Social class — Jane Eyre — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Social class
Themes
What you need to know
How Brontë explores class and money, from Jane's dependence at Gateshead and her place as a governess to her inheritance 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: 'you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us', 'I should not like to belong to poor people', 'I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste', 'half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi', 'I am a judge of physiognomy, and in hers I see all the faults of her class', 'she was not good; she was not original', 'I felt degraded', 'the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me', 'these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy'.
Context: the governess as a lady who works for a living, the contempt of the Ingram family for her, and Jane's own prejudices about the poor.
Eduqas's essay on this novel marks context as much as response and analysis: weave context into the argument, and treat the printed extract as a starting point, ranging across the beginning, middle and end of the novel.
