The Receptions of the Female Voice

A new scholar approach to Jane Eyre:

The Receptions of the Female Voice: Uncovering Value in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey through Contingencies of Evaluation

Amber Alsaigh, Fairfield University

Macksey Journal: Volume 3, Article 33  (2022)

Drawing on Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s “contingencies of value” theory, this paper investigates the “continuously changing” factors that influence literary value (Herrnstein Smith 30). Throughout the centuries, contingencies have informed the way readers evaluate literature. When Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847, critics responded to her work by speculating over her gender. Jane Eyre’s initial reception, along with Brontë’s identity as a nineteenth-century woman writer, reveals her gender as a contingency of evaluation. Similarly, the publication of Rupi Kaur’s 2014 poetry collection milk and honey exposes contingencies of evaluation, as the twenty-first-century digital landscape and Kaur’s cultural background influence one’s understanding of her work. This paper argues that these contingencies of evaluation are necessary to consider when uncovering the value in each work and expanding the Western literary canon to include female voices.