In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

94 5 Enclosing Fantasies Jane Eyre Madeleine Wood For the little drama enacted on “that day” which opens Jane Eyre is in itself a paradigm of the larger drama that occupies the entire book.1 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s observation from their chapter “Plain Jane’s Progress: A Dialogue of Self and Soul” from The Madwoman in the Attic contends that Jane Eyre’s red room scene establishes the symbolic pattern for the novel as a whole. Gilbert and Gubar claim that Jane’s incarceration encapsulates the heroine’s fundamental problem: the placing of an “anomalous orphan” within a society in which she has no place. And that Charlotte Brontë quite consciously intended the incident of the red-room to serve as a paradigm for the larger plot of her novel is clear not only from its position in the narrative but also from Jane’s own recollection of the experience at crucial moments throughout the book: when she is humiliated by Mr. Brocklehurst at Lowood, for instance, and on the night when she decides to leave Thornfield. In between these moments, moreover, Jane’s pilgrimage consists of a series of experiences which are, in one way or another, variations on the central, red-room motif of enclosure and escape. (Madwoman, 340-41) This insight constitutes the interpretative foundation for my essay. Reading across Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis, I highlight not only female em- Enclosing Fantasies 95 powerment and self-development but also self-enclosure. The concept of pilgrimage implies a sanctified journey that culminates in a blessed place: while Jane, as the writer of her own“autobiography,”undoubtedly figures her story in these terms, in fact we see a compulsive motif of escape and return rather than progression. Brontë problematizes the concept of pilgrimage, asking us whether we can ever find a true resting place for our selves. Jane does not renounce her sense of self in the same way as do Charles Dickens’s sacrificial heroines (for instance,Amy Dorrit and Florence Dombey), but she undoubtedly perpetuates the conditions that lead to her liminal social and psychological state. While the notion of “pilgrimage” provides the structural model for Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis, my essay uses a traumatic model to reveal the lack of progression in Jane’s journeying: she is caught within her own patterns of desire as well as by patriarchal structures. This concept is implicit within The Madwoman in the Attic’s exposition: the primary doubling of the self in the red room scene is symbolically echoed through the introduction of Bertha Rochester and Jane’s own pervasive doubts prior to her wedding to Edward Rochester. These observations will be reconsidered, exploring how the red room episode establishes patterns of desire that repeat throughout the text. Jane’s encounter with the “other” in the red room is not only with the unknown self but with the missing, and longed-for, father figure. Rather than seeing Jane’s path through the novel as a progressive movement towards a predetermined goal, I see Brontë’s story as inscribing a repetitive fantasy. By reevaluating The Madwoman in the Attic’s treatment of Jane Eyre through the concept of trauma, the nature of the “female imagination ” in the nineteenth-century novel can likewise be reconsidered: she is enclosed not simply by male structures but by desire for the male figure. While Gilbert and Gubar’s essay concludes with an optimistic reading of Jane and Rochester’s isolated marriage at Ferndean, I argue that Brontë’s decision to detach her protagonists from both social and familial structures means that their marriage becomes disturbingly utopian, in Thomas More’s original sense of an impossible “no-place,” rather than idyllic.2 The model of trauma implicit in this reading is Sigmund Freud’s, taken from his writings of the 1890s, prior to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.3 These theories work from the conceptual premise that an originary event, or “scene,” creates a fundamental break in the subject’s development , a break that can only make sense through the accumulation of secondary scenes that follow. Throughout the 1890s, Freud’s trauma model became progressively more complex, moving beyond the single originary events explored by Josef Breuer in the case of “Anna O.”4 But the scenography of trauma slides under Freud’s analytic technique: scenes proliferate, constantly referring back to an origin that can never be fully identified, and yet that is compulsively repeated. The “primal scene...

Share