The Political Unconscious in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations

Abstract

This paper aims to explore three Victorian novels, namely Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) bringing together Marxist and postcolonial theories. While some novels written in the Victorian era deal with imperialism and the colonized overtly, in these three novels, the colonies and the colonized are dealt with indirectly as if only in-passing. However, these in-passing references are very significant because they constitute the recurrent silences, gaps, and absences in these texts, which has critical implications. In Marxist terms, it is history that haunts these texts in these gaps and silences, which means that these Victorian novels are inevitably related to Britain’s imperial history and its ideologies. What is given repeatedly at the margins or gaps of these texts demonstrates the obsessive return of the issue of colonialism though the texts seek to repress it. Exploring the return of the colonial repressed in the gaps and silences of these novels by focusing on Fredric Jameson’s conception of the political unconscious, this paper argues that these novels have twofold function: while expressing the deep-seated anxieties, fears and desires of the Victorian society by projecting them onto the non-white others, they contribute to shape a certain understanding of the colonized other and also a certain sense of national identity.