Jane Eyre And Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants

225 Pages·2013·1.3 MB·English

by  Abigail Ruth Heiniger

Wayne State University
DigitalCommons@WayneState
Wayne State University Dissertations
1-1-2013
Jane Eyre And Her Transatlantic Literary
Descendants: The Heroic Female Bildungsroman
And Constructions Of National Identity
Abigail Ruth Heiniger
Wayne State University,
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Recommended Citation
Heiniger, Abigail Ruth, "Jane Eyre And Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants: The Heroic Female Bildungsroman And
Constructions Of National Identity" (2013).Wayne State University Dissertations.Paper 660.
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JANE EYRE AND HER TRANSATLANTIC LITERARY DESCENDANTS: THE
HEROIC FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATIONAL
IDENTITY

by

ABIGAIL RUTH HEINIGER

DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Graduate School

of Wayne State University,

Detroit, Michigan

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

2013

MAJOR: ENGLISH

Approved By:

_________________________________________
Advisor Date

_________________________________________

_________________________________________

_________________________________________
COPYRIGHT BY

ABIGAIL RUTH HEINIGER

2013

All Rights Reserved
DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Mary Rorem Heiniger,
who spent her vacations and holidays reading chapter drafts,
and to my father, Stephen Lewis Heiniger,
who listened to Jane Eyre driving me back and forth from Detroit.
You made this dream possible.

This dissertation is also dedicated to Dr. Anca Vlasopolos.
It is wonderful to have the opportunity to work with someone whose life and work you admire. It
is quite another thing to have that person believe in you.
Thank you for believing!

ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation rests upon the encouragement and loving critiques of a decade of
professors, mentors, and friends. I would like to thank my entire committee for their support and
feedback throughout this process. I am particularly grateful for Dr. Anca Vlasopolos; she read an
endless number of drafts and helped me excavate the critical stakes in my argument. I would also
like to thank Professor Tamara Yohannes at the University of Louisville, who encouraged a
sophomore English Major to send a paper to Brontë Studies – that was the beginning of
everything.

iii
PREFACE
This project began with an avid interest in fairy tales and Charlotte Brontë’s distinctive
use of fairy lore in Jane Eyre, and it evolved into a study of the cultural and nationalistic stakes
in the literary microcosm that rippled out from Brontë’s debut novel. The rehabilitation of
women writers in both British and American literary studies has led to a growing awareness of
their transatlantic networks. More significantly, Jane Eyre has been incorporated into an
increasing number of recent transatlantic studies, suggesting that this novel generated meaningful
transatlantic influence. Elizabeth Gaskell was the first to note this, in The Life of Charlotte
Brontë (1857) she writes: “‘Jane Eyre’ had had a great run in America” (281). This analysis
examines the cultural legacy of that “great run” and puts it in conversation with notable British
and European responses to Jane Eyre including Brontë’s Villette (1851) and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856). While both British and American responses to Brontë’s first
novel have been studied separately before, the evolution of a distinctive nineteenth-century
transatlantic literary microcosm has never been analyzed. This transatlantic analysis has
uncovered the nationalist stakes both in Jane Eyre and the tradition of the heroic female
bildungsroman, which extends from that novel.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication _________________________________________________________________ ii
Acknowledgements __________________________________________________________ iii
Preface ____________________________________________________________________ iv
Chapter 1 “Introduction to Jane Eyre’s Transatlantic Microcosm” ______________________ 1
Chapter 2 “Faery and the Beast in Jane Eyre” _____________________________________ 20
Jane Eyre: The Faery and the Beast _______________________________________ 28
Death of the Fairy Heroine and a Search for the New Eve in Villette _____________ 67
Conclusion __________________________________________________________ 87
Chapter 3 “Negotiating the Transatlantic Paradigm for Womanhood” __________________ 91
Chapter 4 “Concentric Circles of Women Writers” ________________________________ 138
Appendix A “Cinderella – Not A Fairy Tale” _____________________________________ 173
Appendix B “A New Cinderella” ______________________________________________ 181
Appendix C “A Modern Cinderella” ___________________________________________ 188
Appendix D “Invitation to Presidential Ball” ____________________________________ 204
References _______________________________________________________________ 205
Abstract _________________________________________________________________ 214
Autobiographical Statement _________________________________________________ 218

v
1
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO JANE EYRE’S TRANSATLANTIC MICROCOSM
This dissertation examines the role of fairy tales and fairy lore across the arc of Charlotte
Brontë’s career from Jane Eyre (1847) to Villette (1853) in order to demonstrate the evolution of
the heroic female bildungsroman in Brontë’s work. Jane Eyre’s literary descendants written by
women, both in Great Britain, Continental Europe, and across the Atlantic, in the United States
and Canada embrace this distinctive narrative paradigm, the heroic female bildungsroman.
Expanding upon the theory of transatlantic literary exchange modeled by Amanda Claybaugh in
The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007), I
demonstrate the ideological influence of Jane Eyre and the reciprocal influence of American
literary responses on interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s work.
The fairytale allusions and, more particularly, the fairy heroine figure featured in Jane
Eyre are excised from Brontë’s final novel, Villette (1851). Nor do they survive intact in Jane
Eyre’s other literary descendants: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Susan
Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), and
Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca 1850). These four texts are certainly not the
only works of literature that were influenced by Jane Eyre; however, these are some of the most
prominent examples of literature written by women that are currently being posited as literary
descendants of Brontë’s debut novel.1 Moreover, all four of these texts attempt to replace
Brontë’s fairytale allusions in distinctive an meaningful ways; these authors all model the search
for a female mythology, which persists into the twentieth-first century.2 Moreover, like Brontë’s

1 Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a notable pastiche of Jane Eyre.
2 It may be argued that Jane Eyre’s legacy continue well into the twenty-first century with novels like Diane
Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006). In Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny (2010), Heta Pyrhönen
analyzes Setterfield and other twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of Jane Eyre, emphasizing the
contradictions and tensions of the “Bluebeard” fairytale embedded in Brontë’s novel. However, Pyrhönen claims
that this novel “undoubtedly belongs squarely to Britain’s national heritage” (11). She does not recognize the
transatlantic literary impact.
2
fairy heroine, the larger-than-life heroines in her literary progeny are invested with a range of
regional and national associations that generate nationalistic messages.
Chapter One functions as an introduction to my main argument as well as an overview of
my critical approach. It particularly outlines the distinctive transatlantic microcosm that develops
around Jane Eyre as well as the Cinderella paradigm projected back onto Brontë’s novel by
American authors and readers. Chapter Two covers the arc of Brontë’s career; it explores the
dominant fairytale paradigms in Jane Eyre and identifies the role of the fairy lore in constructing
the heroic Jane Eyre. This chapter demonstrates the connections between the heroic changeling3
and the local, pre-Victorian fairy lore. The argument relies heavily on primary source material
from Haworth and Yorkshire as well as periodicals that the Brontë family read. It concludes by
demonstrating how fairytale material in Villette is excised.
Chapter Three explores the transatlantic community of women writers in which Brontë
was immersed. It begins with the ideological or imaginary transatlantic exchange between Great
Britain and the United States discussed by Amanda Claybaugh in The Novel of Purpose (2007).
It also explores the role that Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë played
in generating a transatlantic mythology that linked Brontë’s life with her texts. Finally, this
chapter examines the mainstream literary descendants of Jane Eyre. It identifies the heavy
reliance on classical mythological allusions to generate a female mythology in the British
descendants of Jane Eyre in the Victorian Era, particularly Aurora Leigh. It also examines
Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables and U.S. novel The Wide, Wide World and the American

3 A changeling is a foundling who is half human, half fairy, particularly in Charlotte Brontë’s fiction. In “The
Foundling,” a story from Brontë’s juvenilia, the half human, half fairy character Sydney is identified as a
changeling. In “Faery and the Beast” (2006), I posit that Jane Eyre is a changeling heroine and argue that through
the changeling and its fairy lore tradition, Charlotte Brontë creates a heroine strong enough to break out of the
established female dichotomy of angels and fallen angels. This dissertation is only tangentially related to “Faery and
the Beast,” however it does rely upon the previously established changeling identity of Jane Eyre.
3
Cinderella paradigm that these novels develop. I argue that the “Beauty and the Beast” and fairy-
bride allusions in Jane Eyre resonated with the cultural traditions of Brontë’s British audience
while Cinderella reflects nineteenth-century American ideals.
Chapter Three concludes with an examination of the recently discovered, unpublished
manuscript, The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1850), by Hannah Crafts.4 This is the first novel
written by an escaped female slave in the United States. Recent scholarship on Crafts has
commented on the way her text borrows large amounts of material from other popular novels,
primarily Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852) and Jane Eyre; critics have even identified the
influence of Villette in the final chapter of Crafts’s novel. The treatment of Jane Eyre and Villette
in The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a distinctive addition to current scholarship on Brontë’s
literary progeny, which has focused exclusively on white authors. Furthermore, this close
reading of The Bondwoman’s Narrative is the first to put this novel in conversation with the
network of mainstream authors that developed around Jane Eyre. Unlike white American women
writers, Crafts’s repositioning of Jane Eyre does not rely upon Cinderella allusions; rather, she
creates a heroic female bildungsroman that undermines this American narrative paradigm,
demonstrating that the white fairytale expectations are founded upon exploitation.
Finally, Chapter Four analyzes the cultural significance of transatlantic responses to Jane
Eyre. Brontë’s novel was incorporated into an American narrative culture. In fact, I argue that
American readers project the nineteenth-century American self-rise ethic onto Jane Eyre, placing
it at the center of a distinctly nationalistic tradition. More specifically, Jane Eyre became mired
in narratives of nineteenth-century American identity formation. It was absorbed into the parallel
tradition of male and female rise tales, related to American individualism and the self-rise ethic.

4 This is the correct spelling of the novel’s title. It is also referred to as The Bondswoman’s Narrative in recent
scholarship.