Gender, Race and Body Politics

A new Brontë-related thesis just published:

"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 (2023)

Harper McCall 

Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 2069

Readers of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) have long been interested in the novels’ engagement with gender and race. Though much scholarship has separately interpreted these constructs’ intersectionality in both works, reading Jane Eyre and Incidents together appears to construct a unified resistance dialogue. That is, both works’ shared emphasis on gender and race seems to form a concentric critique about women’s bodies and their constriction within 19th Century culture and society. To corroborate this claim, Jean Fagan Yellin’s extensive research into the life and legacy of Harriet Jacobs revealed that, before Jacobs began her narrative, she was influenced by Jane Eyre’s “story of a woman’s struggle of autonomy” (Harriet Jacobs 145). Yellin’s work hence reveals a powerful model of influence between Jane’s body within constructs of oppression and its echoes heard in Harriet Jacobs’ harrowing narrative of her time in enslavement. These echoes, however, are not limited exclusively to both novels. Instead, a larger, comprehensive overview of the 19th Century’s socio-political backdrop and leading examples of politically-charged literature give context to Jane Eyre and Incidents’ communicative framework.