Discord in Thornfield Hall: Critical Postcolonial Intersectionality in Jane Eyre

by Emma Ciervo (Directed by Jed Mayer)

This thesis examines Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through the lenses of intersectional feminism, postcolonialism, and trauma. These lenses provide a way to consider the relationships between the principal characters of the novel, Jane, Bertha, and Rochester. Viewing Bertha and Jane as intersectional feminist characters provide insight into how they are oppressed within Thornfield outside of their gender, but also engages each character irrefutably with the privileges gained through colonialism in the British West Indies. By placing Jane Eyre within the bounds of postcolonial studies, we begin to see the cracks within the intersectionality written into the principal characters and see how these expose the ways in which privileges prove to limit the initial intersectionality I identify within Bertha and Jane. The privileges which present themselves through this reading of Jane Eyre lead to a deeper understanding of the struggles and trauma that Jane and Berth incur as women in a patriarchal Victorian society, and thus leads to a deeper intersectionality that originally proposed. Through the evolution of a postcolonial reading into a trauma reading, a similar evolution becomes possible for the intersectionality of Bertha and Jane.