In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), multiple discursive strategies contend with the difficulty of determining racial identity. My aim here is not to delineate a straightforward or unambiguous racial discourse in the novel but rather to clarify the usefulness of ambiguity to the narrative's racialism. If, as Ann Laura Stoler has argued, racism in the nineteenth century depended on flexible rather than fixed criteria, Brontë's novel allows for the study of such criteria and of the discursive displacements that assign them to diverse human qualities.

My discussion of the novel will focus on Jane Eyre's use of race to further another political project, a revision of social ranks and of her own position within a class hierarchy. As Nancy Armstrong has demonstrated, Jane Eyre is among the nineteenth-century novels that contributed to a shift of cultural authority in Britain from the upper to the middle class (9–10, 205–13). My discussion focuses on how Jane's authoritative middle-class subject emerges as white. Without functioning as the central aim of the narrative, racialism nevertheless is embedded in Jane's claims of freedom and of discipline, too, as the superior and ruling powers of the middle-class subject.

Critics have called attention to the threatening character of racial ambiguities in the novel. Deirdre David argues that “Brontë does something more subtly racist in Jane Eyre than merely allow us to think that filthy, crazed Bertha is a black woman. . . . [T]he Bertha of Rochester's narrative is made even more dreadful, even more obscene, even more monstrous, by virtue of the fact that she is a white creole who behaves like a demented black person” (108–09). Uncertainty about whether Bertha is or is not white marks the impurity Victorians assigned to colonial whiteness, as Susan Meyer argues (67–68). And Sue Thomas emphasizes Jane's need to monitor grades of whiteness, given that “in the racial formation of the British empire whiteness was not a homogenous category. There were hierarchies within whiteness, as well as hierarchies which placed various non-white peoples in relation to white peoples and to each other on civilizational scales” (12).

As Thomas indicates, ambiguities of Victorian racial identity multiplied because race was attributed to both bodies and cultures. Victorian scientists, according to Nancy Stepan, organized racialized body types into “a natural but static chain of excellence, whether on the basis of nervous organisation, skull shape or brain size. The hierarchy of races was believed to correspond to, and indeed to be the cause of, what most people took to be the natural scale of human achievement in the world, with the European on top and the African or aboriginal Australian invariably on the bottom” (46). Robert J. C. Young argues that once Victorian scientists attached racial difference to degrees of civilization, moreover, classes within Britain were similarly repositioned. “As the defining feature of whiteness, civilization merged with its quasi-synonym ‘cultivation’, and thus the scale of difference which separated the white from the other races was quickly extended so that culture became the defining feature of the upper and middle classes” (95).Footnote ¹ Culture, taking its place as the measure of racial and class differences, shifts the weight of racial difference from colonial to metropolitan locations in order to buttress internal social divisions.

It is as a member of a cultivated race and class that Jane Eyre narrates her whiteness as she consigns not only the Creole Bertha Rochester but the upper-class Blanche Ingram to the racial status of dark primitives. This project not only promotes and navigates ambiguities of race but employs an unevenness in constructions of white and dark races. For one thing, in Brontë's novel as elsewhere, “black people can be reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race, but white people are something else that is realised in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal, or racial” (Dyer 14). In Jane Eyre, whiteness assumes identity as an abstract, disembodied quality – of spirit and of mind – while “dark” persons are defined by material and bodily properties.

Most important to racial difference in the novel is Jane's insistence that her culture is one of spirit: a Christian spirit, an English spirit, and most of all what Richard Dyer characterizes as “get up and go, aspiration, awareness of the highest reaches of intellectual comprehension and aesthetic refinement. Above all,” Dyer points out, “the white spirit could both master and transcend the white body” (23). Jane also practices an emotional detachment that contributes to her transcendence of material circumstances and to her representative capacity. As David Lloyd and Paul Thomas clarify, an abstraction of persons from their particular circumstances and immediate feelings became critical in the Victorian period to the construction of citizen subjects. “The insistence on abstraction is directed at shaping a population that is less and less divided by differences of place and interest and more subject to a national ‘common sense.’ It is also informed by the view that the development and cultivation of the individual brings into being a disinterested and universal perspective” (124–25). Writing from within “the safe fold of common sense” that is the realm of “Reason” (Brontë 182–83; ch. 16), Jane becomes the representative subject necessary to government and self-government both, demonstrating a right to rule that is especially marked because the older ruling class cultivates neither knowledge nor disinterestedness.

In the discussion that follows, I will chart Jane's cultivation of spirit and insight, along with the strategies with which she racializes this process. Her tactics place Jane at the top of a scale of cultivation; claim that scale as a universal measure of all persons; and identify different degrees of cultivation with different races and classes, to the extent that one race and class acquires the right to police and represent these variations.

The Spirit of Whiteness

Jane identifies her free spirit with nature, with culture, and with England. Protestant ideology invests her spirit with integrity and freedom as well as maps out for Jane a ranking of human attributes that, applied to social classes and to races as well, sees only certain groups of people determined by their nature. Higher groups in the religious ranks exercise spiritual freedom and are determined by their disinterested obedience to God's laws.

Comprehending the supernatural dimensions of the soul, Jane's spirit also comprehends the supernatural dimensions of the legendary fairies and elves believed to occupy England in times gone by. “Having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth that they were all gone out of England to some savage country, where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant” (Brontë 28–29; ch. 3). Driven out of England, apparently by encroaching modernity, these English spirits become the motive driving Jane's repeated liberations from constraints of place, both as social position and as physical location. Her cultivation of a free English spirit reaches back to legends of a savage past for a naturalized national identity yet recovers that identity as a freedom to move out of bounds, not only of nation but of other bounded spaces.Footnote ²

The spirits lost to England, which Jane has heard about in fairy stories, return to her when she needs to make an escape. Locked up in the red room at the Reeds' house, the image of herself she sees in the mirror has “the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie's evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors” (Brontë 21–22; ch. 2). The spirits of old England return to Jane again on the evening when, having felt the need to escape the constraints of life as a governess, she walks out near Thornfield and hears a horse coming towards her.

It is Edward Rochester on the horse, and he, too, feels the supernatural dimensions of this encounter. Because Jane has “rather the look of another world,” Rochester thinks “unaccountably of fairy tales” when he first sees her and has “half a mind to demand whether [she has] bewitched [his] horse” (Brontë 139; ch. 13). This begins Rochester's habit of identifying Jane as elf (275; ch. 22), fairy (300; ch. 24, 487; ch. 37), and spirit (357; ch. 27).

Brontë's nostalgic construction of English spirit follows a pattern of modern recovery to which Andrew McCann has pointed in Romantic literature. “Visions of a people with an intimate, ancestral relationship to place seem to circulate at the very moment that ‘belonging’ . . . has been disrupted or rendered problematic by processes of urbanisation, migration and alienation” (2). The spirits of Bessie's stories become a now alienated dimension of Englishness, which reappears among certain socially marginal characters, notably Jane and Rochester. Given premodern dimensions both natural and cultural, English “spirits” in the novel are to be claimed by characters who respect neither historical nor natural constraints. Once abstracted into individual freedom, the English spirit “belongs” to the placeless character – “wherever you are is my home,” as Jane tells Rochester (Brontë 276; ch. 22) – and acquires transcendent powers.

Jane's spirit is thus located in a double register of nostalgia and modernization, both of which are abstracted from material history. Insisting that every place be refigured as a space in which she can be free, Jane identifies places as stages of a journey, to be left behind with the past when she frees herself. Yet she moves ahead as she brings back spirit to the English, undertaking a nostalgic recovery with which she jettisons her history. Although James Buzard argues that Jane's repeated returns – returns to places she has been before but most importantly returns in her narrative to her past life—work “to disrupt the hegemony of merely abstract or anonymous national identities” (169), nevertheless an abstraction of time and space characterizes Jane's nostalgic construction of Englishness. As Nicholas Dames argues, “a nostalgic history is finally in the service of the future, of freeing it from the claims of the past” (234). The idealized object of nostalgic desire, to be recovered in distant places, makes the English spirit of liberty difficult to detach from the spirit of empire.

Race as Culture

Characters who are identified by Jane as dark or impure, especially Bertha Mason Rochester and Blanche Ingram, fail to distinguish themselves spiritually. While the darkness with which Jane consistently associates Bertha is mostly metaphorical, this metaphorical implication is re-enforced by the material evidence of Bertha's body and of the space she lives in. Jane is frightened by Bertha's “savage face,” showing a “fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments” (Brontë 317; ch. 25); and in the attic room where she is imprisoned Bertha lives “in the deep shade,” where she appears “some strange wild animal” (327–28; ch. 26). None of these descriptions quite assigns Bertha a biological blackness. But they assign her grades of cultural, emotional, and intellectual development deemed primitive on Victorian scales of civilization; and all of these conditions are attached, within Victorian racial discourse, to biological darkness.

As she reproduces in descriptions of Bertha Rochester such interchanges of anatomical and cultural traits, Brontë also identifies Bertha with the threat of contamination conventionally assigned to Victorian blackness both in colonial locations and within Britain. The “racial contagion” Bertha threatens depends, as Stoler's work suggests, on conflicting European assumptions about the fixity of racial identity.

In Jane Eyre, the threat of contamination posed by Bertha has the effect of re-enforcing the asymmetry Stoler points to here, since the only persons susceptible to racial contamination are, apparently, European whites.

The whiteness Jane promotes is not immune to Bertha's contamination but is marked by a capacity for recovery, through spiritual regeneration. Although some English characters such as Blanche Ingram appear, to use Stoler's words, “irremediably ‘sullied’” in their resemblance to foreign and especially dark persons, the more spirited Edward Rochester, who “repudiated the contamination of [Bertha's] crimes” when he left Jamaica (Brontë 345; ch. 27), can improve if, under Jane's influence, he cultivates spiritual salvation. Bertha is identified with material corruption: not only is her body swollen and purple, but she also contributes to a corruption of the spirit that ensues when material considerations – both Rochester's interest in Bertha's fortune and his own sensuality – overpower his judgment and cause him to marry her. “I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited,” Rochester claims, and though he “did not even know her,” he married her (Brontë 343–44; ch. 27), only to find himself “bound” to a “filthy burden” (347; ch. 27).

The contamination posed by Bertha partakes of Victorian atmospheric theory, according to which the air was understood to carry material effects: persons could become infected by disease, for example, if they inhaled air breathed by sick persons (Welsh 24–25). In Jamaica, Rochester, especially one hot night when the “air was like sulphur-steams,” felt so “physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene” that he almost committed suicide (Brontë 346; ch. 27). But England is the location of better influences. The air is cleaner, and the English can feel in the fresh air their own free spirit. Rochester is liberated from Bertha Mason's influence when, in Jamaica, he feels “a wind fresh from Europe” blowing through the window. With “the Atlantic . . . thundering in glorious liberty,” Rochester says, “my being longed for renewal – my soul thirsted for a pure draught. I saw Hope revive – and felt Regeneration possible” (Brontë 347; ch. 27). The cleaner air, equated with spirit, spreads among persons a strengthening moral atmosphere.

The asymmetric construction of racial contamination in Brontë's novel indicates that, whereas white persons may succumb to corruption, they can be purified; while dark persons are impervious to spiritual regeneration. Only white people, this suggests, respond to a clean atmosphere. Bertha is unaffected by moral influence, not only because she is supposedly mad but because “her cast of mind,” even when Rochester first met her, was “common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger” (Brontë 344; ch. 27). The “dark” Blanche Ingram appears equally incapable of spiritual growth.

Influence

Whereas the dark woman contaminates whites, the white woman exercises influence over them, an influence also understood to spread in an atmosphere, but with improving effects on the spirit. Spirit expands in this novel in exercises of freedom, of discipline, and of influence, since the inner spirit is strengthened by assertions of free will and discipline and since Jane's influence projects her spiritual strength into others.

As critics of Foucault have argued, in Victorian Britain a more pastoral form of social discipline was practiced than is evident in the regime theorized in Discipline and Punish. Frances Ferguson has clarified that Jeremy Bentham's thought advocates more personal choice and individual freedom than Foucault allows in his reading of the Panopticon (18–20). Lauren Goodlad argues, too, that among Victorians peer influence was deemed more effective than institutional discipline, and in the exercise of such influence individuals were to be held personally accountable.Footnote ³ Goodlad demonstrates that Victorian discipline and surveillance were exercised individually as well as reciprocally, with persons responsible both for demonstrating their disinterestedness and for influencing others. For Victorians, “to be free is not – as in crude liberal thought – to escape to some autonomous realm outside power but, rather, to exercise one's own power to influence and be influenced by others” (545). Jane's influence is superior to Bertha's contamination, moreover, because, under her influence, persons choose to discipline primitive and sensual urges. White persons exercise and cultivate spirit and free will; dark persons' contamination is sensual and involuntary.

This indicates yet another of the uneven developments assigned to Victorian races. Jane makes, at times, physical distinctions between dark and light persons, especially in the contrast between Bertha's huge, dark body and Jane's own small, white body. These differences are more emphatic because Bertha violently forces herself on other people, whereas most people barely notice Jane's presence in a room. Blanche Ingram's body, in contrast, commands attention because she is grand, stately, and beautifully dressed. In her case, it is cultural considerations that compel people to admire her. The three women's bodies exert different degrees of physical and cultural power, but only with Jane do people seem free to choose whether to be influenced.

For Jane Eyre, ideas of freedom develop from what Goodlad calls a crude form, early in the narrative, into a cultivated social exercise. Initially likening herself to a slave when she says John Reed is “like a slave-driver” (Brontë 17; ch. 1), Jane changes not only from enslaved to self-governing individual but from an isolated individual to a participant in liberating social intercourse. Her receptions of and exertions of influence entail gradations of freedom. John Reed's influence is oppressive, and St. John Rivers's influence is not liberating either. Of St. John, Jane remarks that “[b]y degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind”; and “I did not love my servitude” (Brontë 443; ch. 34). It is her teacher Miss Temple who has the most positive influence on Jane. And it is Edward Rochester who benefits most from Jane's influence, as he finds with her a “society [that] revives, regenerates” his “higher wishes, purer feelings” (Brontë 245; ch. 20). Rochester's influence on Jane, which she represents as “mastery,” in fact seems to liberate her self-expression; and it is in debates with Rochester that she both freely expresses her thoughts and influences him to change his. At the end of the novel, Jane claims that she and Rochester “talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking” (Brontë 500; ch. 38). It is as if individual thought is already socialized, as if each has learned to represent internally a common sense.

Atmospheric Changes

Jane's views are not merely emptied of history but are recast through the perspective of an observer, one who looks not to learn new things about the world so much as to exert her influence over the world around her so that it reflects her inner life. This transposition is important to Nancy Armstrong's analysis of the power Jane demonstrates to lift experience out of history and “to break down a cultural text into components that can be used to construct a whole new system of relationships” (210–11). Armstrong's emphasis is on Jane's revision of the material world into “visual images which point to territories within the self that are beyond the scope of verbal representation” (213). I want to call attention to the atmospheric dimension of Jane's strategic dematerializations of experience, since it is as atmosphere that Jane's influence is projected into the world.

The translation of place into atmosphere is a crucial means by which Jane produces freedom, since this translation empties locales of any history or culture which might constitute a hold on her. To locate influence as an atmosphere, moreover, is to refigure material environment as spiritual, or inspiring, force. Improvement thereby necessarily becomes an effect of detachment from place.

At Lowood School, where she settles for eight years, Jane finds her “place” only once that place has been emptied of history. Jane learns early that her past will not follow her: that although Mr. Brocklehurst judges her according to Mrs. Reed's evaluation, Miss Temple refuses to do so: “We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child. Continue to act as a good girl, and you will satisfy me” (Brontë 83; ch. 8). For some years Jane feels sufficiently at liberty at Lowood, which, when “improved” by “gentlemen of rather more enlarged and sympathizing minds” than that of Brocklehurst (Brontë 98, 97; ch. 10), also offers Jane opportunities for self-improvement. Yet when Miss Temple leaves to be married, Jane also feels the need to leave, not so much because she misses Miss Temple as because the place itself has changed.

With the “discovery . . . that [her] mind had put off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple – or rather that she had taken with her the serene atmosphere [Jane] had been breathing in her vicinity,” Jane now “remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils” (Brontë 99; ch. 10). Feeling again the need to expand, Jane not only decides to move out but does so with the recognition that the place itself as she has known it – the “atmosphere” in which she felt she belonged – has already moved out with Miss Temple. Indeed, Jane herself carries an environment around with her, as Miss Temple seems to do.

At its most “improving,” atmosphere in Jane Eyre effects a dissolution of place and causes spaces to become projections of individuals' inner attitudes and thoughts. To exercise spiritual liberty is to see in places not local attributes but room to expand one's inner life. Jane thinks of Lowood as filled with particular cultural practices – “school-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions” (Brontë 99; ch. 10). But to leave Lowood will be to enter “a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements” that Jane expects to see in her travels. Place, for these purposes, becomes an expanse for projections of “liberty” (Brontë 99; ch. 10). As a reflection of spirit, the identification of place with atmosphere indicates both an abstraction of place from material environment and a homogenization of place necessary to modernization. All places take on the character of the same “field,” now understood as the expanse of a range of inner conditions.

White Surveillance

Expansion becomes for Jane the highest form of spiritual experience. She first feels this when, as a child, she expresses her hatred of Mrs. Reed: “my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt” (Brontë 46; ch. 4). Jane's spirit repeatedly expands as she projects her thoughts and feelings into writing and painting. She learns, moreover, to extend this movement into an exercise of disciplinary power. Bringing moral character to the surface where it becomes legible to the perceptive observer, Jane's insights move her into a position of surveillance as they identify her with practices of social discipline and imperial exploration as well as a visionary aesthetic discourse.

This doubling of the registers in which her observations acquire meaning occurs most pointedly as Jane extends her comparative evaluation of herself and Blanche Ingram to cover not only image but inner life. Jane first focuses on Blanche's beauty when she “sentences” herself to draw two pictures: “your own picture, faithfully; without softening one defect” and a picture of “the loveliest face you can imagine . . ., according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram” (Brontë 183; ch. 16). Jane plans to use these pictures for correctional purposes: “Whenever, in future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them: say, ‘Mr. Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if he chose to strive for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this indigent and insignificant plebeian?’” This “course of wholesome discipline” controls, and also protects Jane from showing, her feelings (Brontë 184; ch. 16). Yet after following this plan, Jane shifts her disciplinary campaign to a reading of bodies according to moral rather than aesthetic or class standards. Denigrating the showy practices of the upper class, as critics have emphasized, Jane nevertheless institutes a different kind of show, as she makes inner qualities visible through her reading of social life.

To identify Jane's narrative project with a show of disciplinary force is to align her reforms of private life with a modernization of discipline in the public sphere. Critics have stressed that Jane effects a gendered revision of scopic practices. Jane Kromm argues that Brontë depicts clearly “the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society” but argues that Jane departs from these norms (369, 372). Her production of images is open to “contradictory interpretations,” for one thing; and these institute a “reversal of visual expectations, in which multiple vantages keep being substituted for singularly correct views” (Kromm 383). Peter J. Bellis stresses that Jane becomes an increasingly invisible narrator as the novel proceeds and acts as “unseen observer” because of her gender (649). Yet Jane's invisibility also qualifies her as the detached and “neutral” surveilling subject required by scopic discipline.

As Nicholas Dames clarifies, such discipline in Brontë's fiction is signaled by practices of phrenology. “The process,” Dames says of a scene in The Professor, “loosely runs as follows: a phrenologically inspired visual assessment; a naming; the imposition of an organizational or classificatory scheme. Such is taxonomy, moved outside the clinic and into the home” (98). This move into taxonomy is evident in Jane Eyre when phrenology is employed, as Dames indicates, and also when Jane's drawing of the two pictures is followed by her surveillance of the feelings of the houseguests for Edward Rochester. Watching Rochester talking to Louisa and Amy Eshton, Jane sees them “in no sense moved” by him (Brontë 199; ch. 17). A similar spiritual failure is evident when Jane sees that Blanche cannot move Rochester.

Jane begins here to paint a new picture of the comparative powers of Blanche and herself. She “sees” how, though Blanche fails with Rochester, she herself might succeed.

Transforming what appear as Blanche's advantages into evidence of “coined” feeling, Jane shifts the range of her surveillance to spiritual dimensions. On interior ground, Jane becomes the standard against which Blanche is judged, and Jane thereby moves into the picture because of the very invisibility that has seemed to devalue her. The fact that she is not worth the Ingrams' notice is countered by Jane's observation that Blanche doesn't notice the truth about Rochester. Blanche lacks knowledge of his feelings, moreover, because she lacks feeling.

The visual economy here depends exclusively on looks. Jane renders Blanche comparable with herself according to the looks on Rochester's face when with Blanche and when with Jane. Jane can compare herself favorably to Blanche because she shifts the standard of comparison to looks that can be read as signs of inner feeling. Jane thus repositions the people she watches as she puts herself into the picture, not only to exercise critical insight into her own character but to hold herself up as the standard of insight her rival cannot meet. This does not appear as a mere comparison of personal attributes such as the pictures allow but as a comparison of persons to an impersonal standard. Jane's study of Blanche's inner depths, or shallows, suggests that Jane's observations of the “very showy” (Brontë 210; ch. 18) traits of upper-class culture amount in fact to a comprehensive survey of surfaces and depths.

Jane has recognized both Blanche and Lady Ingram as women “of the loftiest stature.” The mother has “Roman features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat like a pillar: these features appeared to me not only inflated and darkened, but even furrowed with pride . . . . A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity” (Brontë 195; ch. 17). Blanche is “as dark as a Spaniard” (Brontë 196; ch. 17) and enjoys dressing up “in oriental fashion” to perform charades that restage Biblical stories (Brontë 208; ch. 18). As Meyer has demonstrated, the showiness of the English upper class here signals a moral corruption clearly identified with the returns of empire (70–71).Footnote ⁴ The primitive character of their imperial dignity, which belongs to Rome and Spain rather than England, lies also in the form of that dignity, which attaches to them the character of classical architecture. The show of class becomes evidence of a mere form of power.

The charades confirm not only Jane's critique of Blanche Ingram as showy but also Jane's commentary on the superficiality of Blanche's knowledge. “She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her” (Brontë 210; ch. 18). The group watching charades, relying on the pun “Bridewell,” plays at insight but only reproduces, like Blanche, unoriginal “sounding phrases from books.” The double meanings discerned in order to decipher the charade remain double meanings on the surface of signs. Any “deeper” meaning – the suggestion that marriage is a prison, for example – is presumably perceived by Rochester, Jane, and the reader but remains unnoticed by the other performers and observers.

Drawing on familiar critiques of aristocratic excess and depravity, Jane positions Blanche and herself within a framework of assumptions about class that would gain strength through the Victorian period. By identifying her upper-class enemy as Oriental, moreover, Jane draws on the wealth of Orientalist discourse already in circulation, to produce Western superiority to Eastern culture. As she shifts her observations to moral and emotional details, and observes that Blanche is lacking in both insight and feeling, Jane is practicing the kind of knowledge in the production of which, as Edward W. Said argues, “the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks” (40).

But while Blanche is contained, Jane is liberated, through her asymmetrical reading of the fixity of social class. Jane recognizes, as she notes when considering the possibility of their marriage, that Blanche and Rochester together belong to their class. “The longer I considered the position, education, & c. of the parties, the less I felt justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram, for acting in conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them, doubtless, from their childhood. All their class held these principles: I supposed, then, they had reasons for holding them such as I could not fathom” (Brontë 212; ch. 18). Here Jane identifies a depth of culture within upper-class persons. Yet she brings it to the surface and renders it knowable as she surveys the houseguests. She sees in them, for example, traits belonging to other ruling classes, distant in time and space. Moved into the English country house, these signs of Roman and Spanish cultures allow Jane to generalize about ruling classes and to understand the Ingrams as primitive imperialists. Moreover, despite his different upbringing, Rochester is someone whose place Jane can take, and with this move she assumes an exchangeability of their positions: “were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom only such a wife as I could love” (Brontë 212; ch. 18).

On the one hand, Jane observes, from a disinterested and detached position, persons immersed in the class in which they have been raised. On the other hand, the people she observes become comparable to distant cultures and to her own, as she moves imaginatively between classes as between historical times and spaces. Jane implies, moreover, that she, unlike the Ingrams, can detach herself from her class and move into theirs. Thus Jane assumes a superior position not only because she values feelings but because she can abstract herself from her situation, whereas Blanche appears bound by hers. Because Jane can transcend historical particularities of class, Jane's own cultivated insight does not contain her but expands beyond any material limits. She then becomes able, too, to judge the inner worth of persons and demonstrate not only her disinterestedness but the superiority of her emotional depths.

But if Blanche is fixed in her class, Rochester is not. The conclusions Jane draws about character allow her to reclaim Rochester as one of her own kind despite separations of rank. “He is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine; . . . I feel akin to him, – I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him” (Brontë 199; ch. 17). Here Jane first shifts kinship away from material cause, to relocate it internally, but then claims an assimilation of both body and mental parts.

Jane Eyre cultivates a “specular morality” in the novel, comparable to that which Mary Poovey identifies with a process of abstraction at work in the construction of class differences (“Production of Abstract Space” 72–73). As she “observes” both physical and mental attributes of the upper class, Jane's surveillance does not directly police them. But she produces discriminatory knowledge, which has the effect of surveillance, as she “sees” how limited are these people's capacities for judgment. Jane's observations read morality into bodily signs, abstracting the meaning of what these show into a taxonomy of racialized class attributes. She both abstracts Blanche from her situation and insists that the “dark” Blanche cannot practice this abstraction. Blanche does not practice any such moral evaluations or exercise any such mobility of point of view; nor can she apprehend the higher law that governs Jane's behavior. The Ingrams become bodies to be governed rather than part of an abstract body politic capable of governing.

Surveying Landscape

Exercising her spiritual liberty, Jane cultivates a surveillance of her surroundings, too, and produces displacements and abstractions of natural landscape through her imagination of distant places. Jane moves in both her writing and painting into a position of knowledge and power according to which, as Said has explained, “knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant” (32). Jane's regenerative powers depend on her capacity to transcend her particular place through travel and through imaginative projections.

At each place she lives, Jane takes positions from which she transcends local confines. Hers is a traveler's perspective and demonstrates the “new notion of ‘freedom’” which, Inderpal Grewal has argued, “was constituted as mobility” according to Enlightenment principles (137). Jane's expansive vision affects her own mobility and that of other persons and things as she empties spaces of material history, of cultural occupations and cultural constraints. In the pictures of wild birds and then in images that occur to her imagination, Jane's vision assumes her capacity to move into spaces and to invest them with imported meaning. Moreover, she can move out again with ease, since the meaning she invests is abstract, and can be abstracted from, any particular place.

Not only when absorbed in the book of birds she loves as a child, but when she herself paints pictures, Jane practices projections of spirit into spaces in which she feels free. Those of her paintings which Edward Rochester selects as worth studying are those in which he reads her mind. What Jane has painted are visions, dreams, “shadow[s] of [her] thoughts”; and the thoughts are “elfish” (Brontë 144; ch. 13). In one, there is “an expanse of sky,” and “rising into the sky, was a woman's shape to the bust”; “the dim forehead was crowned with a star.” In another, amid an iceberg and the northern lights, is “a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg,” with “above the temples . . . a ring of white flames” (143). Strangely filled with various body parts, a shipwreck, an iceberg, jewels, these pictures represent spaces that exist only in Jane's mind and that are composed of parts of other persons, places, and scenes, put together because, apparently, they represent Jane's feelings. Reflecting the mind of the painter, these scenes depict atmosphere or mood rather than any locale. Jane's mind becomes the atmosphere in which things are pulled up and reordered to reflect an abstract vision. Despite the striking uniqueness of these images, therefore, this vision homogenizes places, which have become meaningless locations, displaced by Jane's abstract thought and feeling.

Racialized Travels

In Jane's narrative, persons, places, and things are mobilized and broken into parts in order to serve as self-expressions. Such revisions of the world are common to Victorians who wrote about their travels and also those who collected and brought back to Britain persons and things from distant places: to be displayed, for example, in museums and freak shows. What Jane sees when she envisions open spaces with moveable, at times apparently random occupants suggests that she is comparable to the Victorian women who, Grewal says, “used their belief in racial superiority to travel” (80). Not only does Jane represent herself as a subject who can move around, but she represents, as Deirdre David has insisted, the disciplined subject who can be transplanted into the empire to exercise discipline in colonial locations.Footnote ⁵ The remove at which Jane observes the world is an important element of her racialized discipline, as is her removal of many persons and things she observes from places to which they might otherwise belong.

As in the “monarch-of-all-I-survey scene” that Mary Louise Pratt locates in Victorian travel narratives, Jane's visions of distant places entail an “interaction between esthetics and ideology” (Pratt 205). “Victorian discovery rhetoric,” Pratt points out, causes landscape to be “seen as a painting,” produced and controlled by the viewer (204). Pratt argues, for example, that in Richard Burton's Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), Burton aestheticizes African landscape, as he empties the distance between himself and the landscape for a clear view and also clears the land of local markings. This clearance makes room for English, now apparently universal, attributes, and so for beauty in the eyes of the English. A mountain is called “steel-coloured,” for example, and there is “snowy foam.” “Unlike plain color adjectives,” Pratt points out, “these terms add material referents into the landscape, referents which all . . . tie the landscape explicitly to the explorer's home culture, sprinkling it with some little bits of England” (204). Aestheticization occurs as the scene is first wiped clean and then filled in according to homogenizing terms which make it relative to a European perspective.

In both her views of landscape and her surveys of social groups, Jane refers the meaning of objects to an altogether abstract register: at the Reeds's house, for example, when she looks at Bewick's book of birds, or at Thornfield, when she looks out at the view from the roof. Birds represented on “the coast of Norway, . . . the bleak shores of Lapland,” and in “the Arctic Zone” reference for Jane her own isolation, the bleakness of her environment, her strength and survival (Brontë 14; ch. 1). The view from the roof, too, represents Jane's desire for freedom from her situation, as she thinks while she gazes of what lies beyond her vision (Brontë 125; ch. 12). Seeing what is not there, Jane in her own detachment imposes separations on what she views from any local situation. It is, one might say, the atmosphere in which things exist that is altered in these representations. The local culture in which the mountain has meaning disappears when Burton sees it as a beautiful landscape, as do any cultural reference points or indeed any whole body for the bust of the woman in Jane's painting. In the field in which these objects are represented, they become mere forms. For Jane, objects acquire currency as they shed and acquire various meanings in whatever new perspectives they are placed.

Jane's pictures in particular share certain attributes with other Victorian collections and displays of strange, or estranged, bodies. In Victorian museum collections and the lectures that explained them, as Annie E. Coombes has demonstrated, body parts were the evidence through which African peoples were to be known. In one lecture series at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1894 and 1895, “every aspect of the colonised body was pulled apart – it would not be going too far to use the term dismembered – and subjected to minute scrutiny. Each lecture focused on a specific area of the body: trunk, legs, arms, feet, hands, nails, head and teeth” (144). The famous body of Sara Bartman, labeled the “Hottentot Venus,” was circulated in freak shows and then reproduced in scientific studies in the early nineteenth century as an image of what Yvette Abrahams calls “the sexualized savage” (227), marked by what were depicted as certain abnormally large parts of her body.

Bartman's body represented to the English audience, Abrahams argues, a particular discourse of gender within the empire.

The fair woman in Britain, then, acquired her fairness in contrast to images of “dark” women. “Dark” people were to be civilized, moreover, in the name of “fair” women at home. In this freak show, the aims of imagining Africa appear different from those of Burton when he anglicizes Lake Tanganyika. Rather than assimilation, the effect here is a strict division of attributes so that the English woman can appear civilized in contrast to the savage from far away. But again, the representational strategy is one which sees only parts of persons in order to compare and rank them in common terms.

Like Sara Bartman when imagined as savage, Bertha and Blanche Ingram, too, are “seen” by Jane in terms that are foreign to the cultures in which they have lived. Yet in Jane's terms, the two women also appear both knowable and as Jane's own inferiors on a scale of civilization. If, in Burton's vision, Africa is seen to include parts of England, in Jane's vision of Blanche parts of Roman bodies move into the English country house. The “Roman features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat like a pillar” that Jane sees in Lady Ingram, Blanche's mother, signal a pride which is confirmed by a chin “in a position of almost preternatural erectness” (Brontë 195; ch. 17). The Creole Bertha, when she appears, looks “savage,” with “blackened inflation” of face (Brontë 317; ch. 25), like the body of Sara Bartman whose parts appeared inflated to English viewers. Like, too, the body parts depicted in Jane's paintings – which she copies, she says, “out of [her] head” (Brontë 142; ch. 13) – these parts of bodies are relocated within a field of Jane's vision. In this field, things are measured in degrees of improvement, and some persons therefore become primitive so that others become modern.

Aesthetic inspiration causes Jane to paint parts of persons in places, and in proportions, that they could not occupy in nature or history. A similar narrative strategy seems to require that other characters in the narrative take parts belonging to the storyteller. Thus persons of foreign parts may be seen to be parts of Jane she represses, as Sara Bartman was assigned a part of female identity repressed in ideas of British women. Critics have argued that Bertha Mason, in particular, represents a part of Jane that she must deny. Mary Poovey's reading of the novel is particularly interesting for its attention to narrative strategy, as she argues that Bertha as well as other female characters express feelings Jane herself cannot speak. The text should be read in terms of these emotional displacements: “Anger and violence are transferred from one set of characters to another, revenge is displaced from Jane's character, and agency is dispersed into the text” (Uneven Developments 139). Characters such as Bertha and Blanche can take different parts of the narrator most easily because they are anyway only partial depictions of persons. Yet the parts Bertha and Blanche play effect not only a dispersal of agency but, as was the case with Sara Bartman, a displacement of “primitive” experience from the white to the dark characters. Such a strategy, of course, leaves Bertha to suffer the violence to which people excluded from whiteness were repeatedly condemned in Victorian culture.

Jennifer DeVere Brody has demonstrated that nonwhite women appear strategically in Victorian novels as foils for whiteness, representing white women in a different light (29). Jane's strategic representations of women who appear to be dark and savage enable her to strengthen her own civilized image. Cultures alien to her – those of Jamaica, upper-class Britain, ancient Rome, Istanbul – become, similarly, foils for her own spiritual cultivation as she empties them of any spirit of their own. Such cultures become dependent on a projection of Jane's spirit to move them into modernity. “I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,” she tells Rochester. If he wants “anything in that line,” he should go make “slave-purchases” in “the bazaars of Stamboul.” But if he does, Jane will “go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved – your harem inmates amongst the rest” (Brontë 301–302; ch. 24). Missing from this depiction, which reduces Istanbul women to a condition of uncultivation, is, in a sense, local atmosphere: the mental or social environment in which persons and things acquire culture, history, meaning, and belief.

Being used as image or metaphor of Western experience divorces the Turkish harem from culture as a belief system and positions Turkish persons as part of no culture at all. The harem cannot function as an inspired cultural practice but appears instead as a form of primitive custom that no woman would choose to practice. Nor can Istanbul women appear as part of a national communal life, since Jane conveys no sense of any material culture or belief system of which they are part. Measured wholly on a middle-class English scale, such images are useful as (unwanted) parts of English middle-class experience projected outside of England.

Representative Rule

To become white, according to David Lloyd's argument, is for the nineteenth-century European to practice a disinterestedness that can reproduce the common sense of the public sphere. When judgment is detached from people's different personal and cultural histories, such people appear alike at a level of abstraction which can be claimed to be representative and universal (64). Yet, as Jane Eyre indicates, this tendency to abstract likeness, which characterizes European whites as a ruling class, is prepared by certain specific and local discourses, such as Protestant ideology. The assimilations which constitute European whiteness, that is, are produced as if naturally only by persons of particular cultural backgrounds, and this despite the assumption that those assimilations eliminate particularities and partialities from identity.

In the representational field at work when Jane surveys a range of persons and cultures, she measures them from the perspective of a narrator committed to progress. For her, as for the Victorians generally, improvement constitutes a uniform measure of time and space detached from actual historical moments and actual places. What is looked at with a view towards improvement must be conceived in terms of displacement: persons, cultures, places are associated not with their pasts but with a standardized future freedom. On the one hand, things are recast in terms of common measures, and time becomes uniform. “Modernization,” as Saree Makdisi argues, “implies a temporal project by which, in principle, all places and cultures become comparable by being reducible to the same set of temporal terms” (177). Moreover, Jane's narrative tends to homogenize space, since she imposes a similar geography on each place as she focuses on how to get out of it.

Each of the places Jane lives – the Reeds's Gateshead Hall, Lowood school, Rochester's Thornfield and the Rivers's Moor House – is initially identified by her as being at an undercivilized stage of development due to the tyranny of the man who rules there. Each “primitive” location is left behind, however, when Jane is able to stage her freedom there. Some of these places disappear: the Reeds's house is left empty and the family breaks apart; Thornfield burns to the ground. Other places are “improved”: the school is taken away from Brocklehurst, the Rivers's house is taken over and redecorated by Jane with her new money. Jane goes back to Gateshead and Thornfield to assure herself that not only has she left them behind but they have deteriorated into an empty state.

Spatially, these places all are remapped on a new scale once Jane enters them. Any place she is put, Jane suggests, she will use to prove her liberty. Whether imagining herself in Rome centuries ago (Brontë 17; ch. 1) or in “Stamboul” next year (Brontë 302; ch. 24), Jane in her drive for liberty abstracts experience from location. She does so not only because liberty demands that she be free of material conditions but because the assertion of liberty becomes the common response to any scene she enters. Each place becomes a place to be moved out of.

Moreover, Jane herself “improves” as her narrative goes on, and she performs this improvement as a move through different positions on a scale of cultural progress. Both as a wild woodland spirit and as a slave, Jane occupies primitive political and cultural positions. She entertains these positions, however, in order to insist on her own development from primitive into free individual. Slavery, then, becomes for her another nostalgic construction. Removing slavery from history into metaphor, Jane assumes her own enslavement as an ideal construction, one that can be escaped by an individual with a free and expansive spirit.

According to this reading, Jane's narrative strategy begins to resemble the upper-class charades from which she distances herself. Both endeavors reproduce culturally distant identities within a metaphorical register. Jane's projection of her liberated spirit into an Istanbul bazaar and seraglio insists, like the charades performed by Rochester and Blanche Ingram, that Eastern places serve as sites in which to imagine and act out one's personal story. The idealized past that never was, which is true English spirit, can be seen again in Istanbul, because Jane understands Istanbul, like India, as a place where gross savage and pagan practices function as a field for the work of the civilizing English spirit.

Jane condemns charades as showy. But through her own imaginary performances of multiple and similarly exoticized roles – the slave, the woman in the harem, the missionary who liberates such women – Jane claims the mobility of the knowing subject as well as familiarity with a range of cultural positions. As she entertains them, these roles both expand her mind and expand the range of culture and geography she can survey. Jane moves through the stages of her life as she imagines St. John Rivers moves through India. Translating into symbolic action the violent clearing of colonized lands and cultural life, Jane thinks of Rivers clearing out a path for Christian spirit: “he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber” spiritual “improvement” (Brontë 501; ch. 38). Similarly, Jane's fantasy of liberating women from an Istanbul harem empties an institution of all local culture in order to project into it her own free spirit.

In order to stage English liberty at every place to which she moves, Jane needs places to which she can travel, even if only in her imagination. So too their empire allows the English to realize the freedom that supposedly constitutes their Englishness but that now, as Jane says of the woodland spirits, is to be found outside of England, in more “savage” places. English freedom is constituted by circulation among the spaces of empire, in movements that prove that no place can contain the English spirit or resist the improvements made by white capitalist culture.