Phantom Past, Pure Future: Colonial Hauntings and Temporal Disruption in Jane Eyre

by Qian Xun Tie

The Channel, McGill University, XV (2024), p. 24

While a linear reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre unfolds within the temporal and geographical confines of Great Britain, a post-colonial lens unveils the looming presence of its colonies. Much scholarly attention, notably Susan Meyer’s “Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre”, has been directed towards the analysis of Rochester’s West Indian wife Bertha Mason, whose racialization becomes a conduit for the spectral intrusion of British colonialism into the novel. It is crucial to note, however, that in conjunction with her proximity to blackness, Brontë writes Bertha as a paranormal entity, a phantom presence that haunts Thornfield Hall and its residents. I endeavour to reconcile these dual images by investigating the theme of the supernatural through Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology. By way of synthesis, I argue that memories of colonial trauma haunt the domestic spaces of Jane Eyre and subsequently disrupt the linear trajectory of Britain’s national history. As such, a central predicament of the novel revolves around the means to purge both its characters and their dwellings of the racialized other to restore a pure and untainted British past in order to transition into an untroubled future. (...)

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