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The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sharon Marcus
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Abstract

Through the concept of abstraction I examine the relation between female subjectivity and writing in Jane Eyre. In the novel abstraction means a lack of attention or a lapse of will, conditions that permit Jane to realize her wishes. Three other meanings of the term shed light on Jane Eyre and on Charlotte Brontë's career. Through abstraction as a degree of relative disembodiment, both Jane and Brontë avoid becoming female spectacles, Jane by shifting from corporeal rebelliousness to an anonymous advertisement, Brontë by adopting an ungendered pseudonym. Abstraction also involves the alienation of the self into objects and texts, as when Jane and Brontë project themselves into their written products. Finally, abstraction entails the synthesis of the particular into the general: Jane rhetorically enters a professional body of governesses, and Brontë participates in the commercial literary marketplace.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 2: Special Millennium issue , March 1995 , pp. 206 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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