Protofeminist Criticism of Women’s Role in the Victorian Period: A Systemic-Functional Analysis of a Fragment of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Abstract

Many Victorian novels written by women are presented from the point of view of a single narrating voice , that of the protagonist of the story in the way of autobiography. On many occasions, the events described in the story faithfully reflect the women authors’ lives. When this occurs, it is not easy to distinguish whether the addresser of the message is the author herself or the protagonist character, because there is a frequent conflation of both in these literary works. Women writers used their novels as a tool to criticize the injustices of their society, such as sexual inequality, lack of education, poverty, etc., especially at a time when women were relegated to the private sphere of the home. The authors tried to portray their restricted reality with a subtle veiled criticism. The aim of this paper is to show how a traditional systemic-functional method of linguistic analysis is able to unveil hidden or implicit messages between the lines of a Victorian proto-feminist literary text, namely Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The systemic-functional analysis of the text under focus will reveal that the author employs different grammatical resources with a strong meaning potential in order to convey subtle feminist vindications.