Living in "Jane Eyre"'s shadow: Jane's intertextual presence in works by Maya Angelou, Bharati Mukherjee, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid (Charlotte Bronte).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In recent decades, Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel <italic>Jane Eire</italic> has been revised, revisited and revamped by playwrights, screenwriters and novelists who see in Jane a compelling figure of young womanhood whose struggles and desires seem both timeless and dramatically specific to the Victorian era. My interest in the longevity and legacy of Jane Eyre is centered around its intertextual appearance in four contemporary texts that are written by women from a variety of cultural contexts: Maya Angelou's <italic>I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings</italic> (1969), Bharati Mukherjee's <italic>Jasmine </italic> 1989), Jamaica Kincaid's <italic>Lucy</italic> (1990) and Michelle Cliffs <italic>No Telephone To Heaven</italic> (1987). Each of these texts possesses a plot that repeats—to varying degrees—the story at the center of Bronte's novel: a young female protagonist growing up amid oppressive social circumstances who struggles toward personal and social fulfillment. However, this study delves below the plot in order to examine the complex and subtle ways in which these female protagonists—an African-American, an illegal immigrant from India, and two Afro-Caribbean women—perceive their identity and clarify their life choices through a culturally-influenced understanding and appreciation of <italic>Jane Eyre</italic>.
Some studies have concluded that <italic>Jane Eyre</italic> appears in these books because the novel and its heroine serve as a source of escape and inspiration for the four contemporary women. My study reveals, however, that as these women mature, their relationship to <italic>Jane Eyre</italic> evolves. They develop an ambivalent relationship toward the Bronte novel and its paradigm of “universal” female development that does not consider their complex emotional lives and marginal social status. When <italic>Jane Eyre</italic> is alluded to in these narratives, it becomes a textual manifestation of the postcolonial female's ambivalent connection to her cultural inheritance and points to her ongoing struggle with low self-esteem, racial politics and familial relationships. Each of these young women can only begin to claim control over her life and self-image when she begins to identify and accept her racial identity and cultural past, rather than look to a fictional model of Anglo English womanhood that Jane Eyre embodies.
This study builds upon the recent work of postcolonial critics who have uncovered the racial and gendered “exclusions” that are integral to Jane Eyre's success. These exclusions are evidence of the racial bias and nineteenth-century imperialist ideology that are embedded in the novel and that pave the way for Jane's rise to personal and social success. Chapter one identifies the presence of exclusion, contradiction and ambivalence in <italic> Jane Eire</italic> in order to link these subtextual narrative elements with similar subtextual tensions in texts by Angelou (chapter two), Mukherjee (chapter three), Cliff and Kincaid (chapter four). These analyses illuminate how and why the colonial relationships and imperialist ideology contained within Bronte's novel are present within, and transformed by, the contemporary narratives and psychological journeys of the four twentieth-century heroines.
My dissertation explores the various ways in which the four postcolonial protagonists handle the difficult task of identifying and challenging the cultural and class biases, social norms and familial expectations that threaten to limit their life choices and undermine their self-esteem. To move forward in their lives, they must learn to look beyond the idealized, white femininity of Jane Eyre in order to identify and value Bertha Rochester—not as the brutish madwoman Bronte constructed, but the silenced, long-neglected “dark” female who lies buried in their consciousness and is part of their postcolonial inheritance.