Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Bronte.
Those who remember Jane Eyre solely as required reading in high-school English class likely recall most vividly a childhood banishment(流放) to a death-haunted room, a mysterious presence in the attic, and a cold mansion going up in flames. It's more seemingly the stuff of Lifetime television, not revolutions. But as unbelievable as many of the events of the novel are, even today, Bronte's biggest accomplishment wasn't in plot devices. It was the narrative voice of Jane — who so openly expressed her desire for identity, definition and meaning — that rang powerfully true to its 19th-century audience. In fact, many early readers mistakenly believed Jane Eyre was a true account (in a clever marketing scheme, the novel was subtitled, "An Autobiography"), perhaps a validation of her character's authenticity.
The way that novels paid attention to the particularities of human experience (rather than the universals of romances) made them the ideal vehicle to shape how readers understood the modern individual. The novel seemed perfectly designed to tell Bronte's first-person narrative of a poor orphan girl searching for a secure identity—first among an unloving family, then a charity school, and finally with the wealthy but unattainable employer she loves. Unable to find her sense of self through others, Jane makes the surprising decision to turn inward.
The broader cultural implications of the story—its insistence on the value of conscience and will—were such that one critic worried some years after its publication that the "most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre:' Before Rene Descartes's cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am")，when the sources of authority were external and objective, the aspects of the self so central to today's understanding mattered little then.
To be sure, no earlier novelist had provided a voice so seemingly pure, so fully belonging to the character, as Bronte, She developed her art alongside her sisters, the novelists Anne and Emily, but it was Charlotte whose work best captured the sense of the modern individual. Anne Bronte's novelsAgnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hallcontributed to the novers ability to offer social criticism, while the Romantic sensibilities of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights explored how the "other, " in the form of the dark, unpredictable Heathcliff，can threaten the integrity(完整) of the self.
One of the greatest testimonies(证明) to Bronte's accomplishment came from a modernist pioneer, Virginia Woolf, who declares, "Jane's voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world." Woolf explains how Bronte depicts:
… an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.
It is exactly this willingness — desire, even — to be "at war with the accepted order of things" that characterizes the modern self. While we now take such a sense for granted, it was，as Bronte's contemporaries rightly understood, radical (激进的) in her day.
"_______," Jane says as she is dragged by her cruel aunt toward banishment in the bedroom where her late uncle died. This sentence, Joyce Carol Oates argues, serves as the theme of Jane's whole story.
Charlotte Bronte created a new mold for the self—a person's inner life can allow her to change from the inside out.
It is true Jane does right and exercises great moral strength.
