The Others in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: A Postcolonial-Orientalist and Feminist Reading

Abstract

There are different forms of
 othering in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre:  one which results from Jane’s ambiguous
 position in terms of class hierarchies and another generated by Bertha’s
 presence as a colonized subject. In both cases, femininity amplifies gender-specific
 repercussions in these othering processes. However, while Brontë creates a
 female character in Jane who triumphs over the challenges posed by Victorian
 society’s class and gender hierarchies, i.e., the status as other of
 governesses and women, problematic as it is in its final solidification of the
 status quo, Bertha reflects the dominant, Eurocentric ideologies of nineteenth
 century England concerning race and the racial other. She is the colonized and
 racial other, a madwoman who threatens British men as embodied in Mr.
 Rochester, and women embodied as in Jane, and her final self-destruction for
 Jane’s sake are poignant plot devices to this end.  This paper offers a comparative reading of
 two female characters’ othered status in Victorian British society in relation
 to the dominant ideologies of the era concerning gender, class and race. I
 argue that whereas Brontë, following a feminist reading of her novel, fictively
 assuages the othered status of British women in the characterization of Jane,
 who triumphs in resisting society’s rigid class boundaries and women’s
 subordinate position in terms of legal and financial matters, does not grant a
 similarly fictive emancipatory view to Bertha as the colonized and racial
 other. This is an obvious and clear indication of Brontë’s limitations
 concerning feminist activism and inclusiveness as her implication in advancing
 the dominant, imperialist discourse.