“Reader, I Grew Up”: Rewriting Jane Eyre after 9/11

Abstract

ABSTRACT American cultural and political presentations of 9/11 often resort to the easily recognizable narrative convention of Bildungsroman, intensifying the nostalgia for an illusory, ideal past before the crisis. Evoking the classic novel Jane Eyre as well as the history of its reading, Patricia Park’s Re Jane and Susan Choi’s My Education disrupt the narrative scheme of initiation, destabilizing and questioning the popular way of understanding growth in connection to the experience of 9/11. Both novels’ engagement with feminist ideas enables them to stage different ways of imagining a continuation over the temporal and spatial rift that 9/11 created in American popular imagination. Furthermore, as the protagonists of the novels are presented as products of American military and political imperialism in Asia, writing their multidimensional subjectivity into being has significance for positioning America in the international world. This global feminist perspective not only retrieves complex feminist history but also introduces broader global networks within which to regard the stories of 9/11. This article examines the particular ways in which My Education and Re Jane problematize and experiment with different modes of storytelling and argues that such narrative projects have multilayered implications for narrating 9/11 today.