The Homosocial Network: Miss Temple's Virtues and Significance Anonymous College

If Charlotte Brontë’s character of Miss Temple in Jane Eyre could be distilled down to one word, perhaps it would be “perfect.” At a cursory glance, Miss Temple seemingly represents a paragon of conventional, Victorian femininity. Brontë foregrounds the character’s stoicism, grace, and maternal compassion, while preserving her ostensible obedience to male authority and social norms. Beneath this façade of external conformity, however, Brontë complicates Miss Temple’s female role by placing emphasis on her female homosocial connections, and repurposes her conventional femininity as a subtle means of subversion against traditional power dynamics.

Miss Temple’s femininity appears to be in line with societal expectations at its surface. In reflecting upon the completion of her eight years at Lowood, Jane describes Miss Temple’s relation to her as that of “mother, governess, and latterly, companion” (100). Yet in the very next sentence, she mentions that Miss Temple “married [and] removed with her husband” (100). These two facts – and their consecutive order in the novel’s narrated sequence – construct a panoptic image of Miss Temple as a role model of conventional womanhood. Miss Temple’s marriage suggests her willingness to...