Gender, Race, and Body Politics

A new Brontë-related B.A. Honors Thesis:

"My daughter, flee temptation!" "O, do go, dear mother!": Gender, Race, and Body Politics in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harper McCall

Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 2069

December 2023

The following thesis explores the constructs of gender and race in relation to the bodies of Jane Eyre and Linda Brent in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Jacobs. Particularly, 19th Century sociopolitical forces (e.g., British Imperialism, Antebellum American life, and the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade) constrict the womens' bodies as they progress through the novels' plots. By using Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave," both intertextual references and resonant comparisons can be made between the oppression and resistance narratives characteristic of Jane Eyre and Incidents. Such communicative frameworks reveal larger resistance narratives that protested the oppressive nature of the 19th Century and illuminate marginalized narratives in the retellings of 19th-century history.