Bluebeard Gothic: “Jane Eyre” and Its Progeny (review)

Heta Pyrhönen argues that while critics have duly acknowledged Charlotte Brontë’s allusion to the Bluebeard fairytale cycle in Jane Eyre (1847), its intertextual reach has not received “explicit and sustained critical attention” (p. 7). That reach includes Brontë’s reworking of the cycle’s motifs and its “literary legacy” in a lineage Pyrhönen terms “Bluebeard Gothic” (p. 13). Drawing on Shoshana Felman’s theorization of the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1845) and Cora Kaplan’s analysis of Jane Eyre as a mnemic symbol in Victoriana (2007), a text that excites complex “affective dynamics,” a “memorialis[ation] and renew[al]” of the “excess of nineteenth-century fiction,”¹ Pyrhönen uses psychoanalytic theory to elucidate both Jane Eyre and what she terms the “Brönte effect” on a range of reworkings of the novel that also engage with the Bluebeard cycle (p. 13).

To develop close readings of a range of fiction and Anna Leonowens’s semi-fictional The Romance of the Harem (1872), Pyrhönen draws on Freudian theories of psychic fantasy and Lacanian understandings of the registers of discursive layering, especially as refracted through the work of Elisabeth Bronfen, Slavoj Žižek, and Paul Verhaeghe. She postulates that the “progeny” of Jane Eyre unpack symbolic, hysteric, or analytic registers in the novel and that their satisfactions and creative successes are tied to the complexity and range of the registers with which they engage. Apart from Jane Eyre and The Romance of the Harem, the texts discussed in depth are Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Emma Tennant’s Adéle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002), Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale (2001), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), D. M. Thomas’s Charlotte (2000), Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), and Angela Carter’s various engagements with the Bluebeard narrative (1967–1985).

Through readings of these texts Pyrhönen hopes to probe the significance of Bluebeard Gothic in British culture, a move that encourages her to read the lineage and legacy through the dynamics of family and family romance, closing down more rigorous scrutiny of the deployment of the nation-as-family metaphor. Her goal is not well realized because the chosen texts are not established as representative of trends in Jane Eyre adaptation and reworking in Britain nor carefully situated in their historical and cultural contexts. The major historical marker in Bluebeard Gothic is the publication of American critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1972). Pyrhönen uses Bloom’s theory to help explicate selected texts by Angela Carter. Positioning Leonowens and Rhys as British, the former on the grounds of “close ties” with Britain and the latter because she “made it” her “home,” is also problematic (p. 11). Leonowens, born in India, lived a peripatetic life. Rhys, born in Dominica, never felt at home in England, writing in 1959, “I have no country really now.”² Pyrhönen argues that The Romance of the Harem offers “very early the first sustained criticism” of Brontë’s treatment of imperialism, a claim that is inaccurate (p. 238). In a recent edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive (1850), Cora Kaplan has made a case for its sustained engagement with Jane Eyre around questions of racial thinking and empire.³ Pyrhönen’s weighting of the study towards contemporary fiction—all but two core texts having been written in the last fifty years—disconnects the lineage she examines from a much longer, richer, and generically diverse history of the novel’s creative influence, beginning with a stage adaptation in 1848, John Courtney’s Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor.

Close reading produces both illuminating insights about specific texts and critical myopia. In reading Wide Sargasso Sea, for instance, Pyrhönen draws enterprisingly on Irene Kacandes’s insights about witness of...