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A Changeling Becomes Titania: The Realm of the Fairies in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

  • Francisco José Cortés Vieco EMAIL logo
From the journal Anglia

Abstract

Jane Eyre never-endingly mesmerizes readers and scholars alike thanks to its fairy-tale echoes, but Charlotte Brontë also wrote this novel as a tale of her own myth-making about two fairies: Jane and Edward Rochester, because only fairylands of fantasy and daydreaming might empower an unprotected woman in Victorian times. This article explores Jane Eyre’s life journey and life-writing as if she were a fairy. She begins as a changeling child who torments malevolent adults and consoles herself in fairy tales. When Jane becomes a woman, whose fairy wings of rebelliousness and freedom cannot be torn by social rules or by any mortal, she is eventually crowned by her fairy godmother – Charlotte Brontë – with the diadem of love and gender equality as Titania, a queen in her own right, who chooses to marry her Oberon: Rochester.

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Published Online: 2020-03-11
Published in Print: 2020-03-04

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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