Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre

Abstract

Among the many 2016 works celebrating Charlotte Brontë's life and work in her bicentenary year, several essays were published that urge reinterpretation of her sexuality. Influenced by decades of work in gender studies, these essays intervene not only in Brontë scholarship but also more widely in long‐running debates on lesbian historiography of the 19th century that considers whether erotic attraction between women was manifested in passionate “romantic” friendship or in sexual practice. Jane Eyre includes deep currents of lesbian desire, a reading that violently upends the marriage plot. The intense friendships that Jane finds with other women throughout her narrative pilgrimage have traditionally been viewed in Brontë scholarship from a biographical perspective or through the feminist lens of female community. This essay argues instead that Jane's Lowood relationships with Miss Temple and even more with Helen Burns are erotic, with desire and consummation frustrated. Further, memoirist and visual artist Jane painstakingly delineates other women in sketches or paintings as well as in her narrative, displaying a transgressive expression of lesbian desire under the cover of conventional feminine auspices that is most evident in the miniatures she creates of Blanche Ingram and Rosamond Oliver. If the most canonical Brontë novel – and one of the most canonical of all Victorian novels – can be newly interpreted in relation to lesbian desire, there is undoubtedly even more exciting scholarship to come not only on the Brontës' life and work but also on other Victorian novelists, particularly noncanonical writers.