A Study of Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre through the Prism of New Historicism

The nineteenth century is known as the age of imperialism and colonialism and the contemporary British power discourse is characterized by imperialist and colonialist ambitions: thus, imperialism can be an indispensible part of reading and evaluating the 19th-century British literature. Looking for the silenced ethnologic voices, we undertake, in the present essay, to examine Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre (1847) through the prism of New Historicism. We actually endeavor to detect and reveal the ways in which and the extent to which the Victorian dominant power operations implicitly wrote and established itself into the text of Jane Eyre as a typical mid-nineteenth century English novel despite the novel’s blatant resistances to racism and racial oppressions. The novel introduces the foreign characters or those who are physically and mentally attributed to the non-English identity as threats to the middle-class, domestic, English identity of its heroine, Jane. The present essay closely studies the representation, in Jane Eyre, of three non-English races namely the Creole, the Irish, and the French. Presenting its socio-historical and textual evidences, the essay concludes in the conviction that possessing a dialectical texture, Jane Eyre is, at the same time, explicitly an anti-racist and implicitly a racist novel.