Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre on the whole is a very subversive text. Though it might not seem so because of the same monotonous so called happy ending when a heroine finally submits to the hero after all but we can't deny the fact that Jane Eyre in herself is one of the most radical heroine in English Literature who by her wits gained equal status within the domestic setup to the point that Rochester, the hero has to be blinded and in other terms has to feminize himself in order to be accepted by Jane who is by far twenty years younger than him and also possess large fortune to marry whoever she pleases. It is true, the changes of industrialism in Victorian England were undermining gender identities but that also came with the rising anxiety among the bourgeois to polarize the two sexes in order to escape from the infection of licentiousness coming from the working class. 

Jane has been raised in the middle class family of Reeds but she as John Reed ( her cousin) reminds her is dependent because she was left with no money and such girls are ought to beg and have no right to live like those who are their superior. So, she was sent to Lowood institution where girls like her are taught to shed their feminine traits to submit to the practical genderless appearance. Femininity was a middle class luxury which can only be afforded by women of a specific class position. To dress in satin, furs and embellished frocks are luxuries which ladies like Brocklehurst's wife( Brocklehurst being the supervisor of Lowood and a priest) or Blanche Ingram( whom Rochester intended to marry once as she was suitable to his class position) could avail. Women from the lower strata aspiring to improve their position or to maintain a livelihood either have to be governesses or work as house servants. While permeating the wall between the working class and middle class, governesses are like a hole which could contaminate the secured polarized sphere of the middle class. Governesses were paid workers and although they were treated no better than a servant they posses the power of sexual threat to the middle class men due to the genderless appearance they have been brought up with which transforms into androgyny when they assume the masculine role of having paid for their work albeit being a woman. It can be seen when Rochester shares his secrets of his mistress with Jane, there she assumes the position of a fellow man listening light-handedly to what the other( man) has to say. Though at the end of the novel Jane sheds this masculine identity by resorting from paid work to unpaid work by converting into a motherly figure for the blind Rochester but by then the transfer of power from patriarchal grasp of Rochester to Jane has already taken place owing to Rochester's disability.

When we shift from the unreal world to the real world of the author Charlotte Bronte herself, we can see how she has to write using a pseudo masculine name "Currer Bell" because women writers in mid nineteenth century Britain were not allowed to penetrate the male dominated literary circle and when they aspire to do so they know it quite well like Charlotte Bronte they would not be considered seriously and if they would be, it would not be without putting dire allegations on their character. So, Charlotte used a kind of veil to disguise her true identity but a "veil also provokes desire as it teases by withholding" and that quite served her purpose to put forth the harsh prejudices set against women writers. When the literary circle was guessing the gender of the author,  several critics mentioned the text to be too bold to be written by a woman and if it were then the woman must have been long alieneated from her own female sex. In doing so, Charlotte became a powerful critic of the assumptions regarding male-female polarization. 

Jane Eyre showed a man can marry outside his class. A man can marry a plain looking woman. This quite unsettles conventional femininity but on the other hand it also shows how a woman flouting patriarchal control by displaying extreme sexuality has to die because there is no other method to explain such an infiltration. Such women like Bertha Mason could not be subdued in any other way but by death and that makes Jane Eyre a quite controversial and suspenseful narrative.