Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre (review)

The theoretical framework Sue Thomas employs in this monograph is a familiar one. She takes her cue from Edward Said particularly, announcing early on her commitment to the task of "worlding" Jane Eyre (1847). The "worlding" of this novel, she acknowledges, has been an ongoing project for feminist and postcolonial criticism, with Jenny Sharpe, Deidre David, and Mary Poovey among many others collectively arguing for the novel's significance in critiquing Victorian constructions of women and empire. Indeed, Jane Eyre, more so than perhaps any other Victorian novel, has proved a favorite exemplar in arguments within and between feminist and postcolonial theory.

The burden the novel bears is manifest in some of the more exhilarating and groundbreaking of these arguments (for instance, those made by Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) that nonetheless have tended to flatten the novel's complexities. In that context, Thomas's intervention is a welcome one. It is, however, primarily historical. Arguing that even many historicist treatments of the novel have concentrated on the tropological, Thomas establishes "the novel's internal chronology and its references to contemporary events" (3), especially in relation to empire, in order to situate more carefully both the novel and Charlotte Brontë in historical and political context. So, for instance, in chapter 1, Thomas argues that Jane's reference to Walter Scott's poem, Marmion refers not to the original version published in 1808 but to a later one that appeared in 1833. This clarification supports an internal chronology of the novel with significant ramifications. Thomas points out that Jane's punishment in the red room, which she dates as taking place in October 1824, would have occurred just over a year after a slave rebellion in Demerara. The temporal proximity makes even more sense of Jane's use of the language of slavery and mutiny in describing her condition, even if the novel figures it in relation to Roman history. Thomas goes further, pointing out that "Jane's reference to Roman master/slave relations is not a sign of Brontë's historical amnesia over West Indian slavery. On the contrary, an analogy between Roman slavery and slavery in the West Indies circulated in early nineteenth-century missionary discourse and in vigorous public debates over the compatibility of Christianity and slavery from the mid-1820s until the early 1830s" (11).

In her careful analysis of the relations between nineteenth-century religious discourse and imperialism, Thomas's Jane Eyre (and Brontë herself) is rendered a text with reformist sympathies, neither truly radical nor retrograde in its politics. In the chapter entitled "Monstrous Martyrdom and the 'Overshadowing Tree' of Philanthropy," Thomas discusses Jane's refusal of St. John as prompted in part by his identification with a "threatening Gothic darkness and despotism" (66), a Gothicism supported by Victorian missionary discourse. This is a subtle and interesting position, as it recognizes Jane's racial complicity while also implying the novel's critique of St. John's missionary project. Hence, Thomas argues that "Brontë's criticism of St. John acts within the novel to qualify Jane's eulogistic evocation of his missionary endeavours in India at the novel's end" (67), and, furthermore, that the novel offers "an implied criticism of the process of the contemporary Christianization of India, not the legitimacy of the endeavour" (70).

Thomas's most important contribution here is not, however, in her close readings of the novel, which are solid and nuanced but generally unsurprising. Rather, the last two chapters of the monograph make the most original intervention. These chapters are short but fascinating. The first is an account of an 1848 theatrical adaptation of Jane Eyre by John Courtney that played to predominately working-class audiences at the Victoria Theatre, and the second is a discussion of an 1859 reworking of the novel by expatriate Jamaican writer Henrietta Camilla Jenkin, entitled Cousin Stella; or Conflict. We already know how easily and...