Delicate Plants

A new Brontë-relates thesis:

Bachelor Thesis - Norwegian University of Science and Technology
“Young ladies are delicate plants” A comparative analysis of cross-class romance in Romantic and Victorian novels: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)
by Marthe Hildegard Kalset

2022

Many of the literary works we today recognize as classics were written and published during the 19th century. This is demonstrated in the marketing of the American bookseller, Barnes & Noble’s, range of what they identify as literary classics: Barnes & Noble Classics (Barnes & Noble, n.d.). Barnes & Noble define the books on this list as “books that have changed history, inspired Hollywood, and entertained readers for centuries” (Barnes & Noble, n.d.). We find both Emma (1815) by Jane Austen and Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë on this list and can therefore define them as classics from the 19th century. Even though they are written during the same century, they were not written during the same literary period; Emma was written during the Romantic period, while Jane Eyre was written during the Victorian period. Among several other themes and elements, the two books both portray female heroines, social class, character development and cross-class romance. I want to look further into the latter in this comparative analysis of Emma and Jane Eyre. I will use critical material to depict how cross-class romance is portrayed in the two novels, and in that way identify similarities and differences in how cross-class romance is depicted in Emma and Jane Eyre. Among other critical works, I have decided to use Nilay Erdem Ayyildiz’s critical article From The Bottom To The Top: Class And Gender Struggle In Brontë’s Jane Eyre (2017) as a central component in the analysis as it discusses both class and gender. I also chose a central critical article for Emma: The Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen (1999) by Jonathan H. Grossman, which points out the workings of class in Emma. The critical material I have chosen will be a central asset throughout the analysis, as it will provide the analysis with criticism and arguments to discuss and will work as an advantage to support the arguments I formulate in relation with the my research question.