A Cult Text of Feminism

"We tail I believe, all day long."

Jane Eyre 476

"a cult text of feminism"

Gayatri Spivak 244

I. "Speak I Must"

With the childhood declaration, "Speak I must" Jane resolves to narrate her own story (68), to explain and vindicate her life, to exercise her voice and participate in the "joyous conversational murmur" (198). In spite of her extreme youth, her habits of quiescence and submission (resistance was "a new thing for me," she readily admits [44]), her need to be loved and approved, even if only by her oppressors, Jane stands up for herself and for fairness. "I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale," Jane warns Mrs. Reed. "People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful! ... If any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty" (69,68). Jane experiences her first moment of self-narration, in conflict with the official version of her life given by Mrs. Reed, as a moment of "unhoped--for liberty," "the first victory I had gained," "the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt" (69).

No wonder, then, that Jane Eyre has come to occupy a position of privilege in the feminist canon.[1] The novel is read as a "revolutionary manifesto of the subject" (Cora Kaplan 173). Jane's value as a feminist heroine is "figured in the ability to tell (if not direct) her own story" (Poovey 140; see also Homans, Peters). The story of Jane's voice, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, is "a pattern for countless others ... a story of enclosure and escape ... of [the] difficulties Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome" (33839).[2] Reading Jane's voice as a "challenge [to the] limits on female authority" and "the trope par excellence of power" (Lanser 177, 183), a tradition of feminist criticism has constructed its romance with Jane Eyre by reading it as a model of resistance, not only to "the Victorian conception of woman's place" (Christ 67) but to "women's fate within the symbolic order" (Homans 86).

Jane does move from silence to speech, thus providing a model of feminist resistance and liberation. And she directly involves the reader in that liberatory process, providing a model of feminist criticism as a collaborative heroics, of the feminist critic as the ideal listener for which the text longs. So it should hardly be surprising that feminist criticism would borrow much of its romance with women's narration, its metaphorics of voice, and its own self-understanding as an enterprise from this novel. But feminist criticism's affair with Jane's voice and story has too often depended on taking the novel's own romance for granted, even on taking romance--"perfect concord" (476)--on its own terms.

In addition to its politics of voice, a complex and developed erotics of talk also informs--and complicates--the entire novel. While Jane Eyre is a paradigm of the narrative desire for intimacy and recognition, the insight that human life has a "fundamentally dialogic character" (Taylor 32), and while Jane laments her "isolation--this banishment from my kind!" (361) and acknowledges that to be shut out of human dialogue, to be silenced, isolated, and spoken for by others is to be denied identity and being, denied the space, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, where the self "lives" (183), the novel also acknowledges that what Jane longs for is precisely what cannot be fulfilled.

Even if the structure of all language (and therefore of subjectivity as well) is fundamentally dialogic--because, as Bakhtin would have it, every utterance exists only in relation to other utterances--it does not follow that this dialogic relation is always defined by equality and mutuality or that every exchange makes good on its subject-affirming potential. On the contrary, there is no guarantee that any given utterance will succeed as either self-expressive or other-responsive. Conditions of inequality, in fact, virtually guarantee that it will not. What Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a "true conversation," in which neither partner dominates, controls, coerces, or instrumentalizes the other, in which the partners "do not talk at cross purposes," is an object of Jane's narrative desire to the very extent that it is not a feature of her everyday lived experience (see Gadamer 330; see also Crapanzano). And so mapping this dynamic means locating sites of failure