A Comparative Study On The Female Characters In Jane Eyre, Pride And Prejudice And A Dream Of Red Mansions

It is worldly accepted that the novel is the most popular literary genre in the19th century. After a long history of male dominant literature in Great Britain, many female novelists swarm out in the19th century, such as Jane Austen, Bronte Sisters, and George Eliot and so on. In their works, they create many new women images that rebel the paternity and fought for freedom and equality with men, for example, Jane Austen’s sarcasm of the temporal social customs, affirmation on women’s intelligence and identity and Bronte Sisters’exposure of females’survival condition, encouragement of the establishment of women’s independence, equal rights of love and rebellious spirit. Their struggle for equality and freedom in different phases is considered as an evolution of western female consciousness. A Dream of Red Mansions is a great novel in China on females and female activities, in which Mr. Cao Xueqin creates many excellent female characters, shows sufficiently the mental world and expresses the females’self-consciousness and betrayal spirit in Chinese feudal society from unique perspectives and by all-dimensioned description.This article makes an analysis of the typical female characters in these three novels by comparing the female figures in order to present the spirit of rebellion, the desire for independence and their view of free love. All of them are taken as new female images by the authors, but there are still some differences among them in personality traits, periods of time and social backgrounds, which naturally result in their different fates. Qing Wen in A Dream of Red Mansions and Jane in Jane Eyre share the same spirit of rebellion, the same pursuit of independence and quality while Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice and Lin Daiyu in A Dream of Red Mansions are both in pursuit of their longing for love. Each image of them is real in life, which embodies respectively the characteristics of the development of female consciousness in different periods of time and implies the authors’real writing intention. Meanwhile age and cultural backgrounds also leads to the limitations of female characters in their consciousness development.Guided by the literary theory of feminist literary criticism, this paper aims to make a comparative study on the female consciousness of the female characters under two different social backgrounds by focusing on such main female characters as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Jane in Jane Eyre and Qing Wen, Lin Daiyu in A Dream of Red Mansions and so on. The author highly remarks the rebellious spirit in those female characters by exploring the different societies they lived in, the different classes they depended on, the different dominators they rebelled against. Eventually rebellious spirit and the pursuit of independence of female character in Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre promoted the development of female consciousness in19th century British. The excellent female characters in A Dream of Red Mansions showed sufficiently the mental world and cultural quality of female in Chinese feudal society.