Literary Re-Visioning: Jane Eyre and Contemporary Rewritings

Abstract

This research project examines the phenomenon of subsequent rewritings of Victorian literature from feminist lenses. In this way, this dissertation identifies the aspects of the original text that have produced the possibility of literary revisioning and diverse creative responses. In addition to the original text, a selection of two novels is analysed, which both revisit the original work from different periods (a fictionalised past/future). This research concerns how feminist writers employ the Gothic to dramatize their re-imagining of the original female characters to examine women’s experiences of oppression in patriarchal societies. Chapter one analyses Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the contradiction between the purpose of the heroine and her actions. Chapter two discusses the prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), where Jean Rhys invents a past employed as a narrative space for the origins of the female ‘silent’ voice in Brontë’s novel. Lastly, chapter three focuses on a recently published sequel that lacks criticism, Luccia Gray’s All Hallows at Eyre Hall (2014). My research examines Gray’s investigation of the alleged ‘happy’ ending of Brontë’s novel by turning readers’ doubts on the original characters to a fictionalised future. Despite their intensifying of the same gothic mode in the original text, these two writers also shred the romantic notions conventionally associated with Jane Eyre as a Gothic romance. This dissertation also argues that by examining each writer’s response to the proto-feminist components of Jane Eyre, Rhys and Gray shed light on the inconsistency and neglected issues in Brontë’s text.