Jane Eyre Marcus, Sharon PMLA

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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

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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

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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). The subject of capitalism critics understood the novel as a cautionary tale becomes the possessive individual, "human qua about the perils of the split self and interpreted proprietor of his own person," who belongs to a so Bertha Mason as a symbol of the disruptive sexu ciety that "is essentially a series of market relations ality that Jane must either incorporate or expel. between ... free individuals" (Macpherson 158). In turn, however, feminists including Gayatri The possessive individual exists by virtue of his Spivak, Firdous Azin, and Joyce Zonana have criti ownership of self, labor, land, and objects, but this cized Jane Eyre for representing Bertha Mason, ownership is constituted less by appropriation than India, and "the East" as othered entities that the plot by the ability to alienate possessions through sale destroys or appropriates in order to make Jane a to others, which translates the self into money and unified subject. Spivak criticizes the "wholeness" exchange value. Only through alienation into such (244-45) that earlier feminist critics embraced; abstractions does the subject of political economy Azin contends that Jane is a "unified Enlighten come into being. ment subject ... [produced] by the invocation and Convention and law defined the alienated and subsequent obliteration of the Other subject, differ possessive individual as male, but Jane Eyre's rep entiated by class, race and gender" (88); and Zo resentation of Jane's abstraction extends to its nana shows that Jane uses "feminist orientalism" to heroine the imbricated gains and losses attendant "secure more rights for herself," the rights of the on subjection to political economy. When Jane ad unified democratic subject (596). These critics per vertises for governess work, she alienates her em suasively explicate Jane Eyre's imperialism, but bodied existence into abstractions (printed texts, they continue to claim that it consists in the creation truncated names) and thus arrogates to herself the of a subject free of internal contradictions; none normatively masculine conditions of agency in a considers how Jane Eyre's transformation of her

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self into an other suggests that the split subject and tion. The novel's second paragraph evokes Jane's the imperialist-capitalist subject may be equivalent. "consciousness of ... physical inferiority" (39), Yet scenes of writing in the novel depict Jane and the novel's first chapters establish Jane as a as being most successfully herself when she sup vocal child who cries out to her repressive Aunt presses, evacuates, or commodifies her material Reed, "Speak I must" (68). Jane's "fierce speak being. Jane becomes an economic actor and the ap ing" makes an impression on her auditors but gar parent author of her fate only when she alienates ners her few concrete benefits, and indeed in those herself into writing, into advertisements, and into opening chapters Jane experiences attacks on her an abstract professional body. Writing and the writ body that often stem from her verbal outbursts or ten advertisement in Jane Eyre mediate between from an insufficiently abstract relation to reading the embodied and the metaphysical, between the and writing (70). Jane is concerned with equating self and objects external to it, between the individ pictures and words and with making each sign sys ual and the social. Writing, which always bears the tem embody the meaning of the other; when she traces of its own materiality, provides Jane with a reads Bewick's History of British Birds she focuses medium for the successful transfer of her own em on how "[t]he words in these introductory pages bodiment, and alienation into an anonymous ad [connect] themselves with the succeeding vi vertisement enables "J. E." to cash in on her self gnettes" and how "[e]ach picture [tells] a story" even as she masks it. (40). That very text becomes a catastrophically ma Studies of nineteenth-century sexuality and gen terial object when her cousin John uses the book to der ideology have shown that women were charac make her bleed. After ordering Jane to "[s]how the terized by overidentification with their bodies (or book," John throws it at her, causing her to fall, cut were substituted for the very idea of the body) and herself, and become a mass of painful sensation: that many discourses represented female bodies as "every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of glaringly visible, material spectacles (Foucault; flesh on my bones shrank when he came near. ... Poovey, Uneven Development 24-50; Bruno 58-76; I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle Shuttleworth). Although Jane Eyre begins with down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pun that version of female identity, the novel proposes gent suffering: these sensations for the time pre abstraction as a technique for displacing the hero dominated over fear" (42-43). If those emotions ine's potentially troublesome embodiment and sex enable Jane to speak up and fight back, her resis ualization onto the medium of writing (in the form tance leads only to more violent punishment. of a printed newspaper advertisement) and thus for At Lowood School, writing continues to serve as gaining the heroine a place in an economic market. an instrument or weapon that makes girls' bodies Throughout the novel, Jane realizes her desires for into the objects of sadistic visual attention. Jane at liberty and mobility most successfully through ad tempts to hide her face from Mr. Brocklehurst vertising copy and the reproducibility of textuality behind her school slate, but, she reports, "[M]y and print. At crisis points in her narrative, she treacherous slate somehow happened to slip from comforts herself with the knowledge that "let the my hand, and falling with an obtrusive crash, di worst come to the worst I can advertise again" rectly [drew] every eye upon me" (97). As in the (126); when Rochester's unexplained absence from episode with John Reed, the visibility and the ma Thornfield distresses her, she responds by "invol teriality of a written text or a writing instrument untarily framing advertisements" (192). Jane uses highlights and wounds an embodied self, for Jane the medium of the written advertisement to negoti becomes more conscious of her body after dropping ate between absolute self-effacement, represented her writing tablet: Miss Temple's whispered words by Helen Bums, and spectacular, Byronic embodi of comfort go "to my heart like a dagger," and the ment, personified by Rochester. other students' "eyes [are] directed like burning Jane first appears not as a writer, however, but glasses against my scorched skin" (97-98). Later, as a speaker, one whose words are identified with Jane reacts with fury and horror when Helen Bums her body and are vitiated by that material incarna- also endures a corporal punishment that involves

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writing and must stand with "the word 'Slattern'" Jane thus aims to achieve liberty through constraint written "in conspicuous characters" and "bound ... and settles for a subjectivity of diminished expec like a phylactery round [her] forehead" (105). tations. In the context of her social disadvantages, In each of these instances, writing impresses it this approach offers her a way to expand her field self on the girls in ways that make them public of action. Concurrently, her speech becomes less spectacles. When writing marks the body in Jane embodied as it takes the form of a silent inner Eyre, it negates self-authorization. Helen's willing monologue that she explicitly qualifies as mental. ness to have punishment written on her body cul Jane's rhetoric also becomes more abstract as she minates in her death by consumption. As Robert rejects the personifications of "Liberty, Excitement, Keefe has suggested, Helen poses a seductive threat Enjoyment" for the abstraction of an abbreviated to Jane, "[f]or Helen Bums is a creature in love with signature drawn from the corpus of the letters of death," and "death holds a strong attraction for her name. Jane" (98, 100). But Jane appears to take Helen as a Jane's shift from internal speech to a printed ad countermodel: "the spectacle of [Helen's] sad res vertisement also entails the mental abstraction that ignation gave me an intolerable pain at the heart" produces her involuntary signature at the Riverses'. (106). At Gateshead, Jane contemplates "never eat She represents the advertisement as originating ing or drinking more, and letting myself die" (47), outside herself, during a suspension of conscious but at Lowood she learns to adopt a more nuanced thought and deliberate effort. Strictly speaking, she stance toward death that entails neither complete re does not decide to advertise at all: after "feverish" jection nor utter embrace. I She begins to construct but "vain labour," a "kind fairy in my absence had her subjectivity on the basis of an alien grammar surely dropped the required suggestion on my pil and a system of representation without referents or low." Jane's will is thus carried out through a split material grounds: in the paragraphs that follow her ting of the self, first into an absent self and the account of Helen's punishment, she writes, "I fairy, then into two rhetorical interlocutors-a learned the first two tenses of the verb Etre . ... questioning "I" who lacks knowledge of advertis That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in ing and a savvy respondent who addresses this "I" imagination the Barmecide supper ... with which as "you": I was wont to amuse my inward cravings. I feasted instead on the spectacle of ideal drawings, which I [A]s I lay down, [the suggestion] came quietly and saw in the dark" (106). As Jane articulates her naturally to my mind: "Those who want situations being (etre) in an alien language and shifts from must advertise ...." material imaginings to more abstract, "ideal" rep "How? I know nothing about advertising." resentations, she also accepts Lowood for the lib Replies rose smooth and prompt now- erty its negativity offers: she declares, "I would not "You must enclose the advertisement and the now have exchanged Lowood for all its privations money to pay for it under a cover directed to the edi tor of the Herald." (118) for Gateshead and its daily luxuries" (106). Jane orchestrates her departure from Lowood to seek work as a governess by reducing her ambi The momentary absence of Jane's self and her sub tions to become a subject in her own right: sequent splitting into the first and the second per son constitute profitable forms of self-alientation "I want [a position as governess] because it is of no because they condense her self into a text, "a clear, use to want anything better.... A new servitude! practical form" (118). There is something in that," I soliloquized (mentally, Jane recounts her advertisement as follows: be it understood; I did not talk aloud). "I know there is, because it does not sound too sweet. It is not like "A young lady accustomed to tuition" (had I not been such words as Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment: ... a teacher two years?) "is desirous of meeting with a now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so situation in a private family where the children are much of my own will!" (117-18) under fourteen." (I thought that as I was barely eigh-

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teen, it would not do to undertake the guidance of bodied, particular self and others' views of her by pupils nearer my own age.) "She is qualified to teach entering what she represents as a professional body the usual branches of a good English education, to of governesses. gether with French, Drawing, and Music" (in those Jane Eyre's implied arguments for female pro days, reader, this now narrow catalogue of accomplish fessionalization reside in the form and content of ments would have been held tolerably comprehensive). the notorious pronouncement Jane utters when she "Address 1. E., Post Office, Lowton, --Shire." mounts the rooftop of Thornfield: "Anybody may (118-19) blame me who likes" (140).4 After invoking an au dience whose members' individuality has been The juxtaposition of the advertisement's text, generalized into "anybody," Jane outlines her de which is isolated within quotation marks, and the sire to participate in a social space that exceeds the parenthetical asides that pose rhetorical questions, bounds of her body by imagining "a power of vi qualify the advertisement's statements, and directly sion which might overpass that limit; which might address the reader, highlights the advertisement's reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I nonreferential status: Jane's advertisement does had heard of but never seen" and "more of inter not reflect her person; it constructs her as a third course with my kind" (140-41). Although Jane's person object, a "young lady," and alienates her language of romantic plentitude at first implies that name into mere initials. Yet the near anonymity of she seeks an emotional outlet for feeling, for "ex "J. E." enables Jane to make a name for herself: je ultant movement, ... trouble, ... [and] life," her spells "I" in French, the foreign language that she concluding arguments present feeling as an ab later speaks with her pupil and that she is studying stract index of humanity that serves as the basis for when she learns "the first two tenses of the verb demanding equal opportunity in the realm of work: Etre."2 And when Jane arrives at Millcote Inn on "women feel just as men feel; they need exercise her way to Thornfield, the waiter who "answer[s] for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as her summons" asks, "Is your name Eyre, miss?" much as their brothers do .... It is thoughtless to (125). As a result of her quasi-anonymous adver condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do tisement, Jane's name becomes a question to which more or learn more than custom has pronounced she can affirmatively respond. Just before she is in necessary for their sex." Addressing a generalized spired to advertise, Jane sits in her room at Lowood "anyone," Jane invokes the "millions" of women School and hears "a bell ... [that] called me down who resemble her and the "masses" of people with stairs" (117); after she has framed her ad, however, whom these women share their discontent (141). it is Jane who "ring[s] the bell" at Millcote Inn, Jane As critics have noted, Jane's use of the terms mil who summons both a prospective consumer and her lions and masses aligns women with workers (Kap self.3 While her advertisement expresses her desire lan 172), but it also rhetorically connects women to serve, it solicits and produces a buyer to pay for to the "wave of association" that in England was her services; by invoking that buyer, Jane also in often the first sign of formal professionalization vokes her self as a worker with services to sell. (Larson 5). Jane's generalization of her listeners The advertisement's involuntary appearance and of herself as a speaker shifts attention from her and abbreviated, semianonymous signature neu individual situation to the shared condition of a tralize the danger and unsuitability of female self collective body, a nascent professional entity. promotion. Jane commodifies herself while avoiding When Jane Eyre was written, real professional the stigma of prostitution often attached to gov opportunities did not exist for governesses, but the ernesses (Poovey, Uneven Development 129-31), rhetorical force the novel confers on this profes indeed to all working women and to all profession sional body is reflected in Rigby's review, which als who put prices on personal services. Alienation uses the novel as an occasion to insist that middle into the third and second persons and into written class women confine themselves to unpaid domes signs does not disable or degrade Jane. Instead, she tic labor. Rigby understands Jane's objection to profits from this opportunity to differ from her em- the gap between existing female capacities and

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nonexistent professional opportunities as advocacy licited an abstract market of "wide and anonymous of the professionalization of governesses. After publics," a process made possible by the develop criticizing Jane as "not precisely the mouthpiece ment of railways, telegraph systems, a modernized one would select to plead the cause of govern postal service, and improved roads (Larson 10). In esses" (176) and denouncing the novel's implied scorning the equation of women and "patent arguments for the professionalization of governess goods," Rigby placed women above the ab work, Rigby's review rejects the Queen's College stractions of exchange value, standardization, and proposal to license governesses: rationalization deemed necessary for professional ization. However, by equating women with the What we ... require and seek for our children is not unmeasurable qualities of "sound principle, refine a learned machine stamped and ticketed with cre ment, and sense," Rigby unwittingly suggested dentials like a piece of patent goods, but rather a that women already were professionals, since in woman endowed with that sound principle, refine contrast to tradespeople, who trafficked in material ment, and sense, which no committee of education in goods and "the external wants or occasions of the world could ascertain or certify .... [N]o gov erness can teach an art or accomplishment like a reg men," professionals dealt in intangible knowledge ular professor. 5 (184-85) such as medical theory or the principles of archi tectural design ("Profession"). In this sense a pro Rigby praises governesses for qualities "far too pre fession entailed a greater degree of abstraction cious ... to have any stated market value," but her than the physical labor of a surgeon or builder did compliment takes a fundamentally negative form: (Perkin 258; Kaye), and professionals claimed to "no governess can teach ... like a regular profes have expertise in "an abstract system of knowl sor." She argues against any institutionalized form edge," which for Andrew Abbott "best identifies of credentialization and approves governesses' in the professions" (8). ability to form professional or trade associations: Whereas Rigby's review warned that profession "the governess [has] no means of resistance. Work alizing governesses would mechanize women and men may rebel, and tradesmen may combine ... make governesses too powerfully abstract, other but the governess has no refuge-no escape; she is writers justified their opposition to professionaliza a needy lady" (179). tion by identifying governesses with the excessive In disapproving of the automatization and com embodiment of "unregulated female sexuality" modification of women as "patent goods," Rigby (Poovey, Uneven Development 131). Although not opposed other aspects of professionalization for sexualized to the degree that working-class nannies women. Although professionals did not deal in and nursemaids were, governesses often received commodities, they commodified themselves. The "dishonourable proposals [and] insulting atten term professionalism, as opposed to amateurism, tions" and figured in pornographic writings (Ad signified payment for and standardization of ser burgham 87; see also Blessington 41, 184; Peterson vices, the abstraction of work into the universal 15; Renton 191). Advertisements in the London equivalent of money, and the subjection of work to Times stipulated that in addition to being well systematic criteria, those "homogeneous and uni versed in academic subjects, a candidate "must ... versalistic principles" used to assess and compare be lady-like in manners and appearance," "her per different members of the same profession (Larson son and manners lady-like," and must supply "the 13). The generalization inherent in professionalism fullest and most explicit communications as to age, thus exemplified Locke's sense of abstraction in health, &c" (Advertisement, 6 Jan. 1840; Adver An Essay concerning Human Understanding: "This tisement, 24 July 1840; Advertisement, 12 Apr. is called abstraction, whereby ideas, taken from 1841). By placing the governess's physical charac particular beings, become general representatives teristics alongside her pedagogical accomplish of all of the same kind" ("Abstraction," Century ments as if the two belonged to the same register, Dictionary). Professionals also generated and so- such advertisements suggested that the governess

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exemplified her lessons in her person as much as selves through abstractions in order to bypass the she transmitted knowledge contained in books. scrutiny to which women were subject as writers Jane Eyre thus gains professional status not only or governesses. because she addresses a generalized group of peers As Jennifer Wicke's work on Charles Dickens but also because she eludes physical scrutiny, ad has shown, authorship without advertising was im vertising her accomplishments in print without ref possible during the 1840s, a period that witnessed erence to her appearance. Throughout her narrative, "the confluence of advertising and literature" (21). most famously during her brief engagement to Ed During the first half of the nineteenth century, ward Rochester, she resists identification with fem "[a]uctioneers and booksellers were among the ininity as an embodied spectacle. In her conflicts heaviest advertisers in terms of the number of ad and triumphs after her departure from Lowood, vertisements taken" (Neveu 29). Indeed, an 1831 Jane draws not on what Rigby calls her merely Edinburgh Review article about the taxes on litera "moderate capital of good looks" but on what an ture surmised that "[a] third part of the advertise Athenaeum reviewer describes as her "capital of ment duty is ... derived from announcements of principle" (Rev. of Jane Eyre). The metaphor of books" ("Observations" 434), and an 1843 article "capital" indicates an abstract quantity separable on advertising noted that although "no trade, pro from the self; the attribute of "principle," a spiritual fession, or condition in life is entirely free from quality distinct from the body. [puffery] ... we are by no means sure that [authors] Jane Eyre culminates with a final instance of ab would not take precedence of even quack-doctors straction: Jane's instrumentalization through mar and auctioneers" (Rev. of Cesar Birotteau 4, l3) in riage to the blind and crippled Edward Rochester. terms of money and effort expended on advertis Although Rochester eventually regains his sight, ing. As Charles Mitchell stated in an 1846 article his right hand cannot be restored. As Jane con titled "The Philosophy of Advertising," "It may cludes her tale, she reports, "I was then his vision, now be laid down as an established axiom, that no as I am still his right hand" (476). Critics have trade or profession can be followed advantageously often interpreted Rochester's blinding and mutila without some species of advertising" (Linton 29). tion as a form of symbolic castration, but Jane ap When the authors of the works advertised were pears to adopt-rather than to triumph over-her women, however, the necessary self-promotion of husband's bodily fragmentation by transforming advertising collided with the self-effacement de herself into a prosthetic part.6 Her insistence on the manded of them. The unpleasant glare of publicity continuity and permanence of her position as a often hampered female writers, even those who writing instrument and on her absorption into her exercised their skills circumspectly in private, and husband's body ("I am still his right hand") and the frequent equation of female writers with the the homophony of right with write ("I am still his sexualized, embodied figures of the prostitute and write hand") highlight the place of writing in the fallen woman belied the increased rationaliza Jane's progress. By using writing to abstract her tion of publishing (Mermin xiv-xvii, 17, 21, 39). 7 body into a mechanized body part, Jane accedes Bronte's own career illustrates the double stan to sovereignty through service and becomes the dard used to evaluate men's and women's writing. scribe of both her own and her husband's stories. When critics assumed that Currer Bell was a man, they rarely speculated on his experiences or physi II cality. When they assumed that Currer Bell was a woman, however, they imagined an autobiographi Jane's strategies for abstracting herself into texts cal identity between the author and her heroines and writing instruments parallel Bronte's strategies and remarked on the traces her embodied experi for advertising herself as the author of Jane Eyre. ence supposedly left in the text. In a review of Even though Bronte wrote fiction as a professional Jane Eyre for Fraser's Magazine, G. H. Lewes author and Jane only advertises herself as a gov wrote that "the writer is evidently a woman" and erness, both author and character represent them- concluded that the work was "an autobiography

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... in the actual suffering and experience" (Allott alienation describes both the proletarian worker's 84). Reviews of Shirley (1849) trumpeted the ap condition under capitalism and Jane's suffering in pearance of what the Daily News reviewer called the first chapters of Jane Eyre; it posits an identifi "a female pen" and rhetorically stripped the author cation with the body rather than an abstraction down to her female attributes: "that Currer Bell is from it. petticoated will be ... little doubted by the readers In Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, of her work" (Allott 118). The Atlas remarked that N. N. Feltes applies the notion of alienation as "there is woman stamped on every page of the pres Entfremdung to Victorian publishing history and to ent fiction," and the Standard of Freedom wrote women's use of masculine pseudonyms. He de that "[t]he hand of a woman is unmistakably im scribes a transition from a petty-commodity mode pressed on the present brilliant production" (Allott of production, in which authors maintained some 120, 133), while the Critic highlighted the notion direct control over their product, to an alienated that a woman's text did not abstract from experi capitalist mode of production, which proletarian ence but directly embodied it: ized authors, gave capitalist publishers a monopoly over the means of production and distribution, and [W]e have come to the conclusion ... that Currer Bell transformed books into "commodity-texts" charac is a lady. The female heart is here anatomized with a terized by alienability (6, 8). Feltes's discussion of minuteness of knowledge of its most delicate fibres, George Eliot, however, replaces the general alien which could only be obtained by one who had her ation of all writers with the specific suffering and own heart under inspection. The emotions so won alienation of female writers. Feltes maintains that drously described were never imagined: they must Marian Evans took on the masculine pseudonym have beenfelt. (Allott 141; emphasis mine) George Eliot as her "professional name" because of "her particular woman's material need"; her Critics have argued that the tendency to see the writing name "specifies the effect of social coer woman in the work fostered the use of pseudonyms cion enforcing feminine subordination on the level as shields from personal remarks, but few have of production" and signifies her exclusion from asked how nineteenth-century women writers si any "professional title" (38, 40, 43). Although multaneously publicized their works. Similarly, Feltes acknowledges the extent to which George while scholars have shown that it was difficult for Eliot attained professional status and profits, he women to think of themselves as professional writ sees Marian Evans and George Eliot as representa ers, less attention has been paid to how women tives of a femaleness and a professionalism radi nevertheless established professional relationships cally opposed to each other. Feltes's argument that with publishers and reviewers. According to Mary the masculine pseudonym referred to the alien Poovey, male writers of the 1840s resisted the ation-as-suffering of the female writer's body helps alienation inherent in the professionalization of explain how advertising could hamper women's writing by modeling their work on an idealized attempts to exploit publishing's opportunities for version of women's domestic labor; the entry of profitable alienation-as-abstraction. A woman writer women into the literary field was thus particularly could not promote her work as Dickens did when problematic, for it threatened to evacuate the cate he gave widely publicized readings of his books gory of nonalienated female labor (Uneven Devel (Wicke 51), and publicity from reviews often re opment 124-25).8 In Poovey's analysis, alienation duced women to a sensationalized femininity that signifies a painful self-estrangement and psy militated against claims to professional status. Dis chological affliction (121, 125). That notion of tressed by reviewers' insistence on the feminine alienation, stemming from Marx's concept of Ent garb, hand, and heart of Shirley's author, Bronte fremdung (Axelos xxxi-xxxii), points to the emo was driven to exclaim, "Why can they not be con tional and physical state either of a sensationalized tent to take Currer Bell for a man?" (Allott 117). body in pain or of a body painfully severed from However, Feltes's interpretation of the mascu consciousness (Cvetkovich 174, 179). In this sense, line pseudonym as a form of negative alienation

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occludes the extent to which a woman writer could rather than a corporeal status for the Bells "by circumvent the pitfalls of publicity by using a mas signing her correspondence 'In the name of C., E., culine or ambiguous pseudonym. The name Currer and A. Bell'" (Gaskell 292). Bell enabled Bronte to materialize her professional To the extent that her pseudonym enabled her self in abstract form, to put herself forward while to produce herself as a published writer, as a simultaneously receding from view, a paradoxical brand name, Bronte engaged in a process of self strategy of self-promotion through self-effacement construction deemed a crucial aspect of profession that is exemplified in an incident from Bronte's ju alism (Larson 14). Professional writers depended venile writing career. In 1837, the young Bronte on the commodification of their names and on the wrote to the poet laureate Robert Southey and re alienation of their books into a network of adver ceived a discouraging reply that included a piece tisements through which the names and the books of advice she apparently acted on throughout her mutually promoted each other. Advertising thus career: "the less you aim at celebrity, the more abstracted the author's body into a series of texts, likely you will be to deserve and finally to obtain and the written advertisements could even be it" (Spark 64). Southey presumed that his corre "decorporealizing" (Wicke 53) because of their spondent had used a pseudonym, although she had distance from the icons, gestures, and speech of in fact signed her given name. In replying to earlier advertising modes (Sampson 19-22). Ad Southey, Bronte accepted his censure but also fol vertisements were also abstract by virtue of their lowed a golden rule of advertising expounded (sar emphasis on form and effect over content (Elliott castically) in an 1843 Edinburgh Review article: 117-19), their focus on exchange and sale rather "never ... omit an opportunity of placing your than use, and their generalized address to an name in printed characters before the world" (Rev. anonymous and global public (Linton 30). of Cesar Birotteau 2). Ostensibly an apology for Bronte's pseudonym inserted her into and al her ambition, Bronte's reply multiplied the very luded to the literary marketplace and its advertising signature whose authenticity and value Southey system. Although pseudonyms seem to mask au had placed in doubt: "The signature which you thors' identities, an overtly artificial one like Currer suspected of being fictitious is my real name," she Bell, which advertises its own fictiveness, consti wrote. "Again, therefore, I must sign myself, 'CO tuted a common nineteenth-century ploy known as Bronte.'" That proclamation of her name was fol the "puff mysterious," which aroused readers' cu lowed by a postscript in which she apologized for riosity and interest by making reference to an writing at all-and then signed her initials yet anonymous, "unknown" author (Hindley and Hind again (Spark 68). ley 92-93).9 The name Bell itself also signified By the time Bronte published her novels, she advertising and publishing to the mid-Victorian had chosen to efface her given name completely in public. Bel/'s Universal Advertiser was the fore order to further the success of her writing name. most advertising newspaper of Bronte's time, and "If I could," she wrote in 1841, "I would always the name Bell was attached to several popular work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be weekly and penny newspapers in the 1830s, includ known by their results" (Gaskell 221); after pub ing Bel/'s Weekly Messenger, which was "chiefly lishing Jane Eyre, Bronte exclaimed in correspon read in the country" and which carried many book dence with a reader for the firm of Smith, Elder, reviews (Grant 133).10 Stuart and John Bell, the "What author would be without the advantage of founders of the Bell newspapers, were successful being able to walk invisible?" (Symington and Wise publicists at the end of the eighteenth century; John 2: 174). Indeed, Bronte split herself into Charlotte Bell launched the Morning Post "as a Daily Adver Bronte and Currer Bell. Charlotte Bronte, the real tising Pamphlet" and also issued The Universal author, masqueraded in business letters as an inter Catalogue (a catalog of books that was subse mediary who brokered the Bells' poems. In that quently called The British Library) in 1772 (Elliott guise, she implied to publishers "that she was not 149). Bell was also the name attached to a series of acting on her own behalf" yet suggested a nominal cheap nineteenth-century reprints of poetry and

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drama. And an 1875 History of Advertising gave the firm that printed the Bells' poetry. Written under bellmen as the name for town criers, who adver the cover of Currer Bell, her letters determined the tised news and goods well into the nineteenth cen volume's price, its advertising costs, the periodi tury (Sampson 59). cals to which copies were to be sent for review, Bronte's choice of the sexually ambiguous first and the extracts of reviews to be used in subse name Currer enabled her to generalize her autho quent advertisements (Symington and Wise 2: rial power in a way that she believed a feminine 89-135). After Jane Eyre's publication, Bronte name could not. To be sure, as Gaye Tuchman sug also wrote at length to her publisher George Smith gests, female authorship had a certain market value about advertising strategies and sought recognition until the 1870s, and male writers often assumed for the name Currer Bell (2: 147-52). Her sug feminine pseudonyms (48-55). However, that gestions to her publishers resembled those of value was limited to the specifically feminine sen successful entrepreneurs, who counseled that ad sibility implied by a feminine name; it rarely trans vertisements helped create the objects they adver lated into the universal currency of genius. Bronte tised. For example, Josiah Wedgwood, a pioneer in advertised an authorship without reference to a the use of advertising, noted that objects "want a sexed body in order to avoid the invidious stan name-a name has a wonderful effect I assure dards used to evaluate women's writings, as she you- ... it will be absolutely necessary for us to indicates in describing her and her sisters' decision mark them, and advertise that mark" (McKendrick to adopt pen names: 112, 124). II Although Bronte told her publishers that she thought reviews were more valuable than Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own advertisements, most reviews differed little from names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; advertisements in purpose, since both sought to the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of con affect sales and circulation (Collins 191). The Ed scientious scruple at assuming Christian names, posi tively masculine, while we did not like to declare inburgh Review called favorable reviews "indorse ourselves women, because ... we had a vague im ments" (Rev. of Cesar Birotteau 14-15) and accused pression that authoresses are liable to be looked on them of being veiled advertisements; indeed, until with prejudice. (Gaskell 286) 1853 favorable book reviews were taxed as though they were advertisements (Turner 82). By choosing "ambiguous" names, the Brontes pre Bronte produced names for both herself and her vented attention from fixing on the bodies sug works and used those names to advertise each gested by feminine or masculine names; indeed, other; all Currer Bell's books published after 1847 Bronte notes that the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, were labeled "by the author of Jane Eyre." Bronte and Acton "veiled [her and her sisters'] own suggested to Smith, Elder that publication of The names," thus emphasizing the nominal and figura Professor would give the name Currer Bell a recog tive rather than the material and personified exis nition value that would help to sell subsequent tence of the Bronte sisters. works by that author. She viewed her works as mu Although "averse to personal publicity" and anx tual advertisements for one another: The Professor ious to avoid any "personal interview" with pro "might be published without serious risk" because spective publishers (Symington and Wise 2: 87), the "more striking and exciting" Jane Eyre would Bronte avidly sought the impersonal publicity pro follow; the success of the second work might in vided by writing and encouraged advertisements crease if its author's name were circulated through of Currer Bell's work. She was familiar with ad the publication of the first; the first novel would vertising rhetoric from her earliest days as a reader retrospectively ride on the second's success, and and writer; her and her siblings' juvenilia "fre "thus the interest of the public (if any interest was quently imitate[d] the format of ... [news]papers aroused) might not be suffered to cool" (Gaskell and their specific advertising copy" (Shuttleworth 317). Bronte's self-contained and self-sustaining 48-49), and Bronte used that knowledge in her advertising system was designed to have bodily ef tenacious correspondence with Aylott and Jones, fects on an abstract public, "arousing" and heating

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its interest. Writing from behind a di~embodied Notes name, Bronte could then relish the materiality of her books, describing them as if they had bodies. IFor a detailed discussion of Jane's attitude toward death and On receiving the first copies of Jane Eyre she thus of death's imbrication with acts of writing and with texts, see wrote to her publishers, "You have given the work Susan Derwin 98-108. every advantage which good paper, clean type, and 2Mark W. Hennelly, Jr., also notes that "J. E." suggestsje and calls this "text-self equation" one of the novel's many "reflex a seemly outside can supply ..." (Gaskell 321; ive signatures of self-hood" (703). emphasis mine). 3London Times advertisements from the early 1840s show Although advertisements for Jane Eyre named that governesses and employers advertised in roughly equal Currer Bell as the author of the novel, the title numbers; Jane's decision to advertise for an employer rather page of the first edition designated Currer Bell as than to answer a preexisting advertisement thus represents a de liberate effort to call her future employer into existence-the the editor of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. The desire Jane serves is an alienated version of her own. editorial device came from earlier forms of the 'Virginia Woolf viewed this passage as the disfigurement of novel in which authors posed as editors to lend ve the novel by an excessively personal rage (71-73), while subse racity to their tales and to authorize the public cir quent critics have been drawn to the scene's cathartic release culation of autobiographical confessions, whose of anger. 5Although established in 1841, the Governesses' Benevolent content required privacy and anonymity. Jane Institution was less a professional entity than an employment Eyre's editor, however, never appears within the agency and charitable resource until 1848, when its head, F. D. work's frame. Currer Bell thus takes on an invisi Maurice, founded Queen's College in London to train gov ble, phantom existence as an abstract convention ernesses. In an 1846 essay "On the Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses," Anna Jameson emphasized that that saves Jane from being the author of the text: governesses did not belong to a profession (156, 159). Although without the words "Edited by Currer Bell," the Rigby's review nominally referred to the governess "profession" reader would assume that Jane Eyre herself had (177, 180), governess work was not professionalized in the written the eponymous text subtitled An Autobiog I 840s, as architecture was (Kaye), nor did it conform to what raphy. Jane Eyre and Currer Bell cover for each Magali Larson identifies as the sociological-ideological defini tion of professionalism: there was no qualifying exam, standard other: Jane's story can be published only under the ized course of study, mechanism for exclusion or for recruitment protection of a nonfeminine name, while Currer of members, control over fees, autonomy, or prestige (xi, x). Bell attains the invisibility that Bronte sought for 6Derwin interprets Rochester's mutilation as a displacement that name by disappearing within the text that Jane and literalization of the "symbolic embodiment" and "symbolic Eyre writes. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, and Cur violence" Jane undergoes in the course of her "achievement of selfhood" (97-98). rer Bell all publish under cover of a veiled visibil 7For an interpretation of the author-prostitute equation that ity that exploits print's erasure of the author's body links prostitution not to embodiment but to the abstraction and to authorize women's professional participation in alienation of exchange, see Catherine Gallagher, "George Eliot" a market. This abstraction into market value is 41-42; "Masked Woman" 27-28. both a cause and an effect of capitalism's political 8Women as well as men, however, often modeled their autho rial efforts on familial labor, service, and self-sacrifice and re economy, and in exploiting that economy and al solved the conflict between alienated market production and lowing it to exploit them, Currer Bell, Jane Eyre, nonalienated domestic service by assimilating one form of and Charlotte Bronte share the limitations that Jane work to the other. Bronte, for example, reconciled her displays avows when she states, "I was not heroic enough of talent with a self-effacing desire to serve, acknowledging to purchase liberty at the price of caste" (57). If Elizabeth Gaskell's dictum that the woman writer must "not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte retain a place in a others" (Gaskell 334; see also Mermin 18). posthumanist and postcolonial feminist canon, it is "Writing about the pseudonym George Eliot, Alexander Welsh because they reveal the lures as well as the limits, notes that "[plseudonymity ... cannot be regarded as solely a the profits as well as the costs to themselves and to defensive maneuver ... since it immediately fuels speculation and publicity for a successful book" (Mermin l55nll). others, of a woman's alienation into the capitalist lOAn 1843 journal article reported that of 616 families who marketplace and its advertisements. read newspapers in a London parish inhabited by domestic ser vants and laborers, 283 read Bell's Weekly Dispatch, and 23 read Bell's Life in London (Altick 342-43); Bell's Life in Lon-

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don had an average weekly circulation between 17,700 and Feltes, N. N. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: 21,000, and the name Bell was also attached to a penny weekly, U of Chicago P, 1986. Bell's Penny Dispatch, and, as already noted, to Bell's Weekly Foucault, Michel. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New Messenger, which Altick calls the "Tory farmer's old standby" York: Pantheon, 1978. Vol. I of The History of Sexuality. (343,349). These figures may not be accurate, and I have found Gallagher, Catherine. "George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The no direct evidence that the Bronte family received a Bell paper, Prostitute and the Jewish Question." Sex, Politics, and Sci but beyond any doubt, the name Bell was overdetermined and ence in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazel I. easily available as a signifier of newspapers, advertising, and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.39-62. literary editions. --. "Who Was That Masked Woman? 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