ABSTRACT
Earlier, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and even in the juvenilia, Bronte is making not just a feminist plea empowering women to feel. But a woman writer's plea that women be allowed to dip their pens into their hearts–not to carve their texts in stone, but to inscribe them on their hearts so those hearts do not turn to stone. Bronte makes use of a triadic structure to trace her heroine's development. There are very few female initiation novels that start with childhood; more typically, an inexperienced 20- or 21-year-old, like Austen's Emma Woodhouse or George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, is the protagonist. One can only assume that the concluding paean to Rivers in the last two paragraphs of the novel reflects an uneasy Bronte who fears she has taken her love story too far, beyond Christian bounds, and probably wishes to placate her traditional, thoroughly Victorian father.
