Class and Classrooms: Teaching Jane Eyre with Adele Grace and Celine

• Published in: Victorian review 2023-03, Vol.49 (1), p.40-43
• Main Author: Stetz, Margaret D
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antisemitism; Attitudes; Bronte, Charlotte (1816-1855); Children; College students; Dominican literature; Employment; English literature; Females; Middle class; Novels; Race; Racism; Reading; Rhys, Jean (1890-1979); Students; Victorian period; Women; Working class
• ISSN: 0848-1512; 1923-3280; 1923-3280
• DOI: 10.1353/vcr.2023.a925216

[...]a lack of attention signals to white students that merely noting the presence of historical racism is sufficient, without considering its relevance to their own lives and its continuing power in shaping current-day attitudes. To foreground race and racism not only in Jane Eyre but also in other times and contexts, the reading list for my Legacies course has included, over the years, a number of Jane Eyre-influenced novels by women of colour, such as Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991), Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015). [...]of their race or ethnicity, few of the middle-, lower-middle-, or even working-class undergraduates whom I teach express any interest in or concern about the many servant characters who populate Brontë’s fictional landscape, let alone about the women like Céline Varens (or the Italian “Giacinta” or the German “Clara”) for whose sexual services Rochester paid and who feature in the history of his earlier amatory exploits that he shares with Jane. Later, when Jane is eighteen and on her way from Lowood School to employment as a governess at Thornfield, she and Bessie encounter one another, and we learn that the latter married the Reeds’ coachman and now has a child; yet her chief function in this reunion scene is merely to affirm that Jane has become an accomplished and ladylike figure, while also noting that the years have not increased her beauty.