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The Madwoman on the Third Story: Jane Eyre in Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Deanna K. Kreisel
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Abstract

A long-standing misreading of Jane Eyre is that Rochester's wife, Bertha Mason, is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall. In fact, she resides on the third floor. This mistake has implications for readings of the novel and for recent critical methodologies such as “surface,” “denotative,” and “dialectical” reading strategies. Jane Eyre associates the spaces of Thornfield with psychological registers that are in turn associated with types of meaning making. This essay delineates these registers by mapping them onto the Lacanian schema of imaginary, symbolic, and real orders, thus drawing out the novel's engagement with a nascent nineteenth-century depth psychology while noting how the novel itself militates against so-called surface reading.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 101 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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