의학과 법, 그리고 억압과 감금

This paper aims to investigate into various characters in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations who suffer physical and mental suppressions at school, prison, and hospital in the name of reform. In particular, women like Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, Molly, Miss Havisham, Estella are portrayed to suffer in confined spaces such as a red room at Mrs. Reed’s Gateshead Hall, Lowood school, Bertha Mason’s attic at Thornfield Hall, Miss Havisham’s Satis House, and Jaggers’ House. It was believed in the Victorian age that symptoms of madness and insanity might be cured or controlled by the institutions and regulations of medicine and law, which tend to bind even individual body and spirit to specific limited spaces like prison, school, and hospital. Pip is always obsessed with a sense of guiltiness, afraid of being imprisoned like in Newgate. Pip’s future depends on the secret legal agreement made between Mr. Jaggers and Magwitch. Molly, Estella and Havisham are also all victims as they are all tied to the legal constraints ingeniously designed by Mr. Jaggers. In conclusion, the medical and legal institutions exercised much influence on the lives of the weak, the poor, and the female in the name of modern reform of insanity and madness, as shown in the two novels in which a culture of patriarchal superiority, sexual suppression of the women, and social status inequality are vividly revealed.