Adapting (to) Jane Eyre: Racial Violence, Intergenerational Trauma, and Black Optimism in Lauren Blackwood’s Within These Wicked Walls

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This article draws on Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe’s writings on ‘optimism,’ ‘wake work,’ and ‘fugitivity’ to present a reading of Lauren Blackwood’s 2021 rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a metafiction of Black literary adaptation as survival. In rejecting the overdetermined stereotype of the mad subaltern woman as the localised focus of the novel’s commentary on racial violence, Within These Wicked Walls departs from twentieth-century, postcolonial responses to Jane Eyre exemplified by Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Wide Sargasso Sea to offer an explicitly Black and anti-racist rewriting of the Victorian novel. I show how Blackwood draws on the diasporic discourse of “Ethiopianism” and American genres of multiethnic and Black Gothic storytelling to explore the trauma of racialised violence (including its imperialist literature) as a cultural and intergenerational curse that must be faced, exorcised, and grieved by a younger generation. This analysis highlights the contributions Blackwood’s novel makes to the Black radical tradition, underscores the need for more Critical Race Theory in the study of Victorian literature, and reminds scholars of the vital role literary adaptation once played – and should still play – in criticism of race and imperialism in Victorian literature.