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RACIAL STRATEGIES IN JANE EYRE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Patricia McKee
Patricia McKee*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), multiple discursive strategies contend with the difficulty of determining racial identity. My aim here is not to delineate a straightforward or unambiguous racial discourse in the novel but rather to clarify the usefulness of ambiguity to the narrative's racialism. If, as Ann Laura Stoler has argued, racism in the nineteenth century depended on flexible rather than fixed criteria, Brontë's novel allows for the study of such criteria and of the discursive displacements that assign them to diverse human qualities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 67 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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