“THE LOW, VAGUE HUM OF NUMBERS”: THE MALTHUSIAN ECONOMIES OF JANE EYRE

Abstract

JANE EYRE, CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S QUINTESSENTIAL NOVEL of “hunger, rebellion, and rage” (34),1 has been in recent years the subject of a number of important critical discussions about food, privation, and the social production of the female bourgeois body. These analyses, generally indebted to the theories of social practice and disciplinary individualism Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish, tend to focus on issues of anorexia, female desire, and women’s agency, reading Jane’s intriguing concerns with food as either a rejection of adult female sexual development or as an articulation of other, more abstract desires for psychic or intellectual fulfillment (Hoelever, Michie).2 Although it seems inevitable that this “cult text of feminism” (Spivak 243) would produce such readings, I wish, in this essay, to shift our focus slightly, to suggest that the novel’s obsessive circlings around the issues of food and hunger are centered not so much around the nurturance and development of a specifically female or feminine body, but rather around the peculiar fate of the often ungendered3 yet extraordinarily vulnerable child’s body — a body largely understood, in nineteenth-century social discourse, to be strangely perishable and infinitely prone to danger and decay. Brontë’s frightening portraits of childhood starvation and neglect in the Lowood School chapters of Jane Eyre can be read as dramatizing the laws of Malthusian economics, speaking powerfully to a range of mid-nineteenth-century social anxieties regarding the relationship between the overproduction of unwanted children and the threat of mass starvation on a national scale.