It was completed, I would say, in the 1979 work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose Madwoman in the Attic secured Jane Eyre’s position, in one critic’s words, as “a cult text of feminism.” If Adrienne Rich’s Jane is heroically stalwart, the Jane of Gilbert and Gubar is heroically enraged. The co-authors, whose very collaboration stands as an alternate to singular patriarchal authorship, explore what happens to women whose voices are repressed. They focus on the incarcerated, incendiary figure of Rochester’s wife in the attic, Bertha Mason, and find in her an emblem of justified female madness and rage. This is the rage that consumes Jane, Charlotte, and all women whose lives have been circumscribed and voices silenced. It is the self-same rage Virginia Woolf had seen as a defect and Adrienne Rich had countered with her delineation of the heroine’s constructive quest. For Gilbert and Gubar rage is the truth that will out and the route to liberation. Powerful in its influence, Madwoman in the Attic established Jane Eyre as the voice of feminist anger, exploding to protest women’s oppression. Burn down the house, burn your bra, burn in righteous anger. Women, as Jane says, want action, too. Jane Eyre thus became the Brontë text white middle-class second-wave Feminists of the 1970s and ’80s had to read and teach and write about. As a committed white middle-class feminist myself, I was happy to put it on my syllabi, my enthusiasm to teach its themes overriding my personal failed connection to the novel. I have probably taught it more times than any other work of English fiction.
In the twenty-first century Jane Eyre is still prominent on my syllabi, but yet another paradigm shift has occurred. In recent postcolonial and global (third-wave) feminist readings, Jane has been reassessed as both racist and insufficiently feminist. She has been cast as colonial oppressor, a white woman marginalizing the Creole Bertha as she herself has been marginalized by a patriarchal culture; she has been castigated for her ultimate failure to break out of the bourgeois domestic sphere. One of my graduate students for whom the old feminist Jane Eyre clearly has Rich’s “special force and survival value” was so indignant that she wrote her masters thesis using the new historicist approach that seeks to ground a text in its times to rescue the heroine from these latter-day revisions. Jane, the student posited, is as much of a rebel as she can be and should be honored for her proto-feminist achievement.
Postcolonial critical approaches make Jane Eyre more controversial, but still, they keep it at the top of reading lists. The novel, as I have said, is a serviceable text. Just as its feminist strains could be mined, it lends itself to postcolonial readings in the abundance of its colonial material. Critics can engage in what Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism calls “contrapuntal reading”—“reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England.” Contrapuntal reading of Jane Eyre highlights that Rochester has enriched himself through marriage to a West Indian Creole, that Jane’s inheritance, securing her financial independence, derives from an uncle’s fortune made in Madeira, and that St. John Rivers joins the missionary arm of empire.
Postcolonial approaches also find textual metaphors that we had somehow overlooked before. It took Gayatri Spivak in her influential article “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” to show that Bertha Mason’s death could be read as an act of suttee: the third-world wife sets herself on fire, acting out of hate but serving the cause of love and empire. Bertha, Spivak argues, must “play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive ‘Other,’ set fire to the house and kill herself so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction.” Another critic, Deirdre David in Rule Britannia, gives us a chastened Rochester, now a true widower cleansed of his sultanic excesses, reunited through the purgation of Bertha with the British heroine who has redeemed him for the colonizer’s mission. These readings set Jane and Bertha in opposition, Jane thriving at Bertha’s expense. But there’s also a postcolonial-era Jane who herself faces dangers of suttee and the seraglio, at least metaphorically. She will not join Rochester’s harem. She will not marry Rivers because that, she says, would kill her (though she is willing to go to India where she feels she would certainly die).
I myself—it’s part of my essential uneasiness with Jane Eyre—have always been disturbed by how much Jane Eyre seems to relish her metaphors of subjugation. “Do you think I can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?” she asks. The dashing and the snatching have always seemed as vivid to me as Jane’s resistance to these violent acts. A way to engage this aspect of the novel, different from the postcolonial, is to filter it through psychonanalysis, a useful lens through which to explore Jane’s seeming masochism. One of my masters students, in an approach I would call socio-psychological with an overlay of feminism, argued in her thesis that Jane’s “social masochism” serves as an effective weapon for someone powerless “to take possession of her own marginalization and use it as a narrative and social technique to ally readers with her plight.”
And so it builds: the list of competing and compounding interpretations in the ongoing reimagining of Jane Eyre. Modernist, new critical, feminist, Marxist, new historicist, psychoanalytic, psycho-social, psycho-biographical—the approaches proliferate, the bibliographies lengthen. Then, too, the text has generated postcolonial rewritings of itself: Jean Rhys’s
