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Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte

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Following the experiences of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, expresses many elements of gothic literature throughout her novel Jane Eyre. In her perfect understanding of gothic literature, she expresses the three types of evil commonly found in gothic literature, including the evil of the supernatural, the evil within or the instinctual evil motives of humans, and lastly, the evil because of societal influence. Jane Eyre experiences all of these three evils with her aunt and three cousins with her residency and return to Gateshead: Jane encounters the supernatural and the evil of societal influence as a child and she fully encounters the evil within upon her return.
As a child at Gateshead, one discovers the first form of evil in the novel with the negative interactions between Jane and her relatives, which sparks from both, “physical inferiority,” (Bronte 11) to her cousins, and as Bronte eventually states, her lack of money. Doing rather short work, the reader discovers Jane does not belong in Gateshead with her rich Aunt, Mrs. Reed, and her cousins, John, Georgina, and Eliza. Jane’s three cousins cluster, “around their mamma,” (Bronte 11) in the opening of the novel, but Jane sits in solitary. She leaves to ask her aunt, “What does Bessie say I have done?”(Bronte 11); her aunt responds she likes children, who do not take up their elders, and Bronte implies, she likes good children, which becomes surprising with Jane’s cousins later actions. As Mrs. Reed departs from the

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