From Autonomy to Reform: Cultural Models of Womanhood in Jane Eyre and Kecha va kunduz

Abstract

This article examines Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Cho’lpon’s Kecha va kunduz (1936) as representations of distinct cultural models of womanhood. Instead of viewing the novels as examples of one “woman question”, the study employs close reading of each novel to demonstrate that they offer different answers to the question of what a woman is for. Jane Eyre expresses a model of moral autonomy, where selfhood, conscience and equality of soul empower a woman to reject degradation and a sanctified but loveless obligation. Written at the edge of Soviet modernity, Kecha va kunduz is a transitional model in which a talented woman’s voice and desire are in conflict with an inherited system of kinship, honour and communal reputation that renders her voiceless and with a reform whose promised “day” never comes. The analysis is based on Bartmiński’s theory of cultural models and stereotypes, Wierzbicka’s theory of cultural scripts and the study of gendered expectation in Cameron, Holmes and Tannen and reads each novel against the cultural changes of its world: industrial Protestant individualism on the one hand and the Jadid reform movement’s challenge to Central Asian tradition on the other.