Susan Sniader Lanser – Jane Eyre’s Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity

 

Reading Journal - Session 6 - 29/11/2016

Susan Sniader Lanser – Jane Eyre’s Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity
 

·         novel only not a failure because it was promoted as autobiography with a strong narrative voice, impersonal narrator wouldn’t have had the same effect

·         female personal voice took form in the early 19^th cent. by merging two different genres: courtship novel and spiritual autobiography

·         governess novels preceding Jane Eyre: retrospectively told by a woman who has been a wife for some time, with the goal being instruction

o   silence a condition for the position of the governess, as well as an expectation of womanhood

o   restlessness with their own submissive and pious femininity

·         Jane Eyre exposing earlier governess narrators as only fictively female and singular, occupying the ideological positions of men

·         most crucial to the development of Jane’s character is the preservation of her right to speak

·         proceeds as though she must not only have a voice, but be the voice

o   vanquishing the verbal authority of men

o   becomes her own spiritual authority, instead of accepting the assumed connection btw. God’s authority and man’s

·         addressing the reader directly as form of public epistolarity

·         to tell is to exist

·         Jane Eyre as a starting point for a tradition of fictional autobiography by women

·         but in order to be so effective, Jane must silence all other voices (especially Bertha Mason Rochester, Jane’s silenced double), subjugation the Victorian Empire demands

o   racialized other, defeminized, dehumanized, assures Jane’s own femininity

o   compared to Bertha’s uncontrollable voice, Jane’s outspokenness is ultimately safe and unthreatening to social order

·         just as Romantic narrative constructed authority as essentially masculine, Jane Eyre legitimates female authority as essentially white

This essay raises interesting points concerning the narrative voice in Jane Eyre that made the novel so different and successful in the history of English literature. It explains how it becomes the starting point of fictional autobiography of female voices and the importance of Jane’s outspokenness throughout the whole piece. But it also takes into account that for Jane to be as outspoken as she is, everyone else has to be silenced, the men she interacts with as well as other women who threaten her position. While Jane Eyre is an important work of fiction in the context of feminism by making her voice equal to men in the narrative, it is also important to consider the unequal notions by silencing all the other women. In a racial context, this becomes even more severe in the person of Bertha Mason Rochester who is silenced, dehumanized and killed to further Jane’s own narrative. It is no wonder that she received so much attention later on through the “Mad Woman in the Attic” as well as the prequel of the book Wide Sargasso Sea for “The Empire Writes B(l)ack” that deals with Bertha’s story. It is an instance that very well shows that feminism for white women and feminism for black women mean very different things and need to be considered differently to reach some kind of equality.

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