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The Archetypal Cinderella in Jane Eyre

Abstract: Charlotte Bronte‘s masterpiece Jane Eyre has won the love and

appreciation of numerous readers since its release. It is a love story --- the love between the orphaned and initially impoverished Jane and the wealthy but tormented Mr. Rochester. The novel depicts the heroine Jane Eyre who grows to be an independent and intelligent lady with self-esteem out of an ugly and loveless girl. She is the first image of an ugly duckling who becomes the heroine in English literature. Since its release many studies have been done from various viewpoints like the feminist perspective. After having read the novel, I find that the heroine Jane resembles Cinderella in the Grimm fairytales a lot in experiences undergone and personality. It is not exaggerated to say Jane is another retold story of Cinderella in the 19th century and no more than a modern version. Thus Cinderella is the archetype of Jane Eyre in this novel. In this essay myth-archetypal criticism is applied to analyze the relationship between the two characters – the similarity in life experience and personality. As the modern version, Jane surpasses Cinderella and becomes a new archetype.

Key words: Jane Eyre, Cinderella, myth-archetypal criticism.

1. Myth-archetypal Criticism

Myth-archetypal Criticism is one of the important schools of literary criticism

popular in the 1950s-60s in the West. It owns mainly to three special figures: James George Frazer, Carl C. Jung and Herman Northrop Frye. The publication of Frye‘s Anatomy of Criticism marks the emergence of archetypal Criticism. It is a form of criticism based on the psychology of Carl Jung, who holds that there are two levels of unconscious: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The latter does not develop individually but is inherited from the ancient ancestors. It is a storehouse of images and patterns, vestigial traces of which inhere in all human beings and which find symbolic expression in all human art.

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The collective unconscious consists of pre-existent forms, the archetype. The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Archetypes, according to Jung, are \of very ancient ancestors which are inherited in the \human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, and private fantasies, as well as in the works of literature (Abrams, p. 10, 112). For Frye, an archetype is ―a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experience‖. It is the communicable unit which recurs again and again in literature. These critics view the genres and individual plot patterns of literature as recurrences of certain archetypes and essential mythic formulae. 2. The comparison of Jane Eyre and Cinderella

The novel Jane Eyre relates a romantic love story between the heroine Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Jane lost her parents as a baby and was taken care of by her aunt. But she was badly treated and abused by her cousins and aunt. Jane was an outcast and no more than a servant. The miserable life never ended before she met Mr. Rochester, a wealthy gentleman. They felt into love with each other despite of the huge gap of social status and wealth between them. In the end they got married and lived a happy life everafter. The plot is much similar to that of the fairy tale, Cinderella. Cinderella was a kind and gentle soul with pretty look. Her mother died when she was a baby and her father remarried the meanest lady in the world. After the wedding, the stepmother began to unleash her fury on her new young daughter. She gave the young girl all the worst jobs in the house. Later at a ball, under the help of her godmother, poor Cinderella encountered a handsome prince and they felt into love at the first sight. But Cinderella had to leave before the first stroke of twelve o‘clock and left her glass slippers in a hurry. To find out Cinderella, the prince announced that

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he would marry the girl who fit the slippers. In the end, Cinderella met again and married happily.

By briefly comparing the two stories, it is easy to find that Jane resemble Cinderella a lot. In the following part, the essay will gave a detailed analysis by applying the myth-archetypal criticism.

2.1. The similarity between Jane Eyre and Cinderella – life experience and

personality 2.1.1. Life experience

Firstly, Jane and Cinderella both lived a lonely and miserable life when they were kids. Jane lost her parents as a baby and was adopted by Mr. Reed, her kind-hearted uncle. He loved and cared the little Jane as his own child. Unfortunately the weak uncle died soon. On the deathbed, he made a plea that Ms. Reed should love Jane as he did. Ms. Reed had no other choice but to accept the plea against her will for she disliked Jane. For her, Jane meant trouble and burden, an outsider who seized Mr. Reed‘s love that was supposed to be only for her own children. Thus, after the death of Mr. Reed, the sufferings and miserable life began for Jane. Her aunt neglected her and her cousins mocked and bullied her. Jane could not read their books and had no one to play with and talk to. After dinner, the cousins could sit around their mom near the fireplace while Jane had no place to go but stay alone in the baby room without light on. The little Jane was lonely and alienated and the miserable life never ended until she left the Lowood charity school at the age of eighteen.

As for Cinderella, she also lost her mother at an early age. Her father remarried the meanest lady, who brought two daughters from the previous marriage. The stepmother treated Cinderella cruelly and unfairly, making her sleep on the floor in the dingy basement and do a lot of housework. She got no love from her stepmother and stepsisters. Little Cinderella endured all the abuse as long as she could until she finally turned to her father for help but he was too weak to help her, just like Jane‘s

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