Rhys’s Haunted Minds: Race, Slavery, the Gothic, and Rewriting Jane Eyre in the Caribbean

Abstract

A casual reader of Jane Eyre (1847) might see Brontë’s novel as a quintessentially gothic text, taken in by its decaying manor, its vaguely Byronic hero, its dark secrets, its vampiric female villain, and its references to madness and the supernatural. Nevertheless, although these superficial currents of Gothicism are certainly present within the text, Brontë criticism tends to emphasize how Jane Eyre complicates gothic motifs and often seeks alternative ways of reading even the novel’s most seemingly gothic passages. As early as 1974, Ruth Yeazell defended “the lovers’ supernatural conversation”¹ and the subsequent reunion of Jane and Rochester as more than “Gothic claptrap,”² suggesting that “[t]here is magic in Jane Eyre … but it is not primarily the magic of Gothic contrivance and supernatural effects.”³ Contemporary critics such as Srdjan Smajic have gone even further in interpreting these scenes, asking that we read “Jane’s ESP experience” as “a provocative challenge to the reader’s understanding of nature” rather than as an actual challenge to the real; as Smajic argues, “It is not only natural to hear voices of absent people, it is a case of nature at ‘her best,’ her most natural.”⁴ As this ongoing conversation increasingly suggests, Jane Eyre tests the boundary between gothic romanticism and a rather sophisticated realism.