Blogpost 4

Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class, or creed. Explain how the character’s alienation reveals the surrounding society’s assumptions and moral values.
In this excerpt of Jane Eyre, Jane is the character Charlotte Bronte uses to display the characteristics of England’s culture around the time period of the book, which is 1847. Jane is seen as an outcast, and because of this, she is forced to be shamed when the judge deems her punishment to be to stand on a stool for half an hour, and for not a single person to speak to her for the remainder of the day. According to the selection, Mr. Brocklehurst accuses Jane of being punishable by saying, “this girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut--this girl is--a liar!” Jane’s lie however is not clarified. In the excerpt, Jane describes her own alienation when she says, “he promise pledged by Mr. Brocklehurst to apprise Miss Temple and the teachers of my vicious nature. All along I had been dreading the fulfilment of this promise,--I had been looking out daily for the ‘Coming Man,’ whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to brand me as a bad child for ever: now there he was.”
To reveal the moral values of the culture during this time period, the reader has to look at what Mr. Brocklehurst rants about during his visit to the orphanage. When he says, “it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them to evince fortitude under temporary privation. A brief address on those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicious instructor would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the primitive Christians; to the torments of martyrs; to the exhortations of our blessed Lord Himself, calling upon His disciples to take up their cross and follow Him; to His warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His divine consolations, ‘If ye suffer hunger or thirst for My sake, happy are ye.’ Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children's mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!" Although lengthy, this quote reveals a lot. It discusses the devotion the people have to following the path of God during this time, and how serious it was to their everyday lives. This signifies how the people believed that suffering for God was the pathway to eternal life. Anyone who deviates from these paths should be shunned and be made accountable for their actions. That is precisely what Mr. Brocklehurst intended with Jane when she lied. He wanted to punish her for deviating from the Lord and shun her in front of other people. Jane’s alienation highlights the values of the people of her time because of the fact that she is punished for not conforming to them.