Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad: Constructions and Deconstructions of National Identity by Abigail Heiniger (review)

Abigail Heiniger's Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad: Constructions and Deconstructions of National Identity is an ambitious survey of the female Bildungsroman and its myths of self-fashioning. The book surveys works by American, European, and Canadian writers that seem to owe a debt to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847), in some cases directly and in others because they share common source material. Heiniger suggests that an author's approach to specific fairy tales—in particular versions of the classic Cinderella story and versions or translations of Beauty and the Beast (1740)—affects the decisions she makes about her heroine's agency and about the relative cosmopolitanism or regionalism of her setting. This is true, she argues, for Brontë and for European and American writers of similar narratives. Writers whose works appear after Jane Eyre are responding (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) to Brontë's use of her source material. According to Heiniger, the European texts that echo Jane Eyre are more cosmopolitan than her American progeny, in part because European writings employ fairy tale motifs within a search for a "New Eve," while American texts combine fairy tale motifs with American "self-made man" or "rise" narratives (57, 100).

Heiniger's structuralist analysis depends on a set list of common elements in these fairy tales, and she uses different indices of folklore motifs to construct her list. The downside to this typological approach is that the reader misses the complexity that comes from multiple revisions and critiques of the source tales, as well as the details of specific retellings. For Heiniger's purposes, the most important element of the Cinderella story is the magical helper, and the most important element of Beauty and the Beast is the enchanted suitor. A different approach to the fairy stories may have provided more flexibility, a benefit when surveying adaptations that offer creative, or even deconstructive, responses to the source material. Heiniger's appendices excerpt specific periodical responses to the Cinderella story from Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1856, 1883) and The Atlantic Monthly (1860), but in her chapters Heiniger depends on a generalized sense of the fairy tale's characteristics.

Heiniger's book is at its best when it turns away from typology and asks why these acts of adaptation and appropriation matter. She finds her answer in the underexplored regionalism of Brontë's work. Paradoxically, Heiniger argues, Brontë's indebtedness to her own Yorkshire landscapes makes Jane Eyre a model for investigating regional American concerns. What happens to the materiality of the Cinderella tale under different models of American capitalism? How might the realities of American slavery transform any story about a so-called beast, or about a poor, beleaguered female servant? In these sections, as well as in the concluding section on Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and postcolonialism, the book eases closest to the promise of its title.

There is more work to do to source the origins of Jane Eyre as well as its afterlives. To what extent, for instance, should common elements in these novels be attributed to the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the quest narrative, or the spiritual autobiography, even more so than to the fairy story? Also, future work could add nuance to the idea of one static national response to Brontë's novel. Heiniger admits in her introduction that there are European responses that do not rely on "a larger-than-life paradigm to guide the female Bildungsroman" and that do contain elements of regionalism (10). These works, which include Olive: A Novel (1851) by Dinah Craik and Thornycroft Hall (1864) by Emma Worboise, are excluded from Heiniger's study, but they could offer a reason to complicate the book's overall thesis. One wonders, similarly, if all white American responses to the novel—as contrasted with escaped slave...