Jane Eyre: A Cinderella Story

Jane Eyre is the story of an orphan who overcomes that barrier and makes a name for herself later in her life. Jane did not have much, if any support from her relatives or anyone she met, and therefore Jane often spent much of her childhood and adulthood within her own imagination, her only refuge from the cruel world outside her mind. This "second self," which Germans call a "dopplegänger, is what helps Jane become a successful woman. By putting herself within her own imagination, Jane finds a way to cope with her unfortunate circumstances, and that avenue allows her to grow as a person in ways that she might not otherwise discover if she took circumstances in her life for what they are, rather than what they could be.

Jane's entire double-life within the real world and the worlds she reads about in such novels as Gulliver's Travels and Arabian Tales creates an interesting parallel between it and the fictitious lives of other heroines in fairy tales like Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and others. In these stories, those heroines were thrust into just as unfortunate a situation as Jane was in the novel's beginning. Charlotte Brontë plays with this parallels through her choices of language throughout the novel, the setting (and those choices stemming from its description, and even how Brontë describes some of the characters, like Rochester.