Originally, I intended to write about Jane Eyre being a bildungsroman novel, but after reading through a few of the other posts, I settled on courtship. Jane Eyre is an excellent book about courtship, but not the kind that one would see in traditional nineteenth-century literature.
I don't think Bronte ever intended for Jane Eyre to be a book involving the traditional courtship of that time and the years before that time. If she did that it would have been another stuffy nineteenth century romance novel with a predictable ending. Instead, Bronte goes into one of the most important things in romance, passion. Passion is the thing that many of those other courtship novels fail to bring up; it's a way of humanizing the characters and making them more relatable to the everyday person. The reader can identify a lot of this intense passion in both Jane and Mr. Rochester throughout the course of the novel all the way up to when Mr. Rochester asks Jane to marry him. In the end the passion is what makes Jane Eyre a real courtship novel and not another stuffy fantasy novel that populated the time period.
That is true but I feel that there's still some elements in the book that can be traditional to the nineteenth century. With Miss Ingram, Jane had assumed that they were marrying for wealth and family, which is a traditional reason to get married for in that era. Also the supposed wedding had been planned by Mr Rochester, the dominant figure, way in advance probably to save time and to get it done without any fuss. I feel like those two reasons can tie it into a traditional sense.
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