s attempt to use the concept of nature as a means of naturalizing class and gender hierarchies and thus impose strict social rules and standards. Jane’s interactions with nature and society serve to deconstruct the binary that opposes humans and natural environments. In so doing, the novel represents the ways in which Victorians manipulate nature to help make social structures appear natural, while simultaneously socializing and altering their natural environments in the process. Jane’s collapsing of the human-made and the natural allows her to embrace her naturalized social subordination through her physical appearance and, ironically, achieve a degree of autonomy. While Jane’s meditations upon her external environments offer romanticized interpretations of natural and social realms, Jane Eyre’s underlying ecological awareness manifests throughout Jane’s story and functions democratically to level social differences.