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WRITING (OF) THE SELF IN JANE EYRE: THE POETICS OF
DISLOCATION AND TRAUMA
Meera JAGANNATHAN *
The genre of autobiography offers the possibility of self‐representation, exfoliation and
scriptotherapy for the narrator, and harlotte Bront’s Jane Eyre is no exception, especially since it is
called “autobiography” by the masked writer. 1 But what makes this novel/autobiography potent for
the reader is its ability first, to express personal trauma through a highly personalized voice, and
second, in its capacity to transfer this trauma on to the unsuspecting reader in an effort to turn
narration into a therapeutic necessity. This aesthetic of wounding trauma and survival, in all its
brutalizing details, is made authentic by the narrator, Jane, who lives to tell the tale. The ostensible
auto‐fiction is a struggle between self and others that leads ultimately to a struggle with oneself; like
in all good auto‐fiction, this works with a double narration—of the suffering and of the telling— thus
turning it into an act of resistance. The novel locates a dramatic center, not in the powerful male, but
in a seemingly powerless woman whose narration both enthralls and wounds the reader in its effort
to elicit an emotional response that in itself affords him/her a catharsis. 2 In this paper, I intend to
look at trauma theories to situate this novel, where the first‐person narrative structure works like a
verifiable autobiographical text, helping achieve a restorative cleansing in the process, with the
reader as the secondary witness.
Poetics of dislocation is a recurring trope that haunts the postcolonial world like a specter, and
writers of fiction and poetry from this world often explore the effects of trauma induced by their own
deracination. A similar sense of deracination pervades harlotte Bront’s novel, Jane Eyre, where
Jane, the orphan struggles to find her place, with Jane, the adult narrator, facilitating this through the
act of narration. I suggest in this paper that Jane, the traumatized narrator, is attempting a selfconstruct
through her revisiting of the trauma sites and through the writing of the narrative, both of
which work as the return of the repressed. Literary studies of late have absorbed theories of
psychoanalysis and trauma in an attempt to reconcile the two disparate fields and to elaborate on
twentieth‐century historical events, whose cultural and ethical implications we live with even today. 3
I propose to study the novel, Jane Eyre mainly through the theoretical lens of athy aruth, Geoffrey
Hartman and Shoshana Felman. These three scholars have linked the forces of psychic experiences
and literary expressions in their attempt to reflect on the ground shaking historical events of the past
century.
In Studies in Hysteria, Freud and Josef Breuer examined the clinical processes of traumatic
hysteria and the causative psychic trauma, and noted that when the reaction to trauma is
suppressed, the affect remains united with memory. In their opinion, this suppression often results in
a silent suffering that is a “grievance,” which is recognized by language as having a “cathartic” effect
only if it is expressed in an adequate reaction like revenge (Breuer and Freud, 1961: 5). 4 He called this
“repetitive compulsion”: the reliving or reenactment of past psychic events that disrupt the present,
with terrifying nightmares, flashbacks and dreams (Breuer and Freud, 1961: 9). The writing or telling
that arise out of such suffering has garnered interest in the school of trauma theory, with the critics
emphasizing the power of texts that seek less to represent traumatizing events, than to transmit to
readers the destabilizing experience of trauma itself, thus underscoring the performative aspect of
this transmission. aruth, coming from this tradition, looks into the relationship between experience
and event that forces the victim to return to their haunting history in the retelling of their story. 5 In
this context she is concerned with trauma textuality and its structural elements, while at the same
time, she believes that the best kind of text is one that induces trauma in its readers. I suggest that
we see Jane’s return to the very locations that caused her original trauma as therapeutic events, for
*
University of Houston, Houston Texas Department of English