ABSTRACT
Passion and restraint Jane Eyre begins with an act of protest. This powerful opening to Jane's story stays with us and is both reaffirmed and questioned as we read on. The rebellious, passionate Jane is extremely attractive to modem readers and celebrated by critics such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose 1979 study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, has become a classic of Anglo-American feminist criticism. Like Ellen Moers's (976) Literary Women and Elaine Showalter's (977) A Literature of their Own, their book is concerned to establish a specifically female literary tradition. They seek to 'provide models for understanding the dynamics of female literary response to male literary assertion and coercion' (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979, p.xii), Their readings of women writers concentrate on patterns of confinement and escape, which they see as mirroring the conditions of women under domesticity and the woman author's need to escape the patriarchal literary tradition. The key method women writers use to achieve this escape is by 'simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards' (ibid., p.73).
