A Study On Illness As Metaphor For Female In Victorian Novels:Ruth And Jane Eyre

Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bront? are two representative Victorian female writers,both with an avant-garde sense of female independence,who were able to see the hypocrisy of society and the injustice done to women and fight for their rights through their works.Since the Victorian period,literary works began to focus on the status of women and some of their rights,but most of the works focus on women within the normal social standards,only a few works noting or confronting women outside the margins of society.Ruth Hilton in Ruth and Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre both belong to the category of women who are excluded from conventional social norms: Ruth is a fallen woman from native England,while Bertha is a mad wife from a colonized country,with similar situations and completely different social backgrounds between them.This thesis,therefore,uses the metaphor of illness as a theory to examinate the meanings of Ruth Hilton and Bertha Mason in the novel.The thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is an introductory section,which gives a brief overview of two authors,Elizabeth Gaskell,and Charlotte Bront?,and their two works,Ruth and Jane Eyre,as well as an introduction to the state of research on both works and the theories that need to be used in this thesis.Chapter two focuses on the associations between females and the illness in the Victorian period,and introduces two types of women who are considered unhealthy,and the existential dilemmas they face.Chapters three and four introduce the illnesses that appear in each of the two works and analyze the metaphor of illness for the two particular women,Ruth Hilton and Bertha Mason.Chapter three firstly introduces the causes of the typhus outbreak in Ruth,and secondly analyzes the two metaphors that typhus produces for Ruth,one of which is the author’s use of the plague as a mediator to provide a bridge to Ruth’s moral redemption,and the other is the author’s realistic view of a fallen woman like Ruth.The fourth chapter focuses on Bertha Mason,the “madwoman” of Jane Eyre,firstly introducing the reasons for her madness and then analyzing two metaphors for Bertha’s madness,the first being that Bertha’s existence is probably an externalization of the extreme ego in Jane Eyre’s mind and the other is Charlotte Bront?’s hidden colonial ideology as a superior imperial person.The final chapter concludes with an analysis of two particular Victorian women with different identities,which reveals the oppression of women at that time.The authority has always regulated women in multiple ways,either by denying them a normal identity or by denying them a voice,which reflects the existential plight of particular Victorian women.At the same time,an in-depth reading of the two works shows that even advanced-minded writers are still influenced by the inherent ideology of Victorian society and have certain ideological limitations.