FEMINISM IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S NOVEL “JANE EYRE” AS A HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PHENOMENON

Jane Eyre, a novel by Charlotte Bronte, is a kind of manifesto of the future feminist movement, its pages refl ecting all the basic feminist demands. In her novel, Charlotte Bronte raised issues of women’s professional self-realization, fi nancial independence, self-suffi ciency in their personal lives, female sexuality and much more. This was, most likely, the fi rst ever example of such a concentrated expression of the ideas of women’s emancipation created before the XX century. As part of the image of her heroine - Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte demonstrated the acceptable female behavior canons transformation that had begun in the Western society. It is not surprising that in the research literature this work of fi ction is often used to study the so-called woman question. Various approaches to this problem, including the popular theory of postcolonial feminism, off er diff erent ways of understanding the role and image of women in the XIX century using the novel as an example. At the same time, in many feminist studies, a certain ambivalence prevails in the assessment of Jane Eyre. On the one hand, the novel is considered a genuine protest against patriarch society and its ideas, on the other hand, it is often perceived as a pre-feminist work, refl ecting the “dualistic” worldview of the author and her heroine, due to the presentation of marriage and family as the main goal of a happy female life and the only possibility of a woman’s emotional satisfaction. As Marianne Hirsch, a feminist historian, put it, this assessment is driven by “reading the past back through our retrospective knowledge of it,” where “the narrator’s general knowledge… of the outcome of a sequence of events is used to evaluate the behavior of the participants in those events, as if they also knew about what’s going to happen”. This approach leads to “negative retrospection,” when modern researchers primarily see “shortcomings” and “gaps” in Charlotte Bronte’s worldview, considering her novel pre-feminist, but not actually feminist. This issue continues to be a fi eld for long and numerous research discussions. This article also uses retrospective analysis. However, it can be designated as a “positive retrospection”, because here the novel text is analyzed not from the position of “incompleteness” in relation to modern feminism, but from the position of “anticipation” of all its main theses and precepts; as a kind of basic text of the feminist movement, containing the rudiments of practically all the feminist claims of diff erent eras and types. The scale of the problems raised in the novel turns out to be so large that it includes, from our point of view, the claims of both the fi rst and all subsequent waves of feminism - right up to the present day.