A new Master of Arts thesis with Brontë-related content:
Hannah M. Karim, University at Albany, State University of New York
2025
This thesis will use Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea to gain a greater understanding of the postcolonial notions of criminality that are sustained and reproduced through racialized purity rhetoric and hierarchy. I argue that the restriction of the definition of the human, within scientific, religious, and legal realms, functioned towards the colonial end of sustaining racial hierarchy. In terms of its means of functioning, I argue that its need to function discretely is a direct response to the abolishment of slavery and with it, the shifting social demand for an appearance of reason, moral righteousness, and equity, making its success reliant on the entanglement of disciplines, not yet codified as distinct until the end of the 19th century. This presentation will follow this solidification of “fact” and how its culmination takes the form of an intricately developed image of the criminal, subject to the same Eurocentric ideologies that are inextricable from the means and ends of colonialism. This historical and literary reflection will therefore examine the construction of the criminal that has unjust ramifications for those who do not conform to the masculine, Eurocentric image of ideal, civilized personhood.
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