Rewilding Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre, interpretation and literary historiography

What characterised the initial, feverish response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), this article argues, was an acknowledgement of the book’s wildness: its strange, disconcerting unwillingness to assert conventional mores and expectations. Even the negative responses decrying the book as demoniacally immoral called attention to how wild the narrative initially appeared. The article asserts that, starting with Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, successive generations of critics elevated Brontë and her most famous work into the heights of the British poetic canon by propagating a tamed, domesticated mythology that viewed Brontë as a long-suffering waif and Jane Eyre as a pious book about the importance of self-denial and enduring suffering. The article asserts how writers, notably Victorian ‘men of letters’ such as Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, made Brontë and her moorland environs appear unthreatening, and it emphasises how recent scholars and critics have succeeded in ‘rewilding’ Brontë, reawakening the intriguingly disorienting strangeness that was so evident to Jane Eyre’s initial readers.