Riding Jane Eyre's Stagecoach Rhythm in Jane Re's New York Subway

Abstract

In the Victorian era, innovations in infrastructure, notably the revolutionary stagecoach, redefined women's travel experiences and offered them a means to break free from domesticity. While the rapid pace of the stagecoach initially unsettles individuals like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), she accustoms herself to its motion to evade perilous situations. Bearing in mind the cadence of the stagecoach, I suggest that Patricia Park's modern retelling of Jane Eyre, Re Jane (2015), adapts the rhythm of the coach by recasting it as the motion of the New York City subway. Revising in this way, Park incorporates positive racial representation through the subway and its passengers. By re-creating the rhythm of the coach through the subway train, Park considers two historical ideas: the New York City subway was built by racial and ethnic minorities such as Irish immigrants and African Americans, and the subway also softly calls back to the beginnings of the American transcontinental railroad that erased the visibility of Chinese immigrant laborers. This essay contends that the transportation systems in nineteenth-century England and twenty-first-century New York created changes that liberated women from the rooted domestic ideologies of their respective periods.