Replacement and genealogy in Jane Eyre and wide sargasso sea

Abstract

This is a polemical paper trying to formulate a poetics of replacement and genealogy based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Thornfield, in the book Jane Eyre, is one of the most famous haunted houses of British literature where, at the superficial level, the character of Jane Eyre replaces Antoinette as the female partner of the man of the house. Thornfield and the two women in it, representing different types of femininity, have haunted both novelists and theorists for decades, and have given us the typology of the ‘mad woman in the attic’. The idea of replacement, in the context of ‘writing back’, can be seen as a larger question of the literary cannon: just as one character can be a replacement for another, so can one literary work act as replacement for another. This idea allows us to conceptualize replacement as a function of genealogy: replacement can be a mode of reiteration, or even a compulsive repetition. When it comes to the story line, the central ‘replacement’ in Jane Eyre is Rochester trying to replace Antoinette as partner; the replacement in Wide Sargasso Sea is the replacement of Jane Eyre with Antoinette as the protagonist.