Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

In Victorian England it was considerded beautiful to be very tall, full waistested, plump and have a pale complection; in 1920 it was beautiful to have a flat chest, bobbed hair, and a boyish figure; from the 1930s to the 50s women aspired to have a curvy hourglass shape; today most women want to have large breasts and bottom, flat stomach, and healthy skin. In each of these time periods the idea  of what is beautiful was a specific body type; not everyone looks like that. Does that mean they are not beautiful? Of course not. In the novel Jane Erye there are two very important aspects of the story that create the plot: beauty standards and money. Jane is classified as plain, but does that mean that she is not also classified as beautiful? Acording to dictionary.com beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight”. Nothing in that definition says that if you are considered plain you cannot be beautiful. “If you get simply beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing God invents.”- R. Browning. In the novel, Jane Eyre was taught that there are more important things that beauty. It is better to be simple, smart, have multiple accomplishments, and be able to carry a conversation. Mr. Rochester could have just as easily married Miss. Ingrim as Jane Eyre. Miss. Ingram was considered beautiful, she could sing, play the piano, and draw; most of wich Jane could do. The one thing that she lacked that Jane didn’t was the ability to be intelectualy stimulating and to Mr. Rochester that made her more beautiful.

Jane Erye is described throughout the novel as plain. Most of the time she is describing herself this way because she has been brought up to believe that being plain is more attractive than being obviously beautiful. Jane had been forced her entire life to supresse her emotion and personality. Her plain style symbolizes how she was brought up. She grew up being taught that being practicle and smart was more beautiful. It is more practicle and smart to wear plain clothes than extravagent silks. There are more important things in life and Jane Eyre understood that. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Everyone finds different things, features, and characteristics beautiful. It is ignorant to say that someone is not beautiful because there is someone in the world that will worship them as the most beautiful person ever. The novel does not have the plot that it does because Jane is plain, it has the plot that it does because of who Jane is; which woud not be changed if she was beautiful. There is a misconseption about the book that Jane’s aunt did not like her because she was not beautiful. This however is wrong; Jane’s aunt did not accept her because she felt that her husband spent more time with Jane than his own children. While it is indiffernt to the story wether or not Jane was beautiful, it is important to the story that she did not believe that she was. This was cause for some of Jane’s growth throughout the novel. The book was written through Jane’s perspective so it is difficult to tell what others thought of her appearance. Miss. Ingram hated Jane. It never said this in the book, but I intrepreted that this was because Jane was beautiful and she knew that Mr. Rochester was in love with her.

In today’s time too much ephasis is placed on outward apperances and not enough empashis is placed on inward apperances and who people truly are. The world is too superficial. Before school started I got a pixie cut, maybe not for of the right reasons but because I felt that I had changed so much as a person, that it seemed foolish that my outward appearance did not reflect that. The day that school started (my sophmore year of highschool) I was welcomed back with comments such as “did you decide to be lesbian over the summer?”, “Oh so you’re like a really big femanist.” , “Does the word communism mean anything to you?” I was getting judged on such a simple thing as my hair and not by what type of person I am. After hearing insults like this over and over again it made me regret getting my hair cut…for a while. After a week or two into school I realized that it does not matter what these people thought as long as I liked my hair. Once I realized this it made me like my hair even more just for the fact that it wasn’t what people would call obviously beautiful on a girl. Like Jane portrayed in the novel it is much more important to be smart, kind, and witty than to be beautiful. Someone is always going to be prettier than you, or have better clothes, so if you are always trying to out do them you are never going to be happy. You have to be satisfied with who you are as a person. I think that this message is a little too over used, which makes sense because it is important, but it also makes people disregaurd it. That is why Jane Eyre is such an amazing book. She shares this message in such a nonchaluant way that it gets the message across without actually coming out and stating it.

            The story would be emensly different if Jane was rich instead of poor. In the novel Jane was humble, knew how to work, and wanted to be independent. She would have been brought up completely different if she had had money. Those morals would not have been instilled in her if she had been rich. Although it is hard to say what would happen if one essencial part of a story was changed, but from how I see it there would be no story. The entire story was based on Jane not having money. If she had inhareted a large amount of  money at birth then she would never have gone to work for Mr. Rochester. She would have never fallen in love or had the amazing experiences (good and bad) that she did. One of the major themes of the book is that money will not make you happy if you are not, as a person, already happy. Mr. Rochester, for example, had a great deal of money, but as a person he was misserable. He had made mistakes in the past that he would not forgive himself for and this caused him to hate life. If Jane was born rich and did not have to work for anything in her life she might have ended up being miserable. One of her greatest pleasures was teaching. When she went to visit her cousins before her aunt died you could see how miserable they were. Neither daghter shed a tear for their mother. They could not wait for the affair to be over so they could move on with their lives. Money does not buy happiness. That is a lesson that Jane was shown first hand. She never wanted to be rich, she just wanted to have enough money not to worry. She had the right idea in my opinion.

            These two asspects are essential to the story. The fact that Jane views herself as plain means that she is humble, modest, and apprecietes things more than if they had just been given to her. Jane is rich, she just does not know it. An uncle on her father’s side, who had a large sum of money,  would have been willing to adopt her but her aunt told him that Jane was dead. When this uncle died Jane receive a large inheritance. She gave a portion of the money to the family that had helped her onto her feet after she left Thornfeild. Without these key aspects of the novel there would be no plot. Charlotte Bronte was icredibly talented and smart for putting this into the story. She took true issues of that time and today and built a story around it. The concept of beauty has been a problematic subject matter since the beginning of time. Throughout the years the idea of beauty changes and will continue to change as long as there are women to contradict each theory.