Gender Norms Are Overated

Mihalis Sourgiadakis
Prof. Helms
4/27/2024

For this piece I decided to create a painting of Jane Eyre and Mexican Gothic. When I was first coming up with ideas on what to write about, I immediately thought about how women and men are portrayed in literature. Obviously, more recent literature is starting to give women more voices and power, but it’s also showing how men can be vulnerable. Women and men have always been portrayed mostly as protector and protected, abuser and victim, or even adult and child, they are almost never both protectors. However, this is starting to change with more recent pieces of literature like Mexican Gothic. The effect that trauma has on society is a major part of why gender norms are portrayed in the way that they are, and how breaking gender norms in literature is of major importance for society.
When reading Jane Eyre, there were multiple parts in the story that made you realize that Jane was trying to act outside of gender norms. Jane Eyre as a character, is a woman that knows her own worth deep down, especially when she held her mom accountable for what they did to her. However, she is still portrayed as someone who only exists for Mr. Rochesters convenience. Jane Eyre went through a lot of trauma, especially when she was locked up in the red room. A study done by the National Library Of Medicine stated, “Our results demonstrate that traumatic life experience significantly increases the likelihood of mental health disorders in this setting and that these traumatic experiences have a larger effect on the mental health of women than men.” This is made very apparent in regards to how Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester both handled their traumas. Jane would wear it on her sleeve and basically show everyone how she was feeling, while Mr. Rochester locked his problems away and pretended like nothing was wrong. These reactions, from both of them, explain perfectly how women were viewed as emotional, and how men were viewed to have no emotion.
Jane Eyre portrays gender norms to the core of what they are. On the other hand, Mexican Gothic shows how gender norms are made up concepts that we as a society are still trapped by. In Mexican Gothic, our main character Noemi is exactly like Jane Eyre in my opinion, with the main difference being Noemi knows how society works. Noemi has been through a lot and could have been portrayed as naive likeJane Eyre was, but she decided to use it to her advantage. We see her using the fact that she is a woman to get the things she wants by acting clueless. This completely breaks regular gender norms, not only in a mental sense, but in a physical one too. She fights back at the end and without her everyone would have been doomed. Women gender norms are not the only ones being broken in this story, Francis also breaks multiple gender norms. Francis is also severely traumatized, but he doesn’t run away from his problems, or put on the front that everything is okay all the time. Multiple times throughout the book he tried to warn Noemi that she needed to leave, and even showed an act of weakness when he didn’t help her during a certain scene. Men, when it comes to gender norms, are supposed to be the hero’s and save the day all by themselves at the end, but that’s not what Francis did. Francis and Noemi both played major roles at the end of the story, with Noemi being the one to save his life in the end. Noemi also stated that Francis looked like Sleeping Beauty.
I decided to make a painting of the mushroom from Mexican Gothic burning down with strips of Jane Eyre and her trauma underneath as a way to show that everyone handles/reacts to trauma differently no matter what gender they are. As a future educator I think that It is of utmost importance that we make a society where children/adults can deal with trauma in ways that they want to. Men shouldn’t have to hide their emotions or problems away like Mr. Rochester did, and not all women become super reliant on others like Jane Eyre did. In conclusion, I believe that we as a society need to create more stories like Mexican Gothic that break away from gender norms for a better future for all!