The Queerness of Fairytale Romance in Jane Eyre
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Since its publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has captured the imagination of reading audiences through its gripping romance combined with graphic depictions of violence against women. The novel draws its readers into a fairytale world in which a poor orphan girl discovers love and happiness with an aristocratic gentleman while also thrilling its audience with numerous episodes of betrayal and suffering. Recent criticism has addressed the problem of violence in the novel by stressing Jane’s intimate relationship with women as a means of overcoming patriarchal violence and achieving agency. This criticism has viewed Jane’s relationship with women as spanning from motherly and sisterly forms of nurture to more erotic expressions of same-sex desire which either downplay the novel’s heterosexual narrative or imagine female same-sex relationships as a model for Jane’s marriage to Rochester. This article builds on and complements these recent queer readings of the novel, but, rather than focusing on Jane’s same-sex intimacy with other women, I analyze the queerness at the center of the novel’s romance between Jane and Rochester. I argue that the novel’s extensive use of fairy tales introduces these mythical tropes as forms of queer performativity that strive to effect an egalitarian relationship through the enunciation of imagined male same-sex desire.
Abstract
Since its publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has captured the imagination of reading audiences through its gripping romance combined with graphic depictions of violence against women. The novel draws its readers into a fairytale world in which a poor orphan girl discovers love and happiness with an aristocratic gentleman while also thrilling its audience with numerous episodes of betrayal and suffering. Recent criticism has addressed the problem of violence in the novel by stressing Jane’s intimate relationship with women as a means of overcoming patriarchal violence and achieving agency. This criticism has viewed Jane’s relationship with women as spanning from motherly and sisterly forms of nurture to more erotic expressions of same-sex desire which either downplay the novel’s heterosexual narrative or imagine female same-sex relationships as a model for Jane’s marriage to Rochester. This article builds on and complements these recent queer readings of the novel, but, rather than focusing on Jane’s same-sex intimacy with other women, I analyze the queerness at the center of the novel’s romance between Jane and Rochester. I argue that the novel’s extensive use of fairy tales introduces these mythical tropes as forms of queer performativity that strive to effect an egalitarian relationship through the enunciation of imagined male same-sex desire.
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