Gothic Transgression: Jane Eyre and Boundaries

Jane Eyre is clearly a Gothic text, and the 2006 BBC miniseries adaptation of it foregrounds this genre categorization: much of the actions takes place in and around Thornfield Hall, a spooky castle of a home with sprawling, wild grounds; Jane is both literally and figuratively haunted by Rochester's living wife, Bertha; the question of insanity (both Bertha's and Jane's) pervades the narrative--the list goes on and on. While much can be (and has been) said about Jane's feminist asociality and unladylike passion, I would like briefly to comment in this post on the liberatory power offered by the very use of the Gothic genre itself--a genre that is characterized by radical transgression.

When one hears--or at least when I hear--the term "Gothic novel," one of two works is immediately brought to mind: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula. Both of these books (and the genre of the Gothic in general) are deeply concerned with boundaries: defining them, transgressing them, dissolving them. Frankenstein challenges the boundaries between the living and the dead, between science an the occult, and between the discreet self and the Other (often read in racial terms.) Dracula--which is perhaps more relevant to a discussion of Jane Eyre (vampirism is even hinted at by Bertha's choice to attack her brother Mason not with a weapon but with her teeth)--challenges all of these boundaries as well, but it often frames the transgression of social boundaries and hierarchies in gendered terms. Jonathan Haker's encounter with the three vampiresses in Dracula's castle is often read as an inversion of sexual hierarchies (he becomes passive and powerless at the hands of these hypersexualized women); Mina Harker's centrality to the eventual demise of the count challenges socially bound gender rolls; and the one boundary generally held sacred even in the most radical romantic literature--rigid heterosexism--dissolves in the homoeroticism of a symbolic gangbang when the Band of Light plunges a stake into Lucy's lifeless body. The Romantic tendency to push boundaries comes to a head in the Gothic space of Dracula, where nearly all boundaries--both gendered and non-gendered--dissolve into a haze of psychological ambiguity.

The Gothic framework Stoker provides--which is primarily concerned with social and sexual transgression--can be laid onto Jane Eyre. Bronte's novel also questions gendered social roles (as numerous feminist critics have noted in Jane's outspokenness and refusal to compromise,) but its primary Gothic tool is its deployment of the uncanny. Freud essentially conceptualizes the uncanny as the familiarization of (or the discovery of the familiar within) something unfamiliar or the defamiliarization of something familiar (i.e. characteristics of the living being attributed to the dead.) This process of developing uncertainty pervades Jane Eyre: as a governess, Jane occupies an ambiguous space as part family, part servant, part bourgeois, part proletariat; Bertha--a rich and beautiful woman--is filled with violence and madness; Thornfield is burned down by a flaming wedding dress, a traditional sign of life and celebration. Such deployment of the uncanny destabilizes the socially systematized space in which Jane comes of age and allows for the dissolution of conservative boundaries concerning the proper behavior of women. This process of defamiliarization is tellingly a dissolution, not an inversion; seemingly contradictory terms consistently become united (i.e. Bertha's beauty and her madness) rather than trade places in the Victorian system of values.

Such a dissolution allows Jane to become a unique brand of feminist heroine. Her passion is not directed exclusively at the betterment of her own place in the world or even that of women in general; instead she uses her drive and her knowledge to attempt to better the position of those in need regardless of gender. She does not become a teacher while living with her family at Marsh End because she wants to educated little girls but because she wants to educate children. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this radical novel is Jane's radically ungendered humanism, her refusal of oppressive cultural mores that just happen to disadvantage women.

Bronte's deployment of the Gothic creates a space in which such a radical humanism is possible. Jane's refusal to see those around her in terms of gender characterizes her as incredibly progressive within her own Victorian culture, and in the relative terms required by postcolonial- and ethnic-theoretical cultural sensitivity--as David Damrosch points out in the introduction to his book What Is World Literature?, cultural imperialism is not only spatial but temporal as well--she could, in a sense, be understood as a type of deconstructive feminist heroine.