‘I thought unaccountably of fairy tales’: Jane Eyre, Form, and the Fairy Tale Bildungsroman

Abstract

Frequently Jane Eyre (1847) has been compared to various fairy tales, many of which are seemingly woven through the plot and characters of the novel. Largely unremarked upon however is the effect of those fairy tales on the form of the novel itself, particularly as those fairy tales collide with the Bildungsroman genre. Rather than reaffirming the telos-driven nature of both the fairy tale and the Bildungsroman, Charlotte Brontë, through Jane as narrator and protagonist, questions the narrative finality of both genres through their combination. The resultant Bildungsroman actively eschews any potential ossification of Jane as she invents and reinvents herself in her narration and deployment of narrative forms. Rather than a singular finished figure at the end of the novel, Jane offers a spectrum of identities that continue to grow and change from their initial contexts.

Keywords:

• Bildungsroman
• fairy tale
• form
• narrative
• narration
• Jane Eyre

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In her compelling reading of the female Bildungsroman, Carol Lazzaro-Weis points out that many authors, but particularly women writers, have traditionally approached the genre with this thwarting in mind: ‘Women writers, like their male counterparts, have traditionally turned to the Bildungsroman not to subvert its structures but rather to flaunt the contradictions in the form’ (1990, 21).

2 In his influential reading of the novel genre, Mikhail Bakhtin outlined one of its primary strategies: ‘The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types [raznorečie] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorečie] can enter the novel’ (1981, 263).

3 Lorna Ellis writes that, in the female Bildungsroman, the heroine frequently must ‘understand themselves and their relationship to their environment, and to negotiate that environment in order to maintain some form of agency’, and is subsequently forced to ‘give up those aspects of her independence that separate her from patriarchal society’ (1999, 16). While this perhaps does not fully encompass Jane’s maturation, at several points in the novel Jane does indeed bow to the conventions of the patriarchal society she inhabits.

4 Hilary Schor and others have questioned David’s heroism in his own novel. Schor writes that ‘Dickens may be sure David is his favorite child…but the novel is less certain that it belongs to David’ (2000, 11). She goes on to argue that, in David’s own eyes, ‘the hero of his life is his wife Agnes…It is Agnes who has made possible the author’s heroism’ (12). For my purposes, it is sufficient to treat him as ‘protagonist’ if ‘hero’ seems too strong. Borrowing from Alex Woloch’s influential formulation of character in the novel, David occupies the largest ‘character-space’ within the ‘character-system’, and determines the relative space and importance of other characters with his authorial pen (2003, 14).

5 This moment is itself an echo of an earlier section in the text, Rochester’s costumed ‘reading’ of Jane at Thornfield. What distances the two is by my reckoning the lack of humour and playfulness that characterises Jane and Rochester’s relationship, which is sorely lacking from St. John.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Dougherty

Daniel Dougherty is a PhD Candidate in English literature at Boston College with broad interests in literary form in the novel and the Anglophone Bildungsroman. He has long had a special enthusiasm for the works and life of Charlotte Brontë.