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mediation by the screen as a function of the dyad of patriarchy and society disables her defenses,
and effectively neutralizes her ability to process this pain. But others have seen Jane’s ability in
neutralizing precisely this wounding gaze that is achieved through her retreat into self‐imposed
obscurity, which is a deliberate act of subversion. 9
Self‐effacement as strategy
Trauma to the psyche is explored in full detail whenever Jane finds herself in danger of selfeffacement
through neglect, and the party scene is a good example. The beautiful, rich people at the
party scene in Thornhill are described in rich visual detail, as if to reinforce the original incursion of
trauma; for Jane is exquisitely conscious of physical perfection. But we could instead, note that this
visual power and its deployment offers Jane, the narrator, mastery over others. She can survey
everyone, but they cannot see or observe her, for she is sitting hidden from their view, and this
panoptical ability renders her powerful as she surveys them from afar. Words describing physical
charms reveal the keen eye of the artist: Blanche has “noble bust” and “sloping shoulders”; her
height is noted, in an inward slight to Jane’s small stature; but, her “arched and haughty lip” is also
mentioned, lest the reader succumb to the power of mere outward perfection. Thus, the act of
looking itself becomes an entry point or a threshold between the outside and inside, says Newman,
and I add to this observation that this entry point is a perfect device for a liminal character like Jane
(Newman, 2004:41). In the narration of her episode with the Rivers family, Jane describes the
Calvinist, St. John River’s “Greek face”; like the Keatsian urn, the face is wrought of marble, although
“beautiful in harmony” and so is cold and unmoving ((Brontë, 2006: 396). Her rejection of him is twofold:
first is her repulsion for his repression of passion; second is her disdain for his displacement of
human passion by a cold spirituality. She rejects his proposal of marriage and says to him: “If I were
to marry you, you would kill me” (Brontë, 2006: 475). Here, Jane’s retelling of her story is the
enabling kind of trauma, for she is able to effectively reconstitute herself in the process. Thus, selfeffacement
as a deliberate strategy by the wounded has valid purchase in light of Caruth’s reading of
the crippling or the enabling forms of mediating trauma.
Jane’s other rival is Bertha Mason, the famous madwoman in the attic. 10 Turning to the dark side
of the voice that speaks from the past, Freud uses the phrase “daemonic power” to describe the
sufferer’s disrupted temporality, thus effectively situating the haunting traumas in the unsolvable
past (Freud, 1922: 22). Bertha then, is the unsolvable, haunting daemonic power who circumscribes
the narrative of Jane and Rochester, caught as they are in the inevitability of linear time. 11 That the
episode with the “daemonic” as an incursion to the psyche occurs in Thornhill, home of the sexually
disturbing Rochester, is an interesting complication. 12 Thornhill, as one of the memory‐sites, seen
through Hartman’s theories, becomes doubly relevant; for Jane experiences here the haunting as we
understand in her many surreal and dislocating dreams, where the mind is a memory‐landscape with
all its disturbing undulations. 13
But Thornhill, as a geographical site is equally haunting, for this is where the powerless Jane is
subjected to psychosexual trauma. This is also the site of a heightened masochism, evidenced in the
dialogues between Jane and Rochester. The past as viable landscape in this text helps the narrator
play with the poetics of dislocation, but it unsettles the reader at the same time through the many
disjunctions it creates. Readers have looked into the five different ‘home‐scapes’ where Jane
undergoes varying degrees of trauma and shifts in temporality as invasions of the self by Jane, the
subject. Hartman sees the processing of trauma through the sedimentation of memory, where the
inassimilable parts of the past become part of the landscape and nature. 14 Read this way, Jane’s
descriptions of nature draws attention to its symbolic and ritualistic myth‐like quality. 15 For example,
the chestnut tree that is in Jane’s mind, a symbol of the love of Jane and Rochester, is reduced to
charred wood, just when their mutual passion is about to get a resolution, thus portending the doom
of their union even before it has been allowed to surface (Brontë, 2006: 296). Or could this be really
Jane’s way of externalizing her desire to distance herself from Rochester, whose sexuality is
overwhelming to her autonomy? Earlier, the love scene in the orchard that is described in all its
fecundity and sexual imagery, nature (landscape) itself seems like an active participant in the