Jane Eyre Foreign Analysis

“The Foreign” in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was published in England, in 1847, during the height of the Victorian era. Given this cultural and historical backdrop, it can be easily conceived as a socially progressive novel, unabashedly challenging the values of its day. In a patriarchal society, it exalts as a heroine a young woman whose appeal lies in her homeliness, cleverness, stubbornness, outspokenness, and self-assuredness—in short, defiance of the traditional feminine ideal. In a bourgeois society, it endorses the leveling of class hierarchies, with respect to both wealth and occupation. Kind “superiors”, who treat their “underlings” with fairness and respect, are consistently commended, and cruel ones condemned (as manifested,

Jane Eyre, to put it bluntly, is xenophobic. The message the novel relays to its readers is, on one level, entirely lacking in subtlety—“the foreign is foul” it declares, calmly and without the slightest trace of irony, for it takes for granted this equivalence as a simple fact of reality. Wickedness emanates from virtually every non-British entity that makes an appearance in the novel. Little Adèle’s French-ness is her flaw; Bertha’s Creole and Caribbean roots are the roots of her madness; Mr. Rochester’s European-wide excursions are experiments in moral depravity; Jane, if she were to go, was destined to die in India. Still, the novel’s rejection of foreign forces isn’t purely visceral. There is an order to the degrees of degeneracy; the farther away from home one strays, the bigger the problems that come one’s way (where “home” denotes merry ol’ England), the novel seems to say. It further operates on the principle that the obvious discrepancy between the local and the foreign need not remain static and separated. In fact, this perceived British (and in some cases, Western) superiority becomes both a motivation and justification for a select kind of interaction (or interference) with those poor, pitiful, decidedly lower “others”. British forces, when mixed with non-British forces, always have the effect of lifting the latter to a more respectable existence, as goes for European forces upon the non-European. The converse, however, is also true—the non-European will corrupt the European, as the non-British will the British—and this, accordingly, must be guarded