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Jane Eyre and Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants: the Heroic Female Bildungsroman and Constructions of National Identity

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Jane Eyre and Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants: the Heroic Female Bildungsroman and Constructions of National Identity Wayne State University DigitalCommons@WayneState Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2013 Jane Eyre And Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants: The eH roic Female Bildungsroman And Constructions Of National Identity Abigail Ruth Heiniger Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Heiniger, Abigail Ruth, "Jane Eyre And Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants: The eH roic Female Bildungsroman And Constructions Of National Identity" (2013). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 660. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. JANE EYRE AND HER TRANSATLANTIC LITERARY DESCENDANTS: THE HEROIC FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY by ABIGAIL RUTH HEINIGER DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2013 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved By: _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ COPYRIGHT BY ABIGAIL RUTH HEINIGER 2013 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Mary Rorem Heiniger, who spent her vacations and holidays reading chapter drafts, and to my father, Stephen Lewis Heiniger, who listened to Jane Eyre driving me back and forth from Detroit. You made this dream possible. This dissertation is also dedicated to Dr. Anca Vlasopolos. It is wonderful to have the opportunity to work with someone whose life and work you admire. It is quite another thing to have that person believe in you. Thank you for believing! ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation rests upon the encouragement and loving critiques of a decade of professors, mentors, and friends. I would like to thank my entire committee for their support and feedback throughout this process. I am particularly grateful for Dr. Anca Vlasopolos; she read an endless number of drafts and helped me excavate the critical stakes in my argument. I would also like to thank Professor Tamara Yohannes at the University of Louisville, who encouraged a sophomore English Major to send a paper to Brontë Studies – that was the beginning of everything. iii PREFACE This project began with an avid interest in fairy tales and Charlotte Brontë’s distinctive use of fairy lore in Jane Eyre, and it evolved into a study of the cultural and nationalistic stakes in the literary microcosm that rippled out from Brontë’s debut novel. The rehabilitation of women writers in both British and American literary studies has led to a growing awareness of their transatlantic networks. More significantly, Jane Eyre has been incorporated into an increasing number of recent transatlantic studies, suggesting that this novel generated meaningful transatlantic influence. Elizabeth Gaskell was the first to note this, in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) she writes: “‘Jane Eyre’ had had a great run in America” (281). This analysis examines the cultural legacy of that “great run” and puts it in conversation with notable British and European responses to Jane Eyre including Brontë’s Villette (1851) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856). While both British and American responses to Brontë’s first novel have been studied separately before, the evolution of a distinctive nineteenth-century transatlantic literary microcosm has never been analyzed. This transatlantic analysis has uncovered the nationalist stakes both in Jane Eyre and the tradition of the heroic female bildungsroman, which extends from that novel. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication _________________________________________________________________ ii Acknowledgements __________________________________________________________ iii Preface ____________________________________________________________________ iv Chapter 1 “Introduction to Jane Eyre’s Transatlantic Microcosm” ______________________ 1 Chapter 2 “Faery and the Beast in Jane Eyre” _____________________________________ 20 Jane Eyre: The Faery and the Beast _______________________________________ 28 Death of the Fairy Heroine and a Search for the New Eve in Villette _____________ 67 Conclusion __________________________________________________________ 87 Chapter 3 “Negotiating the Transatlantic Paradigm for Womanhood” __________________ 91 Chapter 4 “Concentric Circles of Women Writers” ________________________________ 138 Appendix A “Cinderella – Not A Fairy Tale” _____________________________________ 173 Appendix B “A New Cinderella” ______________________________________________ 181 Appendix C “A Modern Cinderella” ___________________________________________ 188 Appendix D “Invitation to Presidential Ball” ____________________________________ 204 References _______________________________________________________________ 205 Abstract _________________________________________________________________ 214 Autobiographical Statement _________________________________________________ 218 v 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO JANE EYRE’S TRANSATLANTIC MICROCOSM This dissertation examines the role of fairy tales and fairy lore across the arc of Charlotte Brontë’s career from Jane Eyre (1847) to Villette (1853) in order to demonstrate the evolution of the heroic female bildungsroman in Brontë’s work. Jane Eyre’s literary descendants written by women, both in Great Britain, Continental Europe, and across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada embrace this distinctive narrative paradigm, the heroic female bildungsroman. Expanding upon the theory of transatlantic literary exchange modeled by Amanda Claybaugh in The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007), I demonstrate the ideological influence of Jane Eyre and the reciprocal influence of American literary responses on interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s work. The fairytale allusions and, more particularly, the fairy heroine figure featured in Jane Eyre are excised from Brontë’s final novel, Villette (1851). Nor do they survive intact in Jane Eyre’s other literary descendants: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca 1850). These four texts are certainly not the only works of literature that were influenced by Jane Eyre; however, these are some of the most prominent examples of literature written by women that are currently being posited as literary descendants of Brontë’s debut novel.1 Moreover, all four of these texts attempt to replace Brontë’s fairytale allusions in distinctive an meaningful ways; these authors all model the search for a female mythology, which persists into the twentieth-first century.2 Moreover, like Brontë’s 1 Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a notable pastiche of Jane Eyre. 2 It may be argued that Jane Eyre’s legacy continue well into the twenty-first century with novels like Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006). In Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny (2010), Heta Pyrhönen analyzes Setterfield and other twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of Jane Eyre, emphasizing the contradictions and tensions of the “Bluebeard” fairytale embedded in Brontë’s novel. However, Pyrhönen claims that this novel “undoubtedly belongs squarely to Britain’s national heritage” (11). She does not recognize the transatlantic literary impact. 2 fairy heroine, the larger-than-life heroines in her literary progeny are invested with a range of regional and national associations that generate nationalistic messages. Chapter One functions as an introduction to my main argument as well as an overview of my critical approach. It particularly outlines the distinctive transatlantic microcosm that develops around Jane Eyre as well as the Cinderella paradigm projected back onto Brontë’s novel by American authors and readers. Chapter Two covers the arc of Brontë’s career; it explores the dominant fairytale paradigms in Jane Eyre and identifies the role of the fairy lore in constructing the heroic Jane Eyre. This chapter demonstrates the connections between the heroic changeling3 and the local, pre-Victorian fairy lore. The argument relies heavily on primary source material from Haworth and Yorkshire as well as periodicals that the Brontë family read. It concludes by demonstrating how fairytale material in Villette is excised. Chapter Three explores the transatlantic community of women writers in which Brontë was immersed. It begins with the ideological or imaginary transatlantic exchange between Great Britain and the United States discussed by Amanda Claybaugh in The Novel of Purpose (2007). It also explores the role that Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë played in generating a transatlantic mythology that linked Brontë’s life with her texts. Finally, this chapter examines the mainstream literary descendants of Jane Eyre. It identifies the heavy reliance on classical mythological allusions to generate a female mythology in the British descendants of Jane Eyre in the Victorian Era, particularly Aurora Leigh. It also examines Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables and U.S. novel The Wide, Wide World and the American 3 A
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