Compare Contrast – Wollestonecraft & C. Bronte Essay, Research Paper

Vindicating Women’s Strength

The focus of female literary writers from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth century is to reform men’s attitudes toward women. Through their writing, they are encouraging women to gain respect and acceptance as viable, rational and intelligent human beings rather than domestic maidservants created for the pleasure of man. Women writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bront? forcefully bring these issues into the forefront of societies minds.

Wollstonecraft’s publication, A Vindication of the Rights of Women is in response to the French Revolution. Arguing the subjugation women endure from the lack of education and legal rights afforded them will result in undermining the government’s goals. She bases her response on men’s misconception that women lack the basic human intellectual qualities to be equal to men.

Bront?’s Jane Eyre is the type of personified woman Wollstonecraft ascribes women to emulate. Jane Eyre, a fictional portrayal of a woman seeking her independence and equal rights is unwilling to sacrifice her principles to satisfy society standards. In 1848 Elizabeth Rigney stated, “Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit.” (468) Rigney and societies belief is based on the writings of men, as Rousseau, who states women should be “pure, submissive, decorous, and even angelic creature[s]” (289) depending on men for instruction and guidance to preserve their virtue.

Wollstonecraft in her essay detests this type of thinking, believing women should aspire to become “masculine”. (259) When using the term “masculine”, she is encouraging if not demanding women to seek out intellectual “exercise of which enobles the human character, and which rises females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind. . .” (259) Wollstonecraft contends, if “women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue” (262) they will remain in a subservient status depending solely on their beauty and charm for fulfillment and direction in life.

Bront?’s Jane echo’s Wollstonecraft’s thoughts. Feeling confined in her governess duties at Thornfield Hall she begins to “feel just as men feel; [needing] exercise for [her] faculties and a field for [her] efforts as much as [men] do; suffer[ing] from too rigid a restraint, too absolute stagnation, precisely as men would suffer”. (544) Although reasonably content in her employment, Jane longs for the same freedom as men to gain…

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