Which social groups are marginalized, excluded or silenced within Jane Eyre?

Part 3: Literature: texts and contexts

Prescribed Question: Which social groups are marginalized, excluded or silenced within the text?

With specific focus on the silence of racially ‘different’ female characters in the text (Bertha Mason) and the depiction of these characters.

Title of text(s): Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)

My critical response will: 

• Outline the importance of the first-person narration in the text and how it excludes other points of view.
• Discuss the racial exclusion within the text and how the racial ‘others’ within the text are framed in such a way that contributes to typical ‘savage’ image of Black people.
• Analyze the association of ‘whiteness’ with good and ‘blackness’ with evil and how this excludes the racially different from ever obtaining a position of the ‘hero’ or even sometimes a chance to tell their side of the story.
• Examine the parallels between Jane’s past and Bertha’s situation to highlight the racial inequalities in opportunities and when it comes to moral decisions and judgments.
• Explore the creation of a ‘new world’ within the text in which issues of race do not exist and how this contributes to the silencing of racially others and the implicit messages of this.

Word Count: 197

One of the elements of the text that need to be discussed in order to fully understand the extent of the bias in the novel is the fact that it is narrated in first person. The character of Jane takes us through a journey of her life which has a very introspective style, reflecting upon her decisions and generally giving us insight into her mind and thought process through which the reader gains a very personal relationship with the character. However, because of the introspective nature of the narration the audience is left to wonder what happens when Jane is not narrating and it is painfully obvious how she manages to frame the profiles of certain characters and situations according to her moral standards and thoughts. The reader is almost always left desiring a more ‘objective’ story as we are not allowed to observe the story from any other perspective but Jane’s. It is through this partisan narration that we come to know every other character in the book and it is through this lens that Jane seems to create a world of her own.

In this world, Brontë manages to not only cast a certain stereotypical Victorian judgement on women that have what could be described as typically associated ‘African’ or ‘Black’ personality traits but also goes as far as ‘demonizing’ characters that she created to be with typically African physical traits in the characters that Jane dislikes.

When building the character of Bertha Mason, Brontë took great care of framing her story in such a way that never allowed her to tell it herself. We learn about her through Jane’s recount of Rochester’s story, and before the revelation of her existence Brontë was careful to ascribe non-human traits and building the audiences perception of her as a malevolent character and preventing the audience from seeing Bertha as anything else than an evil creature. Brontë describes her “preternatural laugh” (Brontë, 127), and her “[…] demoniac laugh […] goblin laughter” (Brontë, 173) when Bertha attempted to light Mr. Rochester’s room on fire, and furthermore when Bertha attempts to kill Mr. Mason, Brontë describes a “snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarreling” (Brontë, 241). Brontë associates her with everything evil such as sexual desire, cannibalism, vampirism, etc. a heathen for all purposes and we can see this in her description of her “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not […] tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal. […] The clothed Hyena rose up […] The maniac bellowed […] I recognized well that purple face — those bloated features […]” (Brontë, 338). Once again, Brontë manages to ascribe certain stereotypical traits to Bertha such as transforming her into basically an animal in her actions, and describing her as “a big woman, in stature almost equaling her husband, corpulent besides: she showed virile force” (Brontë, 338) imposing on her traits typically thought to be African, a clear contrast to Jane’s small feminine body. Bertha is compared to an animal as she only yells and does not speak and is constantly referred as ‘that’ or ‘it’ or a ‘thing’, ultimately dehumanizing her and contributing to the ‘savageness’ of the non-white races.

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