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Representation of the Other in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

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Representation of the Other in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
Representation of the ‘Other’ in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Abstract

This study aims at examining the representation of the’ other’ as portrayed in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). It attempts to inspect how the ‘Other’ is viewed in Nineteenth century England and the cultural ideology behind such specific representation. It poses crucial questions as to why the ‘Other’ is always represented negatively in main-stream western narrative as in the case of Bertha Mason who is portrayed as a madwoman and a voiceless monster that deserves a ten-year- rigorous confinement in the Attic. I will attempt to focus on the cultural and historical context of ‘Jane Eyre’ and its impact on the representation of the’ Other’. I will also draw on Edward Said’s theorization related to race, representation, and resistance in my analysis.

I am going to examine and explore the meaning of representation and its enormous power of construction of social reality especially if it is allied with political and imperial conquests. For that reason, we have to put into our account the historical and theoretical relations between Western economic –political domination and Western intellectual production. A case which I am going to examine thoroughly in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and its tendency of representation of the 'Other' with special reference to Bertha Mason. My objective is to show how the' Other' is represented negatively and how such representation usually involves unequal power relations.

Representation and resistance are very broad arenas within which much of the drama of colonialist relations and post-colonial examination and subversion of those relations has taken place. Helen Tiffin argues that’ in conquest and colonization, texts and textuality played a major part. European texts-anthropologies, histories, fiction, captured the non-European subject within European frameworks which read his or her alterity as terror or lack’. (1995:83). It is



Cited: Ashcroft , Bill ,Griffiths, Gareth ,Tiffin, Helen .ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. Ashcroft, Bill and Pall Ahluwalia .Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity. London and New York: Rout ledge , 1999. Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre .London: Everyman’s Library, 1908. Donnelly, Tam Truong.”Representing ‘Others’: avoiding the reproduction of unequal social relations in research”.RCN 9-3(2002):57-67. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask. New York: Grove press, 1967. _____________ ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds.. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg ,Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988. Gilbert ,Sandra and Gubar ,Susan .The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979 . Gilman, Sander .Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness.Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Lentricchia ,Frank ,and Thomas Mclonghalin ,eds .Critical Terms For Literary Study. second edition.. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Rich ,Adrienne. ‘Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman’ in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 .New York: Norton, 1979. Said, Edward W.Orientalism, Vintage Books :New York, 1978. .__________. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books :New York, 1994.

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