Jane Eyre: A Fictional Character or a Cultural Icon?

Jane Eyre, a classic and now firmly canonical fiction, is not only recognized as a milestone in English literature, but has a life of its own, beyond its place on school and university syllabi, thanks to its intrinsic value as a text as well as to the numerous imitations and variations on its plot and character. It is, in fact, the eponymous protagonist that is responsible both for the success of Charlotte Brontë’s novel among common readers and for the important critical debates that have developed since its publication in 1847. Cora Kaplan has written: “Jane Eyre, its heroine and its author (the distinction between book, character and writer are frequently blurred) have acted as a kind of cultural magnet in these debates, drawing widely dispersed issues into the novel’s field of meaning. While a graph of its rising and falling reputation in the last quarter century gives too historically limited and too linear an impression of the controversy it continues to stir, we should remember that in the 1970s Jane Eyre briefly attained a unique status as a positively ‘cult text’ for second-wave Anglophone feminism.” The heroine - the protagonist of the first important female Bildungsroman - has become an iconic cultural artefact not only for feminism but also for literary criticism in general. In fact, through the different approaches to the text we can retrace the various critical theories and methodologies that have come one after the other in the last century: from Virginia Woolf’s and Raymond Williams’s individual contributions (in the 1920s and in the 1960s-1970s, respectively), to English and American feminist ‘schools’, to Postcolonial and to “Thing Theory” . My aim is to follow up these various voices in order to identify the different heroines that have been constructed out of the ‘original’ Jane Eyre, and to understand why this fictional figure has become - through successive readings and re-readings, and thanks to the affective response to the novel on generations of women readers’ part - rather than a character, a cultural icon