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narrative (Brontë, 2006: 289).Thornhill is also the landscape of a particular kind of sexual trauma for
Jane, since it is the seat of Rochester’s power, and its ruin at the end of the narrative, is a Freudian
wish‐fulfillment for Jane. Jane’s bildung or self‐evolution is carefully positioned against the death,
ruin and decay of others that work to consolidate her position and we could note that Thornhill’s ruin
coincides with Jane gaining economic competency.
The red‐room episode that has fascinated readers and critics endlessly is a violent landscape that
mirrors Jane’s surreal paintings that impress Rochester so well. The red‐room is more a place of
traumatic memory than a physical landscape, even though its physical characteristics are
painstakingly documented. Jane says about the red‐room, “it was chill, it was solemn, it was silent,”
thus passing the dread very effectively to the reader. The Gothic elements of death, decay and
mystery are all present in this scene. But the red‐room and the Reeds who commanded it have all
been attenuated by the end of the narrative, and Jane is left with her love, strong and self‐possessed.
The memory‐place that was a site of stasis, hindering Jane, the subject, vanishes, leaving her fully
healed—thus making it possible for the reader to see how the landscape of the past can absorb
trauma and heal the psyche, working as a therapeutic and redemptive force.
The reader’s trauma: bearing testimony
Characters, nature, events, all are constructed with a blinding intensity in order to effect
maximum secondary trauma on the reader who must bear the testimony.16 For example in the
scene, where Jane and Helen leave after spending a pleasant evening in Miss Temple’s room, the
narrator says, with heightened sentiment: “Helen she held a little longer than me; she let her go
more reluctantly. It was Helen her eye followed to the door; it was for her she a second time
breathed a sad sigh; for her she wiped a tear from her cheek” (Brontë, 2006: 87). Here, the overload
of affect threatens to ruin the narration, yet, the reader knows at a subconscious level, that Helen is
about to die soon, and so is unable to be critical of the overtly maudlin language. Freud’s caution in
Studies in Hysteria that when the reaction to trauma is suppressed the affect remains united with the
memory can be comprehended in this very episode. For the reader, the narrator’s memories become
sub‐texts and inter‐texts; the haunting is then, a rewriting. This is the performative aspect of trauma
that interests Felman. “I will suggest—in line—with what has recently been claimed by feminist
psychiatrists and psychotherapists—that every woman’s life contains, explicitly or in implicit ways,
the story of a trauma”, writes Felman in her book What does a Woman Want?, where she explores
the desire to tell the story by the female subject, which results in an alteration in the female listener
(Felman, 1993:16). In an earlier book, working with clinical psychiatrist Dori Laub, Felman had
studied the power of the listener/witness on fragmented testimony, and how the testimony is made
whole again because of the sympathy of the listener/witness. Jane, the narrator, is a self‐conscious
performer, apostrophizing the readers periodically, and thus creating a rupture in the telling.17
Yet, for Jane, the subject, for whom self‐effacement is a vital strategy, all performance is shallow;
this is but a natural corollary to her dislike of self‐display. Both Céline Varens and her daughter Adèle
are shown in poor light—frivolous, superficial, and greedy for material things, and eager to perform
for others. Although our knowledge of Céline comes from Rochester’s narration, it is still filtered
through Jane’s perspective. Blanche, when taking part in the game of charades where she is the star
performer, becomes, in Jane’s words, “showy but not genuine”. She says in the same paragraph,
“Miss Ingram was a mark beneath my jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling” (Brontë,
2006: 215). Curiously Jane does not feel contempt for Rochester for his performing tendencies; the
reader learns that he has a great baritone, and he participates in the charades as well. Thus Jane’s
subjective opinions are formed around the idea of gender, with the female seemingly more
problematic for her sense of identity. Earlier in the narrative, Adèle sings a song to impress her new
tutor, which in Jane’s opinion, is clearly unsuitable for a child, and “in very bad taste”( Brontë, 2006:
121). In the scene when Rochester narrates his dark history about the French performer Céline, for
whom he had nursed a “grande passion,” and who had later treacherously betrayed him, nativism
collides with a bitter contempt for frivolity, and Jane, the narrator, derives great satisfaction in
relating all the unsavory details (Brontë, 2006: 165). This is the revenge of the repressed, even