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though the narrator is true to the events of the past, for, in the present moment, it becomes her
production. In addition, the restoration of desire and identity through language is achieved in other
ways, as in Jane’s usage of hyperbole, metaphors, intertexuality and other narrative devices, even
when she tries to restrain herself, as in the scene in Miss Temple’s room, in Lowood, where the
young Jane gives testimony on behalf of herself:
I resolved in the depth of my heart, that I would be most moderate –most correct; and,
having reflected a few minutes in order to arrange coherently what I had to say, I told her
all the story of my sad childhood. Exhausted by emotion, my language was more subdued
than it generally was it developed that sad theme…Thus restrained and simplified, it
sounded more credible…
(Brontë, 2006: 84).
The fragmentary nature of testimony in need of a sympathetic listener that Felman and Laub
speak of can be understood in this scene (Felman and Laub,1992: 57‐74). Felman’s theory holds that
the primary trauma is that of the subject—here, a child whose vulnerability is laid bare—and the
secondary trauma is of the listener, and the two are brought together through the bond of
testimony. We can see how this theory is valid in Jane’s telling of her tale. The intense and
hyperbolic narration exaggerates the sensation of affect and sentimentality, yet works to elicit
suitable responses from the reader
Trauma theory in all its variegated formulations highlights the inner catastrophe that trauma is,
and helps in marking its two‐fold nature: one of the events that is registered, and the other, of the
memory of the event. And I have attempted to show in my reading of Jane Eyre through the lens of
trauma theory that Jane ultimately gains a sense of unity and self‐integration in the transference of
her testimony to her reader. In this retold tale, the poetics of dislocation is harnessed for a rewriting
of the self. Here, the psyche is the text, and the writing of this text is an act of liberation from silence
and capitulation. If desire is the catalyst of conflict as Nancy Armstrong suggests in her analysis of the
novel where she examines the dialectic of individualism and self‐abnegation, then Jane has achieved
her self‐construction through her empowering desire to write and tell (Armstrong, 1987: 79). Jane’s
narration then constitutes mediation between female subjectivity and the masculine‐directed
outside world, where the tension of the contradictory pulls of repression and self‐assertion battle
with one another. In inducting the reader into this conflict, and in her transference of her memorytrace,
Jane gains mastery over herself and the others. In this way, the writing of the repressed
becomes a strong statement of the female condition and of insubordination. Yet she is able to
achieve a reconstitution of the self, alternating between the role of the subject and that of the
narrator/producer. Through the haunting self‐referentiality which is inevitable in any autobiography,
an integrated whole is created from the fragments of the past; and in doing so, both the writer and
the reader effect a healing.
Meera JAGANNATHAN
University of Houston, Houston Texas
Department of English
Notes
1
Helen A. Suzette, in Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life‐
Writing,(New York: St.
Martin’s Press,1998), suggests that” the texts of both autobiography and bildungsroman
exfoliate in the manner of mimetic histories, but necessarily double back, like involuted Möbius
strips, in haunting self referentiality. (Introduction p. xv). See also Helene Moglen for a feminist
autobiographical reading of the novel in which Moglen contends that Jane, the dispossessed
heroine fighting patriarchy, is but a self‐projection of the novelist, Charlotte Brontё. Charlotte
Brontë: The Self Conceived (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
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