Engl 478:  Jane Eyre and Revision: Articulating Feminist Visions
Spring 2007

This course tackles the persistence of the "Jane Eyre" narrative in fiction. Since it first appeared in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has spawned considerable controversy and, over the years, numerous "revisions." With Brontë's novel as our starting point, we will examine a variety of texts that rewrite or re-envision some aspect of Brontë’s text.

The course is organized so you have the unique opportunity to do what students are rarely asked to do, but what literary scholars routinely engage in: read the same text more than once in light of new knowledge and ideas. We will begin by carefully studying Brontë's Jane Eyre as a text that initiated a discussion about women's disempowerment and status in a patriarchal society. By locating this text in its complex historical moment – a moment convulsed by rapid industrial changes, revolutionary ideas, working-class demands, the abolition of the slave trade, slave uprisings in the British colonies, new ideas of race, and an expanding empire – we will study the relation of Jane Eyre's nascent feminism to other radical movements of its day and consider its appropriations as well as displacements of these movements. Next, we will read several revisions of Jane Eyre, each of which highlights or makes explicit something the original suppressed or neglected. Each text offers us new ways of interpreting Jane Eyre and we will be sensitive to shifts in themes (the marriage plot, upward mobility, colonial "careers," madness) as well as literary modes and media (the bildungsroman, print, film, etc). We will examine both Jane Eyre's continuing popularity as a trope for women's lives and rebellion, as well as the various ways the novel and myth have been critiqued and transformed. We will simultaneously consider each rewriting on three registers:

Thus, by the end of the semester, you will have a strong understanding not only of Brontë's novel and a number of literary responses it has evoked, but also of shifts and transformations in Anglo-American feminism from the 1970s to the present.

Texts