CC BY
7
UDK 82-3
Sadullaev F.B.
teacher Hodiyeva O.H. student
Bukhara State University Uzbekistan, Bukhara city DESCRIPTION OF WOMAN IMAGE IN THE NOVEL "SHIRLEY" BY
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
Annotation: In this article highlights description of woman image in the novel "Shirley " by Charlotte Bronte.
Key words: woman image, novel "Shirley", Charlotte Bronte.
XIX century English literature comprises a myriad of great works. The works by Charlotte Bronte are perhaps considered to be the most valuable ones. The writer herself is one of the most prominent female novelists in the XIX century.
As her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell stated: "T he life of Charlotte Bronte is very substance of her novels; three times she summarized what she had imagined, seen or felt. In "Jane Eyre" she depicted her imaginative life; in "Villette", her true moral life; in "Shirley", coming out of herself a little - though very little in fact- and standing as it were at the window of her soul, she depicted the corner of Yorkshire where she lived and what little she had seen of human society". Each of the writer's books therefore is not exercises of the mind, but crie s of the heart; not a deliberate self-diagnosis, but an involuntary self-revelation. Fundamentally, her principal characters are all the same person; and that is Charlotte Bronte. Her range is confined, not only to a direct expression of an individual's emotions and impression, but to a direct expression of Charlotte Bronte's emotions and impressions. In this, her final limitations, we come indeed to the distinguishing fact of her character as a novelist. The world she creates is the world of her own inner life; she is her own subject.
This does not mean, of course, that she never writes about anything about her own character. She is a story-teller, and a story shows character in action, character, that is, as it appears in contact with the world of external event and personality. Only the relation of Charlotte Bronte's imagination to this world is different from that of most novelists. Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist is concerned to convey a subjective impression. Her picture of the external world is a picture of her own reaction to the external world. Every page of Charlotte Bronte's novels burns and breathes with vitality. Out of her improbabilities and her absurdities, she constructed an original vision of life; from the scattered, distorted fragments of experience which managed to penetrate her huge self- absorption, she created a world. At first glance, "Shirley" appears to have no relationship to Charlotte Bronte's other novels: it seems to be an attempt at another genre, an experiment she did not repeat. "Shirley" is, nevertheless, a departure in this direction, being a historical, provincial and social novel that focuses on English middle-class women especially single
women victimized in contemporary society. Shirley is a female representative in the novel who, in her thoughts and ideas about women's roles, is far ahead of her time. She is sure that women are not less clever then men and they can do no worse than men in everything, even in shooting or haunting. Shirley embodies feministic traits, which were not frequent at her time. "If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil. Their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend".
Through the novel, Charlotte Bronte shows how the patterns of women's lives (and those of the workers) are shaped by social attitudes and forces over which they have no control. That the woman question is one of the main themes of the novel is recognized by both readers and the critics of the time. Although a concern with the position of women in society and the kinds of lives they lead is implicit in her other novels, it is only in "Shirley" that it becomes a predominant theme centering on the lives of the two heroines Caroline and Shirley. Caroline's lack of character, her long, brooding inactivity in the novel, her seriousness, is as much the result of the weariness of life without purpose of an unmarried woman as of the sorrowing and decline of the girl crossed in love. Shirley is, of course, is shown to have much to occupy her, but even so, a comparison of the occupations. Shirley's pursuits are quite as trivial in some ways as those of Caroline. Fundamentally, it is Shirley's nature which enables her to find such restrictions of activity not irksome.
In the novel also, Shirley is portrayed as an intelligent woman, observes men' treatment of women and recognizes the perception that underline it. When Robert Moore does not inform her of the attack on the mill, even though he owns it, she marks that men tell women nothing and keeping them completely in the dark about subjects which involve danger. She comes to the conclusion that they perceive women to have as much capacity for thought as children, and clearly that she think this wrong. In any case, Charlotte Bronte offers no solution to the feminist problem in this novel. Shirley, the landowner, farmer, mill owner and heiress, abdicates wealth, position and power in favor of her husband; Caroline marries Robert Moore and the problems of unmarried life are removed from her. But a third attitude to the feminine dilemma is suggested by the young girl, Rose Yorke, in her determination to use the talents God gave her and bury them in a life of domesticity. "Shirley" is intended to have greater insight into what is going on than everyone else, but since she does not reveal her insights until a situation has been revealed to her, she is unconvincing. The attempt to portray the Charlotte - heroine in fortunate circumstances as well as the attempt to analyze the situation of the unmarried woman is unsuccessful because both, by their nature, are dogged by lack of appropriate action.
Finally, Charlotte Bronte's picture of love and marriage reveal her power. But solitary obsession, while it offers equal scope to her intensity and more to her imaginative strangeness, makes no demands on her she cannot satisfy. No power of psychological penetration or accurate observation is needed to communicate the
impressions of the senses in an abnormal nervous state; while to be dreamlike and unrestrained is characteristic of such impressions.
The list of used literature:
1. "Зарубежная литература XX века" Под ред. проф. В. Н. Богословского и проф. З.Т.Гражданской, М-1979
2. Charlotte Bronte "Jane Eyre" M: "Macmillan", 2005"Введение в мировую литературу". М: "Издательство МГУ", 2000.
3. http://elr.sciedupress.com
