Perspectivising Love and Marriage in Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" and Elisabeth Gaskell's "North and South"
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Wuppertal, language: English, abstract: The representation of love and marriage in Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre" and Elizabeth Gaskell’s "North and South" does not seem to be fundamentally different when looking at the story level, the content level of what is narrated (cf. Fabian 172), alone. The female and male characters of both novels struggle in achieving a marriage bond at first due to the class relation between the both of them, but after the heroines inherited a sum of money they return to the heroes’ aids. Of course this is just a brief summary of the novels’ plots to show the similarities both share in their plot structure. This paper, however, will look at the discourse level of both novels thus looking at the presentation level of how the story is narrated (cf. Fabian 172) in order to measure whether or not the novels by Brontë and Gaskell are as similar as a plain summary suggests.For this purpose this paper will perspectivise love and marriage in Gaskell’s North and South and Brontë’s Jane Eyre, meaning it will analyse the narration, the focalization, the representation of speech, and the representation of thought presented in both novels. The analyses of these categories will, of course, focus on the relevant love couples of both narratives, Margaret Hale and John Thornton in "North and South" and Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester in "Jane Eyre". The first chapters will present the tools and techniques that will be used later for the analyses of both novels, presenting first the tools for the analysis of narration and focalization and after that the techniques for the representation of speech and thought. The following chapters will use these tools for the analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre", focussing initially on the narration and focalization in the novel before turning to the representation of speech and thought. The chapters after that will be concerned with Elizabeth Gaskell’s "North and South" similarly; it will at first analyse the narration and focalization prior to the analysis of the representation of speech and thought. The last chapter will recapitulate the findings of the analyses of both novels in order to evaluate if both can be said to shape the same type of love and marriage, like a brief look on the story level suggests, or if there are differences that can be observed on the discourse level.
