It’s a societal ordanace that we as people are entitled to our own belongings. When someone steals someone else’s car they are committing a felony punishable under law. Property rights are one of the few things that human beings hold themselves, while we ourselves should not be defined as property in our own right. The idea of humans as living equity is sickening, but not unheard of considering what our ancestors did. There is a large taboo about owning human beings, yet it seems so easy to constrict them, especially for Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Mr. Bytes from David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. These two men consistently undermine and diminish the people closest to them in order to promote their own self-interest and egos.…show more content… Jane Eyre and the Elephant Man (John Merrick) both are restricted by the men in their life, and the way in which Brontë and Lynch show this masculine control ellicits sympathetic feelings from the audience, and because of their relationships with these controllers the characters lose their own autonomy. The men in both of these novels create such restrictive conditions for the protagonsits that Jane Eyre and John Merrick are forced into a situation where they have to choose to accept or deny a life of no personal freedom. The consistent restrictions on both Jane’s social and romantic endeavors by Rochester keep her silent but active in her own mind, allowing the reader to feel for her because of what she is thinking. In Chapter 27 of Jane Eyre, Rochester and Jane are having an argument after Jane attempts to leave. Rochester cries out after hearing she does not wish to marry him, “Oh, Jane, this is bitter! This--this is wicked. It would not be wicked to love me.” She responds almost abruptly with “It would to obey you” (Brontë 269). Jane is asserting that the idea of being chained to a man who sees her as a subordinate person and
