Context — Jane Eyre — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's life, from Cowan Bridge school and her sisters' deaths to her work as a governess and her pen name Currer Bell,
the governess and women's position in early Victorian England, religion and charity schools, the Bildungsroman and the Gothic,
and how later readers have seen Bertha Mason, as Jane's dark double and as a woman wronged by her husband.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
Charlotte Brontë's life: the Cowan Bridge school, where her two elder sisters fell ill before dying at home, her unhappy first post as a governess, and the pen name Currer Bell.
Lowood and Mr Brocklehurst drawn from Cowan Bridge and its founder, the clergyman William Carus Wilson, and the school's hunger, cold and disease.
The governess: an educated woman without money who earned her living teaching a family's children in their home, as Charlotte Brontë did, and her lonely, lowly place in the household.
Women's position: most women's dependence on a father or husband, a wife's dowry passing to her husband, and marriage as the expected future for a woman without money.
Religion: harsh, self-righteous religion against Christian charity, and the Preface's defence of the novel: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion'.
The Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, and the Gothic, with its gloomy mansions and imprisoned madwoman, and how Brontë combines them with romance.
Bertha Mason, Rochester's first wife from Jamaica, and later readings of her: Jane's dark double in Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, and the victim of a racist, controlling husband in Jean Rhys's prequel Wide Sargasso Sea.
OCR credits context in this essay only where it is relevant to the question: social, historical and cultural ideas, or literary context such as the conventions of the Gothic or of science fiction, woven into the argument rather than written as a paragraph of background.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
