“I can but die”: The Gothic cycle of death and rebirth in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Laura Zuber
Jane Eyre is such a rich and ample text that, where criticism is concerned, almost
anything goes. It is difficult to pin the novel down under one label or genre; in fact, it seems
arrogant to try. Jane, the atypical heroine, seems misplaced in what appears at first glance to be
a classic Gothic romance. Because she is so unusual (the heroine calls herself “perverse”), she is
able to break free from genre conventions. Jane’s departure from the Gothic model is legitimized
by Christian imagery of death and rebirth that contributes to the arc of the novel. After these
deaths and rebirths, Jane is on equal footing with Rochester, no longer caught in a master/servant
dichotomy, and no longer entrapped in a Gothic cycle. Similarly, as the novel moves from one
genre to another, it struggles to break free from similar inflexible guidelines. But unlike its
heroine, it is never quite independent of genre; even as it struggles to separate itself from certain
conventions, it affirms their decided presence in its structure. Although Jane escapes the Gothic
cycle of entrapment, then, the novel’s reader is not so fortunate: in juxtaposing familiar Gothic
elements with the unexpected, Brontë both engages and alienates the reader, ironically provoking
a feeling more uncanny than Gothic conventions alone could have produced. Usually, the
uncanny is achieved through repetitive images or mirroring plotlines; in this case, it is the
repetitive cycle of falling in and out of genre conventions that makes Jane Eyre so uncanny to the
contemporaneous reader.
Alison Milbank approaches this question differently. In her essay “Victorian Gothic in
English novels and stories,” Milbank argues that, in entrapping the heroine in the Gothic novel,
Brontë gives her agency to break free from its rigid structure. But according to Milbank, the
escape always ends in another ensnarement, trapping Jane more than before – and thus
maintaining her status as a Gothic heroine (Milbank 154). She parallels this cycle with the
Gothicizing of the young Princess Victoria, who in Gothic literature was portrayed as an
innocent sexual object on the throne (something like young Antonia’s oblivious affection for
birds in the bath in Lewis’s The Monk), or even an antiquated British building. The common
theme is that Victoria, even when she is hailed as the champion of the past and present Empire, is
always portrayed as being tucked away in enclosed spaces. This, Milbank argues, is emblematic
of the cycle of escape and repression that Jane Eyre suffers, caught as she is within an ‘iron
shroud’ of mental solipsism (Milbank 152).
But Milbank’s argument falls apart because she confuses Jane Eyre the heroine with Jane
Eyre the novel. Milbank’s Gothic cycle of entrapment is valid, but her conclusion is mistaken.
Rather than stifling Jane, the cycle of entrapment produces the hodgepodge of literary
conventions that is the novel. In doing so, it violates the authorial social contract that Fredric
Jameson defines in The Ideologies of Theory. In any genre of this time period, both the reader
and the author agree to adhere to certain rules (Jameson 116). Just as Frankenstein’s monster is a
walking text, Jane Eyre is a walking catalyst for breaking Gothic conventions – a sort of literary
Godzilla tearing down everything in her path. In breaking the Gothic mould, the heroine Jane
violates Jameson’s authorial contract, catching the reader unaware and reformatting the novel
into a piecemeal narrative, telescoping all genre conventions into one. Most interesting is how
the novel is caught in its own cycle of entrapment: even as it breaks free from one genre
convention it finds itself inside another. The hesitation that this provokes on the part of the
reader is parallel to Todorov’s description of the fantastic: just as the blurring between the real
and unreal makes the reader pause, the novel’s vacillation between Gothic elements and those of
other genres makes its readers hesitate as well (Todorov 138).
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Differing critics argue that Jane Eyre is primarily a realist, Bildungsroman, Gothic,
pilgrimage, governess, and/or romance novel. The debate rages on, but its focus is perhaps
misguided: the novel’s classification is a point of contention because it is at once all of these
genres. In his essay “Jane Eyre and Genre,” for example, Jerome Beaty examines the text’s roots
in both the governess and Gothic novel, but never resolves its place within Victorian literary
tradition. Critics are quick to point out that Jane’s maturation and struggle mark her as one of the
first female heroes of a Bildungsroman: her love story with Rochester is emblematic of her
struggle as a young woman to achieve some sort of autonomy in Victorian England. The novel’s
cutting descriptions of Mr. Brocklehurst, Mrs. Reed and Lowood lend it a Dickensian realism.
Finally, we see the romantic elements of the novel in its powerful descriptions of nature, the
idealization of the country and isolated living, and the disembodied voices that Jane occasionally
hears. Although the voices support Gothic elements of the novel because of their uncertain place
between the natural and supernatural, they also emphasize the importance of intuition and
feeling. Three overarching models do seem to dominate the criticism—the Gothic romance, the
realist novel, and the comedy—and it is the escape from them that contributes most significantly
to the novel’s plot.
In synthesizing contrasting genres and breaking away from the conventions of them all,
Brontë’s novel disappoints the expectations of the contemporaneous reader. As a lower-class
literary genre, the Gothic relied on its popular success. The Gothic novel’s formulaic makeup
met the expectations of its readers, who, typical in a booming industrial age, expected plots to be
repeated, recycled, and passed on much in the same way that the books themselves were in
circulating libraries (Gamer 92). It is unsurprising, then, that readers of Jane Eyre were
uncomfortable with the novel. Elizabeth Barrett Browning noticed the novel’s generic
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irregularities, and discussed it at great length in her correspondence. On February 18, 1850, she
wrote to her friend Miss Mitford that the novel seemed ill suited to its genre:
I certainly don't think that the qualities, half savage and half freethinking, expressed in
‘Jane Eyre’ are likely to suit a model governess or schoolmistress; and it amuses me to
consider them in that particular relation. (qtd. in Holloway 3)
Barrett Browning was not a fan of the novel, although one can see its influences in her epic poem
Aurora Leigh. And she was not the only critic to disparage it. In December 1848, the year after
Jane Eyre was published, critic Elizabeth Rigby betrays a clear vacillation between admiration
for and dislike of the heroine. Jane Eyre, she comments, is “merely another Pamela” – an
accusation Barrett Browning leveled as well – but without the sweetness of demeanor that made
the former heroine so palatable (Rigby 101). Of the dreary descriptions of Lowood, Rigby
comments, “it is the childhood and not the child that interests you. The little Jane, with her sharp
eyes and dogmatic speeches, is a being you could neither fondle nor love” (Rigby 109). Like the
servant Bessie, Rigby is hard-pressed to feel sorry for the “underhand little thing” (Brontë 10).
The reviewer senses that Jane’s nature is incongruous to the Gothic setup. Despite her high
praise of Jane’s moral integrity, the juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar repulses Rigby.
That Jane lives to find happiness, and a strong Christian marriage, does not excuse the sinfulness
of being such an inappropriate heroine.
We see this the most when Rigby indicts Brontë for her portrayal of Rochester, saying
that she has committed “that highest moral offence a novel writer can commit” – that of making
a corrupt character interesting (Rigby 108). Rochester, who ought to be the Gothic villain, ends
up marrying the heroine after having attempted to trick her into bigamy. Worse, the novel’s
Pamela, in a feat “new equally in art or nature,” does something that Richardson would not
believe possible: she confesses her love for Rochester first (Rigby 105). Rather than falling in
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love only after a legitimate proposal of marriage has been made, Jane succumbs to Rochester’s
teasing and expresses her feelings openly and honestly. At this time period, conventions in genre
were so strong that character development was less important than a novel’s conventionally
moral message. These deviations are what upset Elizabeth Rigby, more so than the unsavory
portrayal of Bertha or Rochester’s attempt at bigamy ever could.
Curiously enough, perversions of literary form seem to shock her more than any moral
deviation. After all, the novel ends with all the right moral messages: the heroine reaches a
higher social standing and financial independence, enters into a Christian marriage, and bears a
child. Even moral deviations are in keeping with the conventions of the Gothic novel, and the
end is happy and Christian. But the interruptions in the narrative from other genres discomfit
Rigby, until she does not know whether to praise Jane or condemn her, congratulate the author
(who bore the male pseudonym Currer Bell) for his eloquence or condemn his iniquity.
This was not the first time Charlotte Brontë had written a story that was generically
ambiguous. Tales of Angria, the dream kingdom she invented with her brother Branwell, is also
a self-editing text:
[Angria is] an ur-text in the sense that it stands on the margin between pre-literary and
literary composition – a body of imaginative labor which has not yet surrendered to the
constraints of tradition or convention, but which remains in process, revising its bearings
as it proceeds, beginning, but only just beginning, to make choices about genre, mode,
and character. (Chase 8)
Although not applied to Jane Eyre, the argument can be extended to it. Like Angria, Jane Eyre is
“the product of successive transformations of experience,” pieced together from the broken
constructs of various genres (Chase 8). Jane Eyre is the more ambitious text, however, in that it
preserves in its heroine a character that is fully formed and psychologically complex. However
chaotic the novel’s generic structure may become, Jane is untouchable. The reason she manages
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to escape conventions, and the novel does not, is that Jane’s escape is enabled by her series of
‘deaths’ and ‘rebirths’ as a heroine, which are legitimized by Christian imagery. Conversely,
deviations in convention are not enough to help Jane Eyre break free of genre. Instead, the novel
turns out to be caught in a repetitive cycle of escape and entrapment.
Jane learns about the inevitability and necessity of death at a young age, when her
childhood friend Helen Burns dies in her arms. Perhaps because of her own troubled background
(the character Helen is based on Brontë’s sister, who passed away in a similarly harsh
institution), Brontë uses the novel to explore “the presence of death in the midst of life” (Keefe
96). As the novel progresses, Jane learns that death is not only a foil for life, but causes life.
Helen is the first to teach Jane this lesson when she tells her, “We all must die one day”;
however, she comforts her with the hope of an eternal afterlife (Brontë 70). That night they share
a bed, and in the morning the girl who had fallen asleep in Jane’s arms is a corpse.
This open discussion of death’s presence in life is typical of Brontë’s work (Keefe 96).
And death is often a catalyst for greater independence: the death of so many students like Helen
causes authorities to investigate the grim Lowood school, giving survivors the opportunity for a
better life (Keefe 98). The marble tablet Jane places on Helen’s grave fifteen years later
underlines this theme with the Latin “Resurgam” (I shall rise again). Although it is derived from
a Christian belief in resurrection, the phrase is also referencing Jane’s new life here on Earth.
After all, it is the older Jane – Jane the narrator versus Jane the heroine – who returns to place the
tablet on Helen’s grave, implying that she not only survives her experiences but also reaches a
level of domestic comfort where she can travel freely.
We see Jane entrapped again when she discovers the identity of Bertha Mason and
realizes that she cannot be her fiancé’s wife, only his mistress. Lying in bed, she dreams of the
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red-room at Gateshead (Brontë 272). She invokes the image of the red-room, the site of so much
terror for her as a child, because this was where she was originally imprisoned for being angry,
violent, and shy – essentially, a poor Gothic heroine. Mrs. Reed had wanted to punish young
Jane for her rebellion and remind her of her station; years later, Jane learns the consequences of
falling in love with the novel’s villain. Rather than remaining entrapped and hoping to be
rescued, however, Jane makes her escape.
As she flees Thornfield Hall (appropriately, at dawn), she describes her self-exile in
terms of death:
I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way: fast, fast I went, like one
delirious. A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I
lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear – or
hope – that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and
knees, and then again raised to my feet – as eager and as determined as ever to reach the
road. (Brontë 274)
Jane considers her separation from Rochester, whom she describes as her “heaven,” to be no
worse than death. But when she rises again she recommits herself to her pilgrimage. Once on her
own, she must symbolically ‘wander the desert,’ making a bed in wild moors and relying on the
protection of “the universal mother, Nature” (Brontë 275). When her arduous journey is finished,
however, Jane is reborn. She changes her name, finds another job, and establishes a new family.
She explains her need to begin anew – and the danger of looking back – when she first sets off
on her pilgrimage:
No reflection was to be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one
forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a
page so heavenly sweet – so deadly sad – that to read one line of it would dissolve my
courage and break down my energy. That last was an awful blank: something like the
world when the deluge was gone by. (Brontë 273)
In representing her past and future as texts, Jane is drawing attention to the fact that her story,
like that of Angria, is still in process. Moreover, her rejection of the past emphasizes that she
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considers this to be the death of her relationship with Rochester, and that she must now pursue a
new life entirely. This will not be the last time that Jane drops everything entirely in order to
make a pilgrimage: we will see it again when she pursues Rochester’s disembodied voice. These
different journeys and rebirths make Jane a fluid heroine, one that can slip in and out of genres
far more easily than an Antonia or Emily ever could. The reader has the sense that the heroine is
running page-by-page, evading genre conventions that seek to close in upon her.
Jane escapes the Gothic romance to enter a new literary genre, one that is realist, with a dash
of the female Bildungsroman added to the mix. Because she cannot imagine happiness without
Rochester, she tries at least to be useful, devoting herself to her work as a governess and
studying with her cousins in her spare time. Jane’s day-to-day life is described in great detail, a
typical aspect of the realist novel. Rather than glorifying or romanticizing her job, she describes
it with brutal frankness:
Was I very gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder bare, humble
school-room this morning and afternoon? Not to deceive myself, I must reply – No: I felt
desolate to a degree. I felt – yes, idiot that I am – I felt degraded. … I was weakly
dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me.
(Brontë 306)
As in her portrayal of Mr. Brocklehurst and the harsh conditions of Lowood, Jane displays a
candor that rebels against the precepts of the romance. Her narrative takes on a strong realist
bent, speaking freely of her un-Christian distaste for teaching the county’s poor (despite her own
poor background and experiences as a beggar), and emphasizing the everyday rather than the
extraordinary.
As Jane’s would-be suitor, St. John attempts to play the role that Colonel Brandon would
play in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: that of the unromantic, but overall preferable,
fiancé. His proposal to her is unimpressive: he readily admits that he has no strong feelings for
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her, and in fact tells her that she is “formed for labour, not for love” (Brontë 343). The marriage
he offers her is purely utilitarian. Echoing a moral that would become prevalent with the growth
of realist literature, St. John suggests that “undoubtedly enough of love will follow upon
marriage to render the union right even in [Jane’s] eyes” (Brontë 348). But instead of accepting
St. John’s proposal and infusing some sort of moral in her autobiography, Jane refuses him, still
enamored of her Gothic villain. Although she has taken on a new name and a new life, she does
not relinquish her romantic principles.
In the beginning, Jane is caught in the Gothic romance, struggling to find happiness with
her damaged Byronic fiancé. If Rochester represents the gothic/romantic, then St. John is the
ultimate realist. His unflinching confrontation of life’s obstacles, though admirable, is excessive
to the point that he seems to reject his own human nature. Instead of a sinful fiancé who is
indulged by vanity, Jane faces a man so meticulously disciplined and unequivocally practical that
his icy air encloses her like a vice. Out of the frying pan and into the fire: Jane may have
escaped the trap imposed by the Gothic, but only to find one still narrower.
I daily wished more to please him [St. John]: but to do so, I felt daily more and more that
I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original
bent. … He wanted to train me to an elevation I could never reach; it racked me hourly to
aspire to the standard he uplifted. The thing was as impossible as to mould my irregular
features to his correct and classic pattern, to give my changeable green eyes the sea-blue
tint and solemn lustre of his own. (Brontë 339-340)
The challenge Jane faces is one with which she has, to a lesser extent, been struggling all her life:
the balance between passion and discipline. As a child she admires but eventually rejects Helen
Burns’ ascetic philosophy, and as an adult she watches Eliza and Georgiana Reed bicker over
their ascetic and hedonistic ideologies. That Jane lies somewhere in the middle of these binaries
makes her situation more difficult. As a romantic, Jane trusts her emotions and believes in the
sublime communion one can experience with nature; she marvels that St. John never “seem[s] to
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roam the moors for the sake of their soothing silence – never seek out or dwell upon the thousand
peaceful delights they could yield” (Brontë 300). As a realist, however, she recognizes the
danger in being Rochester’s mistress and knows that she must work a trade to survive. For his
own part, St. John seems all parts realist: his self-discipline, unswerving honesty and distaste for
excessive emotion make it difficult to place him in any other category. More than her lack of
beauty, what stands as an obstacle to marriage with St. John is Jane’s “changeable green eyes” –
in other words, the same “freethinking” nature that repulses Barrett Browning and Rigby. Her
ability to reinvent herself, to turn the page of the past and begin a fresh one, is what helps her
adapt, albeit imperfectly, to different genre conventions. Moreover, the same trait helps her
escape their literary clutches. Jane acknowledges her incongruity in the text, calling her refusal
of St. John’s proposal “my perversity” (Brontë 349). Her word choice indicates that her
mismatched fit goes beyond being plain or too passionate a person. Jane is twisting genre
conventions to her own ends, until she is literally depraving the text. She is negotiating a new
role, one that will be sanctioned by Christian imagery but will nonetheless be empowering,
liberating her from the enclosures of Gothic convention.
We have seen how Bertha is an important catalyst to change. Her confrontations with the
heroine, Rochester, and Richard Mason both impede and divert the expected progression of the
novel. More importantly, the revelation of her identity leads directly to Jane’s escape from the
close confines of the Gothic romance. Rather than marrying quickly after engagement, as does
the heroine of Richardson’s Pamela, Jane departs from the isolated manor and enters into a new
genre. Just as her presence interrupted the novel’s romantic flow, Bertha’s death precipitates
another change in the narrative direction, this time from realism to comedy. Her dramatic death
contributes to the reconstruction – or resurrection – of Jane’s relationship with Rochester.
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Typical of a comedy, the one obstacle to Jane and Rochester’s marriage is removed toward the
end of the novel, setting everything right. (We see this in the death of Jane’s uncle as well,
which gives her financial security and unifies her new family.) Because Bertha is responsible for
the fire, her death mitigates any guilt Rochester may possess, or any doubts the reader may have
about his possible status as villain. In this way the narrative’s happy ending allows moral virtue
to triumph.
Of course, Jane’s escape from the realist genre is contingent upon Bertha’s death through
the ruins of Thornfield Hall. After hearing Rochester’s voice call her name, Jane immediately
leaves St. John and travels quickly to Thornfield. Once she arrives, she discovers a “blackened
ruin,” and compares her reaction to that of a man who finds his mistress “stone-dead” (Brontë
361). The manor, she soon learns, had been burned “just around harvest time” (Brontë 363). It is
fitting that the manor should have been burned in the autumn, the season for things to die. The
abrupt shift from St. John’s insistent proposal to the crumbling Thornfield, which has “the
silence of death about it,” illustrates that death not only necessitates change, but can also be
liberating. It is Bertha’s death, and the ‘death’ of the cursed manor, that gives Jane the freedom
to escape the realist novel and find new hope in the comedy.
Jane returns to Thornfield in the spring, and it is not long before images of rebirth follow
her. When she comes across Rochester for the first time, he is ensconced inside a lush, Edenic
forest:
There was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle, between hoar and knotty
shafts and under branched arches … it stretched on and on, it wound farther and farther:
no sign of habitation or grounds was visible … it was still as a church on a week-day.…
[A] figure came out into the twilight … and advanced slowly and gropingly towards the
grass-plat. (Brontë 366-7)
In the passage above, the wildness and seclusion of this private paradise are emphasized. In
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order to enter the forest, Jane must open “iron gates between granite pillars” (Brontë 366). The
elaborate entrance is suggestive of the gateway to heaven; this, coupled with the wild beauty of
the forest, hints that Jane may find eternal happiness inside these walls. Rochester is framed by
“branched arches” that suggest that he, too, is blessed. These springtime images are an answer to
the ruins of Thornfield Hall: the winter, it is implied, is over, and in the springtime all will be
reborn. Besides being a typical element of the comedy, the promise of a new year contributes to
the novel’s overarching theme of escape through death and rebirth. That Rochester and Jane
have both survived their ‘deaths’ to face one another again – hers when she flees from
Thornfield, his during the manor’s fire – seems to prove that death, like the winter itself, will
always be overcome.
This paradise, however, has not come without a price: Rochester’s rebirth is precipitated
by a baptism of flame, and he is humbled as a result. He cites the twenty-third psalm of David,
saying that he has “passed through the valley of the shadow of death” (Brontë 380). Jane
remarks that he has “metamorphosed” into a conciliatory Nebuchadnezzar, introducing more
Christian imagery that legitimizes his rebirth (Brontë 371). (In the Book of Daniel,
Nebuchadnezzar is a Babylonian king who is punished by God to roam the earth for seven years
living as an animal. When he recovers his senses, the king praises God and his life is restored.)
Like Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, some of Rochester’s punishment is only temporary: after
several years of a Christian marriage, he regains sight in one eye. When they are reunited,
Rochester compares himself to the lightning-struck chestnut tree and calls himself a ruin. Jain
replies,
You are no ruin, sir – no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will
grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your
bountiful shadow… (Brontë 378-9)
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Like the harvest imagery of Thornfield Hall, Brontë uses nature as an example of the
sustainability of life, and its natural place within a cycle of death and rebirth. What is being
reborn is not just Rochester, but his and Jane’s relationship as well.
As the novel concludes, Jane reflects that “I am my husband’s life as fully as he is
mine… ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (Brontë 384). In
referencing Genesis, Jane is offering proof that her union with Rochester is holy, and that their
unorthodox marriage upholds the same Christian values that are popularized by more
conservative fiction. In this way she successfully defends the sanctity of her marriage. This is a
typical element of the comedy, which often presents a young couple that overcomes bad luck and
social barriers in order to enter into a forbidden relationship (Frye 115). Before, when she was
caught in conventions of the Gothic romance and in a master/servant dichotomy, Jane had
considered Rochester her “broken idol and lost elysium,” and nothing more than “a temporary
heaven”; now, the heaven that the couple attains on earth is real and permanent (Brontë 300,
273). The state of Elysium in which Rochester and Jane live signifies not just their liberation
from Victorian conventions, but also their liberation from the Gothic cycle.
Through Christian imagery of death and rebirth, Jane manages to break free from the
cycle of escape and entrapment and emerge an independent heroine. Similarly, Jane Eyre the
novel attempts to liberate itself from genre convention; however, even in rejecting its protocols,
the novel ends up affirming genre’s authority. Like its heroine when she seeks employment as a
governess, the novel encounters not freedom, but a new servitude. The way that Jane Eyre
struggles with genre conventions is in itself an uncanny experience for the reader, to the point
that is evokes sentiments uncannier than those a typical Gothic novel could produce.
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In his famous essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud discusses the transformation from
heimlich to unheimlich, or the familiar to the unfamiliar. The word heimlich “develops in the
direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite” (Freud 934). The idea of
the uncanny as the ‘secretly familiar’ is an old one; it can, however, be considered in a new light
when we study the ways in which Jane Eyre plays with genre conventions. The “repetitive
compulsion” that Freud articulates in his article seems, in many ways, custom-made for the
Gothic. The conventions of the genre rely heavily on the surreal effect of repetition: doubled
characters, parallel plot lines, changing narrators and unnatural echoes are a few examples
(Sedgewick 12). That Gothic standards vary little from novel to novel adds an extra dimension
to this repetitive compulsion: more than repeating within one plot, these conventions contribute
to an overarching pattern of Gothic literature as a whole. In effect, repetitive imagery is the glue
of the authorial social contract.
In Jane Eyre, this repetitive compulsion is taken to the next level in the form of
Milbank’s ‘Gothic cycle,’ which seeks to confine the heroine in an unending circle of escape and
entrapment. We have seen that Jane manages to overcome this cycle; the novel, however, does
not. Just as Freud describes turning a corner only to find himself in the same eerie street as
before, Jane Eyre the novel cannot escape one genre without finding itself inside another. The
recurrence of genre conventions provokes in the reader a “sense of helplessness” similar to that
experienced in certain dreams (Freud 941). The involuntary repetition of elements of several
genres lends to the novel’s tone a sense of gloom and inevitability. Perhaps this is what Milbank
sensed when she argued that the heroine’s escape always ended in more repression. But rather
than the heroine, it is the novel that is fated to be imprisoned.
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Ironically, Gothic novels were so widely circulated that their uncanny elements became
comfortable and familiar. If the heimlich can be transformed into the unheimlich, it appears that
it can be transformed back again. While readers felt a thrill reading Gothic novels such as The
Mysteries of Udolpho, it was more akin to the chills Catherine experiences in Northanger Abbey
than the blood-curdling horror Ambrosio provokes in The Monk. In the case of the Gothic
novel, which is heavily conventionalized, the only way to move forward is to turn back and
abandon certain aspects of the genre – to the surprise of the contemporaneous reader, as we have
seen. As the repetitive compulsion became so redundant that it lost some of its value, the
uncanny turned into any deviation from that framework. In playing with Gothic convention,
Brontë reveals that the only way to provoke feelings of the uncanny in the reader is to present
something completely alien and wild – something, for example, like the heroine Jane, whom
Barrett Browning calls “half savage” (qtd. in Holloway 3). Once Gothic elements of the
uncanny become too comfortable, traditional modes, such as the comedy upon which the novel
closes, become the uncanniest of all—familiar and unfamiliar at once.
This perhaps explains why contemporaneous readers such as Elizabeth Rigby and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning experienced such violent reactions to the novel. In his examination
of the role of the uncanny in literature, Freud points out the danger inherent in breaking the trust
between the author and reader:
[The writer] is in a sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly
surmounted; he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all
overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences;
by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has
achieved his object. But … we retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against
the attempted deceit. (951)
Although he is primarily discussing the mixture of realism and the supernatural that prefigures
Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, his discussion parallels our own about the juxtaposition of
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disparate genre conventions. Jane Eyre ostensibly promises us one genre, but after a while
“overstep[s] it” and enters into another, provoking in us strong feelings of the uncanny. Like
Freud, who complains of being duped by a seemingly realist voice, we are lulled into the familiar
paradigm of one genre only to be thrown into another without warning. This duplicity is the
reason Barrett Browning and Rigby betray a grudge against the novel. Brontë has, in a sense,
broken the authorial social contract in order to save her heroine; and while she achieves her goal,
she ends up provoking resentment on the part of the contemporaneous reader, whose previous
literary experience is based at least in part on the fulfillment of generic expectations.
In performing this exercise in generic boundaries, Brontë seems to be making a
commentary not just on Gothic convention, but genre conventions as a whole. After all, if a
Gothic custom is so overused that it is no longer capable of provoking the uncanny, what
purpose does it serve, and how effective is it ultimately? Brontë creates a sense of the uncanny
by departing from the same elements that should incite it, which in itself seems to be a satirical
jab at generic tradition. Furthermore, the contemporaneous reader’s reaction to the text
underlines Brontë’s point all the more: how can one truly surprise and entertain a reader who
opens the book with very specific expectations, and is consequently aggrieved when they are not
met? It is for this reason that Jane Eyre criticizes the contemporary standards of genre.
Jane Eyre is a transitional piece that bridges the gap between Victorian and Modernist
literature. In criticizing the effectiveness of the uncanny and creating its own ur-text, Brontë
seeks to produce a text free of genre. However, she never quite succeeds: while Jane is able to
break free from the Gothic cycle, the fact that she ends up in a comedy binds the novel
irrevocably to genre. Fortunately for us, the novel’s struggle to break away from genre
conventions makes it uncannier to the reader. While each generic convention it explores is
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familiar and acceptable, the fact that they are presented in a mixed bag unnerves the reader. The
novel’s failure to escape, therefore, can be interpreted as a kind of success, because it explores
the possibility of creating a meta-Gothic text. The uncanny juxtaposition of familiar but
disparate genre conventions, the ‘doubling’ of Jane Eyre the heroine and Jane Eyre the text, and
their parallel struggle to escape a cycle of entrapment, join together to create a sweeping study of
the effects of Gothic literature, as well as the pervasive influence of generic archetypes.
In his essay, Freud remarks that Schelling defined the uncanny as “something which
ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” (944). In the case of Jane Eyre, what
ought to have remained hidden was the omnipresence of generic models. Genre conventions
defined the norm in Victorian literature, which makes Jane Eyre all the more remarkable: in
criticizing structured genre, Brontë is questioning the nature of literature itself, as well as a
tradition that long preceded the Victorian Era. It is no wonder that it would take another fifty
years for readers and writers alike to recognize the merit in abandoning genre – and to quit genre
conventions entirely.
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Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.” Fantastic
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