Jane Eyre and its Heteroglossia, Colonialism, Class Struggle, Racial Otherness and the Significance of the British Empire

Abstract

The assessment of colonialism which Jane Eyre promises to make through its correspondence between forms of oppression finally collapses into a mere restlessness about the effects of empire on domestic social relations in England. That disquietude is the only leftover of Bronte's potentially deep-seated revision of the analogy between white women and colonized races, and it is the only unfinished constituent in the ideological closure of the novel. The unsavoury mist which suggests British colonial contact with the racial "other," diffused throughout the ending of the novel, betrays Bronte's persistent anxiety about British colonialism and about her own literary handling of the racial "other," about the technique in which, through repressive metaphorical strategy, she has tried to formulate the world of Jane Eyre "clean."