Much of Volume 1 of Jane Eyre is predominately concerned with a Essay

Much of Volume 1 of Jane Eyre is predominately concerned with a child's sense of injustice. Do you think Jane's sense of injustice is justified Illustrate your answer by using textual examples - Essay Example She is an orphan left behind homeless at the death of both her parents when her mother’s brother Reed takes her in. He adores his sister’s daughter and on his death bed makes his wife promise that she would always look after Jane. Mrs Reed agrees, however, the promise is not fulfilled in the way it was meant to be. The Reeds live at Gateshead and here is where Jane spends the first ten years of her life at. Considering the fact that she is an orphan with only the Reeds as her known, living relatives and no one else, it would be thought that she would be treated like family, in such a way that she would not feel alone with the absence of her parents. Yet this is not the case. Jane is made to feel inferior at Gateshead repeatedly, she ‘is constantly differentiated, excluded (†¦) leaves her as an outsider to the Reed family’ (Peters 20). She is not treated like a family member, in fact, even worse than that. ‘Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room (†¦) Me, she had dispensed from joining the group’ (Bronte 3). This may be due to the various reasons regarding her lack of social status, her father being a poor minister; a passionate personality which was not quite the thing at that time; and plain looks, quite the opposite of what the Reed children were, Georgiana in particular as she says in the book that she is ‘humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John and Georgiana Reed’ (Bronte 3). Even the servants believe that Jane’s station in life is below theirs since she is not, in all actuality, a part of the family. She has ‘no money’ (Bronte 7) nor does she do any work to earn her keep for living there. She is often lectured on even by the servants regarding how she should behave in front of her benefactor and how, if it has not been for her generous spirit, Jane would have been sent ‘to the