The Two-Headed Monster in Jane Eyre: Anomalous Female Readership and Uncanny Intertextuality

Abstract

This paper approaches the manner in which Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a parentless avid reader, comes into contact with parodies of the patriarchal Victorian family, where monstrous male figures exercise authority over female members of the household – the strange child, the vulnerable outcast, the lunatic. To explore the textual and social tensions the figure of the female reader as a threatening force produced in the nineteenth century, this paper focuses on a sagacious heroine civilizing a bestial hero representative of the fairy-tale genre. Though certainly ahistorical, Jane subverts the fairy-tale game of submission and dominance, inviting contemporary readers to see her as a participant in the cons truction of social meanings and challenge conflicting assumptions around her seemingly dark double and physical inferiority. Touching as it does on female experience within domesticity, this study submits findings consistent with the idea that the home – the locus of Victorian well-being – can easily adjoin a horrific Gothic site of incarceration and terror, populated by male tyrants and colonized monsters. For Jane Eyre and other reading heroines confined to such places as symbolic prisons or intellectual hospitals, books turn out to subsume plentiful underlying supplies of vitality.