Discuss the Auto Biological Elements/Treatments of Childhood in Jane Eyre.

Auto Biological Elements/Treatments of Childhood in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre gives a graphic description of childhood in which we find none of the children is well adjusted or happy.

 

Jane is orphaned and left to the merciless treatment first of her cousins, then of the orphanage.  While she had a few good moments in her young life, hers could not be called a happy or even normal childhood.  Through no real fault of her own and through circumstances generally beyond her control, she lived a rather difficult life.
  

The Reed children, though they appeared to have everything as children, were terrors of the worst kind.  They were cruel to Jane and those mean-spirited traits followed them through their adult lives. The other girls at the orphanage are, to various degrees, unhappy with their circumstances--they are, after all, in an orphanage for a reason.

Even Adele, Mr. Rochester's ward, has the benefits of wealth around her but is not in an ideal situation.  Her mother has died, she is living as a ward to a benefactor who is rarely home, and the kind of woman he would have married (if he hadn't met Jane) would have shipped her off to boarding school.

Bronte thought childhood was a hard thing, something which must be endured.  However, since at least a few of the children in this work did grow up to be well adjusted, a bad childhood did not have to carry over into adulthood.  At some point we all have choices--John Reed chose a life of dissolution while Jane chose a life of moral integrity and service.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century there was both a philosophical and psychological debate about how the mind was formed and stocked with ideas. In short, Bronte held children as unregenerate beings.  The Romantics, however, held that children were naturally good and it was society that corrupted them later.  They believed in the "natural child" and felt that children should not be hurried into adulthood.

Charlotte Bronte possessed an awareness of the vulnerability of the child at the mercy of a Mrs. Reed, who finds them tiresome.  She was also very aware of such institutions as Lowood School which summarily categorized children and forced them into more adult-like situations for which they were unprepared.  For instance, the hypocritical Mr. Brocklehurst, who professes that girl's bodies should be starved in order to save their souls when he merely enjoys being cruel, punishes Jane for breaking her slate, saying that the Evil One has already found a servant in her.  He tells the other girls that Jane is a castaway and must be shunned; she is not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien. 

After he maligns Jane further to her incomprehension, Brocklehurst calls her "a liar."  He explains that he has learned this from her "benefactress" who sent her to Lowood.  With this castigation of Jane, he instructs that she be made to stand on a stool and no one speak to her for an half an hour.  In this passage, Charlotte Bronte placed much value upon the perception of children, and strives for as much verisimilitude in describing Jane's experience through her eyes.

Poor Helen is a true Christian, but in the environment of the stringent and hypocritical Calvinist, Mr. Brocklehurst, she, like Christ, becomes a sacrificial victim to the thinking of such cruel men. 

The disturbing treatment of children is part of Charlotte Bronte's theme of the importance of the individual; a worth that should be recognized.