Abstract
Jane Eyre helped to shape new literary and cultural directions in the 1840s through its intersecting themes of the governess, the child, and the transposed Gothic. In bringing together two vulnerable groups, the orphaned child and the impecunious middle-class woman, the novel creates a powerful paradigm that gives high visibility to particular cultural anxieties. The figures of the orphaned child and the governess were to become a pulse point for Victorian discourses on women. While governess novels proliferated in the 1840s, challenging early Victorian domestic economy, Jane Eyre simultaneously uses the dispossessed and unprotected woman to create new forms of narrative agency.
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Notes
- 1.
Now held in the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, the manuscript fragment beginning ‘I have now written a great many books’ is now commonly known as Brontë’s ‘Farewell to Angria’ (cited in Glen, Angria xiii).
- 2.
For an account of how Brontë reacted to silver-fork fiction in her early works, see Arvan-Andrews passim; Glen, Tales of Angria xv–xvii; Wilson 171.
- 3.
Literary scholars have discussed the narrative potential of the Victorian orphan, arguing that ‘the orphan self, with its complex history of loss’ exemplified larger cultural and social concerns that still resonate (Hochman and Wachs 187). Peter Coveney has influentially argued that at the end of the eighteenth century, the child emerged as a central subject of art and literature and became sentimentalized by the mid-Victorian age. Critics have since qualified his discussion of Victorian child cults. Compare Stone’s work on ‘affective individualism.’ However, while reflecting changes in attitudes to children, literary orphan figures also embodied broader cultural shifts. Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs speak of an ‘orphan condition … [as] a state of mind that … informs some part of everyone’s imagination,’ and which manifests itself in Victorian fiction in children who are ‘bruised and battered by wicked stepparents and brutal, exploitative institutions’ (14).
- 4.
Mary Jean Corbett suggests that the text gives a ‘genealogy to Aunt Reed’s “aversion” to her husband’s sister’s daughter, representing it as motivated by a rivalry that also suggests broader cultural change within family formation’ (242).
- 5.
Ian Watt has traced the realist novel to the replacement of collective tradition by ‘individual experience … as the ultimate arbiter of reality’ (14), and subsequent discussions of the ‘classic’ novel have focused on its representation of the individual’s position within society. Victorian first-person narratives focus on the formation of the individual, often presented as an experience shared by the narrator and the implied reader, as in Jane Eyre and David Copperfield as well as in Samuel Butler’s later The Way of All Flesh (1903).
- 6.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have rendered Bertha Mason the iconic ‘madwoman in the attic,’ while Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has sparked off postcolonial interpretations of the text by comparing it with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), an interpretative prequel. Susan Meyer reads Rochester’s ‘mad, drunken West Indian wife’ as the ‘central locus of Brontë’s anxieties about the presence of oppression in England’ (97).
- 7.
On the self-reflexivity and self-irony in Villette’s redeployment especially of Gothic elements as well as of structural elements taken from Jane Eyre, see Tamara S. Wagner 116–18.
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Wagner, T.S. (2018). Jane Eyre, Orphan Governess: Narrating Victorian Vulnerability and Social Change. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_6
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