Outlandish Jane Eyre

We continue with our selection of editorial novelties that treat the Brontës' lives or works in some way or another. This time we'd like to talk about "Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel", written by Timothy L. Carens and published by Palgrave-MacMillan last October.

Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses and studies its emergence in the major works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Meredith. Each of these writers disrupts the certitudes of imperial ideology by appropriating the language of ethnography and using it to describe the social domestic field. Providing fresh readings of both canonical and neglected novels, this original volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Nineteenth-Century literature and Postcolonial studies.

The chapter that focus on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is: "The Juggernaut Roles in England: The Idol of Patriarchal Authority in Jane Eyre and The Egoist".

This is an extract from the first chapter (Bridging the Divide):

Chapter 3, for example, traces the journey of the idol of Juggernaut from English writing about India into Victorian domestic novels. The chapter begins with a comparative analysis of two competing narratives about this specific idol, one produced by Evangelical missionaries, the other by official agents of the East India Company. Although these narratives differ widely in tone and resolution, they share disdain for the idolatrous ceremonies they describe, and both broadly manifest the assumption of English superiority and difference. Charlotte Brontë and George Meredith both embed Juggernaut narratives within their marriage plots, providing fascinating case studies of a major cross-current in the rhetorical system that sought to oppose Protestant England to heathen colonial otherness. Both authors discover an alarming affinity between the despised Hindu cult and English patriarchal culture. Both suggest that the Juggernaut of male authority threatens to crush women who bow before it. Crucial differences between their visions of reform, as well as the ironies that cast the efficacy of those reforms into doubt, only come into focus after first recovering the distinct narrative structures of the ethnographic discourses each appropriates and satirically reapplies.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian_Era,Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë