The Capital Exchanges in Marriages in Charlotte Bronte’s Novels

Abstract

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), being famous for her novel— Jane Eyre, is an outstanding British writer in the 19th century. By scrutinizing the marriages in Charlotte Bronte’s novels with the method of textual analysis, this paper summarizes several marriage patterns, which implies the popular values for good matching and the exchange of human capital, social capital, economic capital and cultural capital in marriages. The author contends that the ideal marriage that the female writer longs for is also inseparable from the essence of exchange, which is actually a form of exchange between the cultural capital she holds and the economic and social capital in the hands of the aristocracy. As an intellectual woman of the middle and lower petty bourgeoisie, Charlotte yearns for greater exchange value in marriage with the development of society and the rising of the bourgeoisie.