Charlotte Brontë and Crime Fiction

I’ll be teaching Jane Eyre in a few weeks, so I just went hunting for my old notes from studying, writing about, and–so I thought–teaching the novel. I had a distinct recollection of teaching it once, when I covered for a Victorian fiction professor who was on leave. I took over in late January, and spent the rest of the full-year course with a group of highly motivated and engaged readers, who were a pleasure.

Although I do recall one student dramatically stomping out of the room, when I handed back the essays their original instructor had graded. She paused only to rip up the paper, with its handwritten feedback (those were the days!), and toss it in the garbage can by the door on her way out. It was in University College, so the solid wooden door made an impressive crash as she slammed it shut.

I digress. Graduate student TAs were on strike and I started teaching the week the strike ended, mostly unhappily. As a non-grad-TA that year, courtesy of a fall semester at NYU, I felt a bit on the outside. I tried to spend some time on the picket line, but it was very cold, and I was recovering from a late-December health issue that left me physically and emotionally wobbly.

Being offered a course in Victorian Fiction to teach was a dream come true. I suspect it was courtesy of my extraordinary graduate adviser, Jill Matus, a Victorianist with multiple research interests including trauma theory.

And so the reading list, for your amusement:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers*

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I’m trying to imagine a contemporary third-year lit class not rebelling at the load, especially the double-barrelled Eliot novels. But read, they did.

This is when I thought I’d taught Jane Eyre, but you’ll notice that it must have been Villette. They’d done Middlemarch in the fall, so I was only on the hook for Villette, Barchester Towers (not my cup of tea), Mill (wow!), and then Wilde, Hardy, and Conrad, which I had to cram into the final two weeks of term. Jude has stayed with me. Until I looked up my notes just now, I couldn’t tell you that I’d ever taught Dorian Gray, and I can’t remember a single thing about Lord Jim.

So I didn’t teach Jane Eyre, not then and not ever, if my teaching notes are reliable. Yet I have a distinct memory of doing so, and of the warm student response to it. Hmm.

What I have done is re-read the novel, every year of the last thirty or so. I came to Jane Eyre later than some readers, after all of Austen, and more than a decade after falling in love with Wuthering Heights. But it’s my favourite book. I’m looking forward to teaching it in Women’s Lit this term, and grappling with the intricacies of its gender, sexual, imperial, and disability politics.

Here’s a budding insight that may be mostly wrong. I’ve been thinking, today, about Jane Eyre as a crime novel.

A few of the potential crimes:

• the misuse of funds at Lowood School (it’s intimated that Brocklehurst and his family are living in luxury, at the expense of the half-starved and frozen orphans)
• the imprisonment of the “madwoman in the attic”, Bertha Rochester, by her husband (locking up troublesome wives was a Victorian hobby–they tended to be consigned to so-called mad-houses, under private care, if there was money in the family, and to much worse public institutions if there wasn’t)
• the usurpation by Rochester of Bertha’s fortune, possibly legal, but I have an interest in the circulation of property and inheritance in the novel (really must finish that decade-old article), and it seems odd that so little provision has been made for Bertha during the negotiation of the marriage
• Bertha’s own crimes, arguably motivated by self-defence (setting Rochester’s bed on fire; attacking him and, more seriously, injuring Richard Mason; burning down Thornfield Hall)

I need to have another look at Jung’s article. But I think there’s more to do here, in assessing how a series of crimes in the novel precipitate Jane’s decisions and motivate her responses to other characters.

For the interested, this book has garnered mixed reviews, but I’m going to skim through it anyway. A helpful intro would be “Literary Mysteries: Did Charlotte Bronte poison her sisters.”

Well, no, she didn’t. More likely, we can thank the brackish water of a parsonage adjacent to a seeping cemetery. And for pity’s sake, if any poisoning was going to take place, surely the sisters would have conspired to end Branwell’s misery and their family’s shame and financial losses rather earlier.

Oh, and here’s a fun story about the famous portrait: http://www.annebronte.org/2022/03/06/in-remembrance-of-the-bronte-pillar-portrait/http://www.annebronte.org/2022/03/06/in-remembrance-of-the-bronte-pillar-portrait/