Jane, Blanche and Clarissa meeting in Korea

A Korean paper exploring Jane Eyre:

Structural Oppression and Self-Alienation: The Construction and Dissolution of Female Self-Identity in Jane Eyre, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Mrs. Dalloway 

Xiaoyan Dong

The Yeats Journal of Korea (한국 예이츠 저널) Vol.79 (2026.04) pp.33-50

This paper examines Jane Eyre, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Mrs. Dalloway as primary texts for a comparative study of female identity under structural oppression. Situating each heroine within her distinct historical context—Victorian England, the mid-twentieth-century American South, and early twentieth-century Britain—the analysis traces how Jane Eyre, Blanche DuBois, and Clarissa Dalloway navigate the intersecting pressures of social institutions, economic dependency, and family structures. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, the study identifies three distinct modes through which patriarchal power operates: visible coercion, internalized discipline, and total erasure. It then examines the forms of self-alienation these modes produce and the corresponding strategies of resistance each woman develops within her structural constraints. By bringing these three figures into sustained parallel analysis, female identity under patriarchy emerges not as a single story of victimhood but as a differentiated spectrum of entrapment and agency, yielding a more precise understanding of how women negotiate and reconstruct selfhood under systemic oppression.