Jane Eyre as Hunger Artist

Abstract

In this essay, the author applies Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque theory and Mary Russo's concepts of the female grotesque to a reading of Jane Eyre which situates Jane's hunger within a mid-nineteenth-century context of self-imposed female hunger, which was largely religious in nature. Drawing on the work of Caroline Bynum, whose Holy Feast and Holy Fast examines the lives of female starving saints, the author argues that Jane Eyre, whose hunger has often been equated by critics with anorexia nervosa, exhibits the motivations of the starving saints, or what the author terms ‘female hunger artists’, who often rebel against injustice while paradoxically displaying temporary female spiritual power by attracting attention through spectacle. Unlike most of the earlier hunger artists who point out their intense personal relationship with a God who sustains them, Jane's hunger artistry denotes a need for earthly justice, sustenance through books and female community, all of which, if realized, would make earth a heavenly home.