Response Essay: Jane Eyre

The Features of Western Bildungsroman and its Significance to the Western Culture

Bildungsroman can be defined as one of the genres in novel in which the protagonist experiences the development—social, psychological, or spiritual—from youth into maturity through the process of realizing. In this realizing process, there are some features accompanying the protagonists’ development. By doing intertextualization, I will describe those features in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and two Western Bildungsroman protagonists—Holden Caulfield (J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, 1951); and Hazel Grace (John Green’s The Fault in Our Star, 2012) —regardless the era and time of publication, I find some patterns in the western Bildungsroman and its implications to the western culture.

The first feature accompanying the protagonists’ development implied the importance of novels/books. All of these protagonists are influenced or passionate by novels and/or books. Jane Eyre reads The History of British Bird which then formulates her consciousness about being free; this desire to be free makes her feel insecure and afraid over something that might bind her passion, for example when she rejects to marry St. John. Similarly, Hazel is passionate to The Imperial Affliction from which she learns about life and let the bygone go. She, moreover, refers it as her personal bible (pg. 10); Holden, among all courses, loves English language and literature best for English is the only course he passes, besides, he is personally close to his English teacher, he reads a lot of classical books (pg.10). From this pattern, we can see that reading books or novels is the practice involved in forming protagonists’ consciousness to reach the realizing process.

The second feature that is typical in Bildungsroman’s protagonists is being critical or freethinkers, especially toward society and religion. Jane, from early age, has been thinking of common sense related to social paradigms about being dependent and also the characteristics of being a woman that she thought she will never fit into. She, moreover, thinks about religion and all evangelical movements when she met three characters—Helen, Brocklehurst, and St. John—who have certain perspective about religion, however she rejects all the three kinds of religion types. I consider Hazel as freethinker when she thinks that the universe is insensitive and the world is not a “wish granting factory”, despite of that, she can still get the meaning in the meaningless life; that is what she learns from the novel she reads. Furthermore, Holden criticizes everything about adult world and call them as “phony”. He also says that he is “sort of an atheist” who despises Jesus’ disciples that he considers as useless (p.54).

Western Bildungsroman, to conclude, has some patterns that reflect the development of personality in western culture regarding the importance of reading and then being a freethinker. In these three Bildungsroman novels, the importance of book is prominent from which the protagonists are influenced and then develop their own ideology and belief about the world around them. This is maybe the reason why western countries have a reading-culture. In addition, the western people mostly are atheist and the freethinkers; or it can be that the western Bildungsroman novels are the reflection of the western cultures.

Bibliography:

Brontë, Charlote. (1847). Jane Eyre.New York: The Book League of America.

Green, John. (2012). The Fault in Our Stars.New York: Penguin Young Readers Group.

Salinger, J.D. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye.New York:Little, Brown and Company.