How does Bronte incorporate elements of the Gothic Tradition within her novel, Jane Eyre?

Clear elements of the Gothic Heroine may be found within the novel’s protagonist, Jane Eyre, a character who both embodies and subverts the Gothic tradition. A far cry from the rather two-dimensional heroines of previous Gothic tales, for example Elizabeth Lavenza in M. Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein’, Bronte’s heroine is imbued with a ‘passionate’ personality, a trait that Mrs Reed implies is a ‘fault’ in her character in Chapter Four. In this instance, and numerous other ways in which Jane asserts herself through the novel, such as rejecting the proposal of St John, Bronte utilises the Gothic Heroine as a platform from which to highlight women’s strength of feeling and frustration against Victorian repression. While Jane still retains her morally conservative values and virginal purity (traditional characteristics of a Gothic Heroine) through her refusal to succumb to her passion and become Mr Rochester’s mistress, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”, she inherently lacks the external beauty of traditional Gothic Heroines. Through humanising Jane with the knowledge that she was ‘obliged to be plain’, both by Nature’s design and her situation as a governess, Bronte creates a character far more representative of the ‘every-woman’, painfully aware of her aesthetic imperfections, yet not allowing that to define her view of herself and her intellectual capability. In this way Bronte’s heroine reflects an autobiographical view of Bronte’s own experiences, reflecting Virginia Woolf’s comment on Bronte’s “overpowering personality” within the novel, with the creation of a relatable female narrator “perpetually at war with the accepted order of things.” Therefore, in the creation of Jane, Bronte creates a character who is both familiar to her audience as a Gothic Heroine, yet revolutionised by her assertation over oppression, perhaps acting as a voice for Bronte’s own passions and frustrations.  Another example of Bronte's engagement with the Gothic Tradition lies in the Byronic depiction of Mr Rochester, with his ‘dark face’ and ‘stern features’ clearly being evocative of the guilt-ridden stereotype modelled on the author of ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.’ However, the Byronic too is subverted by Bronte, with the intriguing mystery surrounding his nature also offering a defiant argument against blatant injustice of the Victorian Social Hierarchy. Gail Griffin remarks that ‘Rochester spends a great deal of time blaming his fate, his family, his women for his predicament, rather than accepting it, painful and unjust though it is.’ Importantly, in repressing his own dark secret, Rochester physically represses his ‘lunatic’ wife, locking her away in ‘a wild beast’s den’ and thereby lessening her to an animalistic state. Post-colonial critics have interpreted this treatment as reflective of the abuse of the power held by the British Empire over foreign nations, with Bertha herself being described as a ‘Creole’. However, other interpretations, such as Jean Rhys’ novel, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ may perceive this depiction as Rochester’s own selfish desire to uphold the façade of a wealthy bachelor, disgusted with his arranged advantageous marriage because of being a second-son.