Jane Eyre Marcus, Sharon PMLA

The profession of the author: Abstraction, advertising, and Jane Eyre Marcus, Sharon PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America; Mar 1995; 110, 2; ProQuest Central pg. 206 Sharon Marcus The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre SHARON MARCUS is assistant INCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1847, Jane Eyre has been read by professor of English at the Uni Sits detractors and admirers as the portrayal of a willful female versity of California, Berkeley. subject who claims her own identity. Readers have failed to note, how She is working on a book titled ever, that the most basic and encompassing marker of that identity, her name, tends to emerge when her will is most in abeyance. A key in Restless Houses: Domesticity stance of Jane's involuntary self-promotion occurs toward the end of and Urban Culture in Paris and the novel, during her stay with the Rivers family, when St. John Rivers London, 1820-1880. identifies Jane as the relative for whom "advertisements have been put in all the papers" (406). St. John recognizes her as the rightful heir of a fortune before Jane herself does. His proof of her identity consists of a signature in "the ravished margin of [a] portrait-cover," which Jane con fronts as if it belonged to another: "He got up, held it close to my eyes: and I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words 'JANE EYRE'" (407). Jane has failed to answer the advertisements of others, but her unwitting self-advertisement has found its ideal reader. Jane construes her signature as "the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction" (407) and thus disowns it as the product of her own voli tion' even as it fulfills the conditions of her uncle's will and her own de sires to be financially independent and to belong to a family. Although Jane has consistently refused to speak her personal story to St. John Rivers or his sisters, her unintentional signature publicizes it for her. Through the use of typographical conventions for designating titles capitalization and quotation marks-the words "JANE EYRE" also em blematize the text itself, suggesting that Jane Eyre the novel, as well as Jane Eyre the character, is the "work ... of some moment of abstraction." In this essay, I analyze abstraction through close readings of scenes of speech, writing, and advertising in Jane Eyre and through a considera tion of Charlotte Bronte's dealings in the Victorian literary market. The concept of abstraction is crucial to understanding the relation of writing 206 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sharon Marcus 207 to female subjectivity in Jane Eyre and in Bronte's replacement of patronage with a middle-class mar literary career because it mediates between appar ket rendered authorship and the sale of books more ently contradictory categories: embodiment and in rationalized, generalized, and generalizing (Heyck visibility, self-effacement and self-advertisement, 24-28). Advertising rapidly developed as a means femininity and professional identity, fragmentation of regulating relations among publishers, authors, and wholeness, and profit and loss. Abstraction and consumers. Improved communications and the takes on four meanings in Jane Eyre, each instanti spread of railway transportation during the 1840s ated by different aspects of the text and all related helped create an abstract space, based on imagined as ways in which Jane becomes a particular kind of proximity rather than face-to-face contact, in which female subject. First, Jane uses the term to mean authors and publishers could locate, solicit, and an absence of will, mind, and attention, as she de supply a mass market (see Collins 19-20, 191; scribes the semiconscious state in which she dis Sutherland 64). At the same time, a growing num tractedly signs her real name on her sketch. Second, ber of incipient professionals in fields other than abstraction becomes a sublation and "separat[ion] writing sought to convince the public to purchase from matter, from material embodiment" ("Ab various types of expertise defined as abstract by straction," OED), which Jane Eyre represents as uniform standards and credentials and by distinc the displacement of an embodied self into writing tion from the more material skills and goods of ar and visual representation. Third, abstraction in tisans and tradespeople. volves the externalization or objectification of the How did these tendencies toward abstraction af self into a partial image, sign, or object, which oc fect middle-class women who worked either as curs in the novel as the splitting and alienation of writers or as governesses? In the final section of this Jane's self into portraits, truncated names, and in paper I examine how Bronte negotiated the conflict strumentalized body parts. Finally, abstraction is between the embodiment attributed to women and the synthesis of the particular into a more general the increasing abstraction of the publishing, ad concept or system based on resemblance rather vertising, and professional identities she sought to than difference, a concept the novel exemplifies as assume. Bronte's career as Currer Bell, like Jane Jane's rhetorical membership in a professional Eyre's as Jane Elliott, transformed pseudonymity body of governesses. into a form of veiled self-advertisement, into a strat The importance of abstraction in Jane Eyre is due egy for disowning the difficulties of female em in part to the text's contemporaneity with the height bodiment by exploiting the powers of abstraction. of British capitalism and imperialism, historical My argument that Jane's and Bronte's subjec phenomena that moved spatial and human relations tivities emerge most strongly during moments of in the direction of greater and greater abstraction abstraction and alienation is informed by both through developments in areas such as statistics, Lacanian and Marxist understandings of subjectiv cartography, a bureaucratic civil service, and a ity. Alienation and abstraction are linked terms manufacturing system that increasingly organized since alienation, in the structural sense of separa workers' space and time (Marx 88, 92, 96; Thomp tion, is the process by which abstraction from the son; Poovey, Social Body). The capitalist ideology material or the particular occurs. For both Lacan of political economy defined human relations and and Marx, alienation is not the absolute loss of the economic value in terms of abstractions-money, thing alienated but a means of elaborating a rela markets, and generalized exchange-while imperi tion to that thing. In the Lacanian notion of the alism sought to extend the reach of those abstrac mirror stage, subjects attain an illusory but power tions and often justified the domination of other ful sense of coherence and selfhood only by alien peoples by claiming that Europeans had a greater ating themselves into such nebulous objects as capacity for abstract reasoning. mirror images (Lacan 1-7). The mirror stage thus Capitalism's tendency toward abstraction neces anticipates the symbolic stage, in which the sub sarily transformed authorship and publishing dur ject is alienated into language, into abstract signi ing the first half of the nineteenth century. The fying systems and social exchanges, and into such Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 208 The Profession ofthe Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre idealizations as the phallus, which represents lack capitalist political economy, which simultaneously and "can play its role only when veiled" (288). limit and enable agency by subordinating it to the Lacan's choice of the phallus as the sign of abstrac abstract laws of the marketplace. tion suggests that men and women have asymmet rical positions within the symbolic and that women, I by lacking or being the phallus, may lack lack it self. The reading of Jane Eyre that follows shows My reading of Bronte's novel and of her strate how a female protagonist and female author might gies as a professional writer questions the critical instead productively attain lack. school that has evaluated Jane Eyre as the story of Abstraction and alienation are also key concepts its heroine's successful attainment of "full person in Marx's readings of labor and of capitalist politi hood" and her transcendence of self-division and cal economy. In translations of Marx's writings, alienation. Interpreters of Jane Eyre have reacted alienation can mean capitalists' exclusive appropri to a tradition of condemning the heroine as an in ation of wealth or the pain experienced by proletar decorously outspoken and desiring female subject, ianized workers. My use of the term combines a tradition represented most famously by Elizabeth Marx's positive definition of human labor as a per Rigby's 1848 article in the conservative Quarterly son's ability to conceive of material products ab Review chastising "a mere heathen mind which is a stractly and to "contemplate ... himself in a world law unto itself" (173) and by Virginia Woolf's dis that he has created" (77) with his critique of capi approval of Jane's and Bronte's rage in A Room of talism as an increasingly abstract system that sub One's Own (71-73). The feminist critical turn of ordinates labor, use value, and human relations to the 1970s and 1980s, which reclaimed the novel as commodification and exchange value. Nineteenth a parable of female development, praised the "re century capitalism worked to link these disparate bellious feminism" that earlier critics had de views by making it possible for workers to perform nounced (Gilbert and Gubar 338). In reinterpreting productive labor (positive abstraction) only through Jane as moving toward "mature freedom" (339) alienation into the structures of political economy and "a complete female identity" (Showalter 112), (negative abstraction).

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