“At least shake hands”: Tactile Relations in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Abstract

Victorians Journal 195 “•fit least shake hands”: Tactile Relations in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane &yre by Kimberly Cox I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead ofwhich, my fingers closed on the fingers ofa little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it.... — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights Little has been written about hands in the Bronte sisters’ literary corpus, despite their overt presence in several prominent novels and their increasing interest to scholars studying the Victorian “tactile imagination.”1 In fact, I can literally count the number of scholarly studies on hands and tactility in Bronte novels on one hand: 1) Melinda Maunsell’s analysis of manual symbolism in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall', 2) Katherine Rowe’s reference to Catherine Eamshaw’s ghostly hand in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights', 3) David Bolt’s assessment of the dangers the blind man’s touch poses in Jane Eyre-, 4) William Cohen’s assertion that ocular symbolism in the work of Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens relies on tactile metaphors; and 5) Peter Capuano’s argument that hands embody and comment on separate spheres ideology as related to manufacture in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley. While each ostensibly examines the role that hands play in social, labor, and political relations, their work only scratches the surface ofhow we might read hands and haptics (touch) in the Brontes’ work. These scholarly conversations often frame discussions ofhands within linguistic structures but have yet to study them as part ofa viable form ofcommunication outside oflanguage. Such a focus opens our interpretative practices to new avenues of making meaning, not only of the presence of hands in specific 1 The phrase, credited to art historian Bernard Berenson (1890s), was the title of a 2014 issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (in turn inspired by a Birkbeck College conference). None ofthe articles focused on the Brontes. 196 Victorians Journal literary texts, but what those instances reveal about social understandings, expectations, and desire. This discussion argues that reading touch as a mode ofhaptic communication in Jane Eyre offers a new way to interpret Jane’s relationship with her body and to read her decision to marry Edward at the novel’s conclusion as a result of more than just her financial independence. Indeed, their final embrace reveals Jane’s authority over and connectedness with her body, Edward’s recognition of Jane’s newfound agency, and the passionate nature oftheir relationship.2 “Manual Intercourse”: Social politics in a Touch of the tland Despite recent critical interest in hands, scholars have paid little attention to moments when hands actually touch each other in Victorian literature.3 I have argued elsewhere that we gain insight into character motivation by reading such literary moments as instances of what I term “manual intercourse”: an extra-linguistic mode of social communication conveyed through the touch of a hand.4 Since much scholarship on Jane Eyre has privileged the visual and linguistic,5 I want to return Jane to her body in a literal sense through a consideration of the manual and haptic.6 My argument for reading manual intercourse as a form of communication not limited by language further dispels a mind-body dualism or hierarchy. If we theorize tactility as language, then we risk repeating earlier Enlightenment patterns of positioning speech as the only viable form ofcommunication and, in turn, privilege reason above feeling, mind above body, man above woman, masculine above feminine, and Western European subjects above those they colonized.7 In fact, Capuano argues that scholars 2 See Owsley for a recent reading ofeconomic independence and female agency in Jane Eyre. 3 See Gilbert (2014); and Briefel (2015). 4 See my article “A Touch ofthe Hand: Manual Intercourse in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant ofWUdfell Hall" (forthcoming 2017, Nineteenth-Century Literature) for a full discussion ofmanual intercourse. 5 See Bolt, Levine, and Plyer Fisk; also Talairach-Vielmas, who argues that Jane “loses corporeality, ultimately becoming a voice which the blind hero can only hear” (128). 6 While the novel...