Micael M. Clarke - Bronte's Jane Eyre and the Grimms' Cinderella - SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40:4 SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40.4 (2000) 695-710 Brontë's Jane Eyre and the Grimms' Cinderella Micael M. Clarke Readers attempting to place Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in the nineteenth-century novel tradition have been puzzled by Brontë's bold mixing of genres and by the immense and powerful ideological dialectic that seems to "close down" at the novel's conclusion to an apparently thin monological stream. Richard Chase exemplifies this critical mystification: "The Brontës' tremendous displacement of the domestic values toward the tragic and mythical, though it falls short of ultimate achievement, gives their work a margin of superiority over that of other Victorian novelists." Chase's statement reflects the difficulties many critics have with the conclusion of Jane Eyre, an ending that often leaves readers wondering what happened to the woman who once so stirringly declared women's desires for independence, replaced by a Jane now apparently living only for Rochester. Has Brontë failed to extricate her vision from the apparently downward-tending "domestic" to achieve the "tragic and mythical" and therefore failed to fulfill the vision she seemed to offer women? Or is it perhaps that Brontë is raising the domestic to the level of the mythical? An examination of Brontë's use of the Cinderella tale in Jane Eyre...