- Summary: Tompkins refutes critics’ claims that sentimental and cliche novels are valueless and solely for aesthetics, arguing that they are actually a medium in which Victorian women writers could better connect their readers to their writings. Therefore, the way in which these women wrote was intentional and meant for a rhetorical purpose. Tompkins also reveals how girls and women were represented in novels and society at the time, by analyzing book characters in terms of her argument.
- Illuminating: How Tompkins argument, seemingly just about novels, encompasses new societal ideals of the time, of which connect to our research.
- In particular, Chapter V Tompkins focuses on Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, revealing that there was a new role for women that made them more important to society, as they were given the responsibility to marry and raise the next generation (Tompkins, 145).
- The subgoal for young women coming of age was to secure a husband, that way they could continue towards the greater goal society had given them, which was raising the new generation. Because of this, they used any advantage they had to secure a husband, that they could to become a productive member of society.
- The most successful at this were women who were beautiful and wealthy, as Jane Eyre says, “And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you” (Bronte, XXIII).
- Jane realizes that class status and/or beauty are what women provide in a marriage and to lack either most likely means failure. This is why she feels so inferior to Blanche Ingram, who has these advantages and therefore more to offer Rochester.
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