Gender and independence — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Gender and independence
Themes
What you need to know
How Brontë explores women's position and Jane's struggle for independence, equality and a voice of her own across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Anybody may blame me who likes', 'women feel just as men feel', 'they need exercise for their faculties', 'confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings', 'Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings?', 'dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester', 'I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio', 'I am not an angel ... I will be myself', 'if I had ever so small an independency', 'I am an independent woman now', 'I am my own mistress'.
Context: the governess between family and servants, the few respectable jobs open to middle-class women, and married women's lack of property rights.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
