The Logic of Subjection and Circumvention in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Abstract

The aim of this essay was to examine the circumventive logic of subjection in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The Victorian classical novel has been lauded as a feminist revolutionary text because it portrays a heroine’s achievement of self-identity and self-assertion against the domination of patriarchy. From Michel Foucault’s theoretical perspective with regard to subjectivity, however, an individual cannot become a subject without the regulatory restrictions of external power. For Jane, the coercive and restrictive powers from the Reeds, Lowood institution, Mr. Rochester, and St. John Rivers contribute to the making of her subjectivity. To borrow Louis Althusser’s terms, the ideological interpellation of those external powers constructs Jane’s soul and her consciousness, although her decisions both to get married to the wounded Mr. Rochester and to sacrifice herself for taking care of him derive from her misconception that her moral and ethical enactments are firmly based on her own self will and her natural promptings as an independent female individual.