Sex, lies and Jane Eyre

A new scholar book appears in which Jane Eyre is used as source material. Sex, Lies, and Autobiography:The Ethics of Confession is written by James O'Rourke and published by the University of Virginia Press.

In Sex, Lies, and Autobiography James O’Rourke explores the relationships between literary form and ethics, revealing how autobiographical texts are able to confront readers with the moral complexities of everyday life. Tracing the ethical legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in a series of English-language texts, the author shows how Rousseau’s doubts about the possibility of ethical behavior in everyday life shadows the first-person narratives of five canonic works: William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Offering a fascinating new way of thinking about ethics through literature, Sex, Lies, and Autobiography challenges the most fundamental principles of the philosophical study of ethics, revealing the innate difference between morality in life and morality in literature.

O’Rourke begins with Rousseau’s inability to reconcile his intuitive belief that he is a good person with the effects that his actions have on others, and he goes on to show how this same ethical impasse recurs in the five aforementioned texts. The ethical crises these texts describe, such as when Jane Eyre’s happiness can be purchased only at the cost of Bertha Mason’s suicide, or when Humbert Humbert’s artistry demands the sacrifice of Dolores Haze, are not instances of authorial ethical blindness, O’Rourke says, but rather are ethical challenges that force us as readers to consider our own lives. In each of these works, a narrator attempts to justify his or her behavior and fails; in each case, the rigorous narrative of self-examination demands a similar effort from the reader, whose own sense of moral rectitude is put into question. (...)

Categories: Books, Scholar, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë