Silence and “craft”: resistence forms of the subaltern in Jane Eyre

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the subaltern resistance strategies in Jane Eyre (2008), a novel originally published in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë, from a postcolonial viewpoint. The highlighted characters will be the ones begotten in Jamaica, Betha Mason and her brother, Richard, using the resistance models defined by Ashcroft et al. (2010) as abrogation and appropriation, and by Bhabha (2010) as sly civility and mimicry. Bertha Mason, the main representative of subalternity, makes use more frequently of sly civility and abrogation, whereas Richard Mason uses mimicry and appropriation, since the woman repudiates the center culture, forsaking the European language, unlike her brother, who searches to imitate it, by appropriating its discourse to guarantee his social status, and, therefore, cultural hybridism. Considered mad and having no voice in the novel, Bertha Mason incites the reader curiosity towards the narrator’s honesty, the latter being white and whose discourse is constructed from other similarly white characters, mainly Rochester’s, who married the autochthonous girl as some kind of colonial enterprise. Thus, one is motivated to understand the subaltern exclusion from the symbolic world, in relation to their racial, cultural and mental precedence, extracting from it the possibility that the discursive cleavage symbolize the colonial oppression and repression of a violent subjugation. However, this does not state the annulment of the subaltern subject, for, even if censored, discursively, s/he finds alternatives to resist the colonizing forces.