Re-Mapping Jane Eyre: Childhood Trauma, Colonial Fear, and the Narrative of Self-Development

Jane Eyre (1847) is a story of human migration and its psychic consequences. The constant displacements of the novel’s heroine, I argue, are a form of internal migration, undertaken by Jane as by many others within the British Empire in the early nineteenth century. Yet, as we shall see, Jane’s similarity to such migrants is complicated by a fear of them—and by her own desire to escape their fate. Jane, too, as a socially marginalized governess, moves from one locale to another. What interests me in particular is the way this spatial movement also constitutes temporal movement that will not let Jane rest and requires her to revisit her own past while she internalizes her childhood trauma. Ultimately, I argue, she accepts her own implication in the English colonial past and its present, before she finds a place of permanent, but not fully secure, abode. Critical accounts, including early feminist critics, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, often treat Jane’s migration as a journey towards maturation, self-definition, and self-sovereignty. I argue that, though migration helps Jane to achieve independence through dependence, it might not be a path leading towards the formation of a unified, conscious, and mature identity. Instead, migration helps Jane to achieve knowledge of the self and to configure that self’s relation to the larger society and world in experiencing alienation within the self and digging deeper into the personal and national trauma of her unconsciousness.