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.

Obscurantism vs. Skepticism: A Critique of Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism?"

Susan Gubar does a fantastic job of outlining the recent history of feminist discourse in her essay "What Ails Feminist Criticism?", and I agree with many of her critiques of what she labels the first three phases of feminist criticism. Her narration of the evolution of feminism draws clear connections of what appears to be historical necessity between each succeeding phase, and her essay acts as an excellent point of access to contemporary theory. Its conclusion, however, is somewhat lacking; Gubar's attempt at a critique of poststructuralist feminism as undermined by its own obscurantism--particularly when compared to her very persuasive criticism of other brands of feminism--is unconvincing, and the essay in its entirety simply cements my personal belief that deconstructive gender theory (in the vein of Butler) provides the most useful framework for understanding sexual politics in contemporary society. In this post, I will briefly provide my own interpretation of Gubar's critiques of the first three phases of feminist discourse, and then I will argue that the poststructuralist school of feminism provides the most valid solution both to gender inequality and to "what ails feminist criticism" in this fourth phase of infighting.

Gubar's primary problem with the "critique" phase of feminism is its negative nature; it lamented the cultural dominance of the masculine and the exclusion of the feminine, but it did not have its own discourse. Its identity was entirely negative and therefore wholly defined and restricted by--as well as dependent on--the discourse of the masculine. (If you're interested in the paradoxically dependent nature of political and representational resistance in general, I'd recommend Eva Geulen's extremely sophisticated essay "Resistance and Representation: A Case Study of Thomas Mann's 'Mario and the Magician'" (New German Critique 68 (1996): 3-29).)

This inevitably led to the second phase--that of "recovery"--which had a positive identity; it developed a unique canon of woman writers and attempted to universalize the plight of women everywhere.

The recovery phase was immediately followed by the third phase--the "engendering of difference" phase--in which the feminist infighting began. Feminists quickly realized that the feminine experience of oppression could not be universalized, and the (in many ways unanswerable) question of race immediately complicated the field. White critics that excluded the literature of other races and ethnicities from their work were considered racist, and white critics that attempted to appropriate such literature were labeled colonialists. (This strikes me as excessively Marxist; in this logic, white feminists are analogous to the bourgeoisie, and all other races--here analogous to the proletariat--must act as their own saviors. This mindset is dangerously linked with violent revolution rather than peaceful political change, and its reliance on dichotomous racial hierarchies gestures toward an eventual inversion of the existing social structure--subjugating the hegemonic class of white feminists through the subjectivation of oppressed, racially other women--rather than the achievement of racial and gender equality.)

This lose-lose situation for white feminists was then reframed with the development of poststructuralist "identity" theory, which dislocated the concept of self and resisted the process of categorization altogether. Poststructuralist theory is appealing for many reasons: its refusal to define "woman" escapes the problems of the third phase and defeats racial hierarchies within the feminist movement, as it does not privilege any particular class, race, or ethnicity with being "more feminine" than any other; it acknowledges differences within and between genders while, through the logic of gender performativity and social construction, allowing for change within and exchange between constructed identities; and rather than subjugating or subjectivating a given race or gender, it moves outside of the logic of hierarchical power systems and avoids the danger of simply inverting the existing sexual-political situation.

Gubar's critique of this school of thought--primarily as voiced by Butler--is somewhat superficial. She questions the validity of the syntax of Butler's prose; this attack is overly (and ironically) formalist, and although Gubar claims that it has bearing on the realm of feminist linguistics, I read Butler's linguistic project as simply accessory, a little interdisciplinary treat to go along with her more substantial work on embodied sex and gender.

Gubar's primary critique of poststructuralist feminism, however, is that it is obscurant. I believe that she confuses "obscurantism"--her favorite thing to associate with poststructuralism--with "skepticism." Poststructuralism works against a unity of meaning and refuses to believe in essential sex or gender; this is analogous to Descartes' radical skepticism of the existence of the human body. Gubar is firmly entrenched in the discourse of sexual difference, and she seems to read gender like a Freudian analyst reads psychological symptoms: although she may acknowledge the social construction of gender, she believes that gender is a symptom--a manifestation--of the sort of platonic truth of biological sex. This reasoning assumes a real connection between gender and sex and between sex and the body. Butler's skepticism rejects this; rather than draw a conclusion that is likely to be correct--that gender and sex are connected in a specific way--she acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the nature of this connection for certain. She is not obscurant; she is radically skeptical and therefore logically realistic--like the school of epistemological phenomenalism--past the point of traditional (and conservative) common sense. The poststructuralist deconstruction of intra- and interracial (as well as intra- and intergender) relationships eliminates the problems of what Gubar calls "critical election" and "critical abjection," placing all forms of identity on an equal level of academic and practical validity.

While all of these schools and phases of feminism are valuable for their historical place in the narrative of feminist theory and their work in the blending of various academic discourses, I am convinced that the most useful mode of feminist criticism is the poststructuralist mode. It locates itself outside the logic of dichotomous hierarchization and allows the individual experiences of women (and groups of women) to coexist under the broad umbrella of "feminism." Although Gubar treats Friedman's suggestion that "gender studies" as a discipline be abolished in favor of a more comprehensive field of "identity studies" as radical, such a move is perhaps the only feasible way of reconciling the diverse and often antagonistic theorists of gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as the incredibly nuanced intersections of these various factors.