Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Chapter 12 · Narrator
Context
Continuing her meditation on restlessness and action, Jane suddenly addresses the condition of women directly, countering the assumption that women are naturally content with domestic routines.
Analysis
Jane's use of 'supposed to be' exposes the gap between social expectation and lived reality; the passive construction itself hints at how these norms are imposed rather than natural. The escalating list—'making puddings and knitting stockings, playing on the piano and embroidering bags'—treats women's prescribed activities as interchangeable trivialities, their paratactic piling-up suggesting monotony. By calling restrictive attitudes 'narrow-minded,' she reverses the usual judgment: it's not the woman who wants more who is unreasonable, but those who deny her.
Essay Tip
Use this to argue that Brontë breaks the fourth wall of the novel to directly challenge her contemporary readers—Jane's shift from personal confession to polemical 'you' implicates anyone who holds these views, making the novel a vehicle for feminist argument.