The Mystery of the Past Haunts Again: Jane Eyre and Eugenie Marlitt’s Die zweite Frau

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a classic in women’s fiction. When it was published in 1847, it made an immediate impact in mid-Victorian England, partly because it drew on the paradigmatic story of a romance heroine, partly because it interpreted the needs of the women of the time. Since then, the Thornfield Hall attic where Bertha Mason is kept hidden by the master of the house, Mr. Rochester, has become the metaphor of a feminine place of imprisonment and,at the same time, of rebellion against patriarchal rules.About thirty years after Jane Eyre, another woman writer published a book which evokes the haunting atmosphere of the Thornfield Hall theme, i.e., the German writer Eugenie Marlitt, the author of Die zweite Frau ( The second wife, 1874).Interestingly, Marlitt seems to recapture, while rewriting it, the character of Bertha within the context of German domestic fiction. Bothnovels explore indeed the issue of the imprisoned and socially marginalised woman in terms of ethnicity to show how gender roles are inevitably complicit with power relations. In Jane Eyre and Die zweite Frau the house motif is a pivotal element that leads to our understanding of the female characters, but it is above all the mystery that reverberates through the houses of the two novels, represented by two women, the Creole Bertha and the Indian Lotusblume, which, being crucial to the articulation of the discursive thrust underlying the two narratives, discloses the multi-layered construction of femininity.