Too Untidy to Live? Helen Burns and Disorderly Girlhood Experience

Abstract

This essay performs a queer reading of Helen Burns’s untidiness in Jane Eyre. While that untidiness is a facet of Helen’s character that has been ignored in recent criticism, attending to this aspect of her character also enables a theorization of the possible forms of children’s resistance within nineteenth-century educational settings. Lowood School aims to control girls’ outer and inner lives by forcing them to attend to their bodies at the expense of their minds, inculcating what I call the time of the body. In order to make this argument, I draw on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s idea that, for children, temporality involves “growing sideways” rather than “up,” that is, finding generative pockets of time that do not lead to a linear or reproductive (adult) narrative. Helen’s untidiness and the desire between Helen and Jane are queer in that they coexist with but are somewhat set apart from the novel’s marriage plot. In addition, both Helen and Jane’s relationship and Helen’s untidy embodiment are queer because they defy Lowood’s insistence on the gendered temporalities of self-sacrifice in favor of an embrace of unruly materiality and contemplation in atemporal and nonphysical spaces.