1. Quoted in Clement Shorter, ed., The Brontës: Life and Letters, 2 vols. (1908; rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), 1:387.

2. On the Austen-Brontë dichotomy in Victorian criticism, see Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 102–05.

3. Raymond Williams, The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 61.

4. Shorter, ed., The Brontës: Life and Letters, 1:386.

5. This characterization of the cultural role of the novel is derived from a series of essays by D. A. Miller, collected in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

6. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 35, 36. All quotations from the novel are taken from this edition. Subsequent page numbers will be included parenthetically in the text.

7. For a provocative discussion of the nonlinearity of Brontë’s plots in terms of the dynamics of Brontëan desire, see John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 60–68.

8. From the Westminster Review’s 1860 review of Mill on the Floss; cited in Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 104. On passionate expression in Brontë as a mode of opacity, see Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction, pp. 40–51.

9. An interesting context for Brontë is suggested by Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). In “many modern novels,” writes Said, “The very problematic of textuality is neither eluded nor elided, but made into an explicit intentional and constitutive aspect of the narrative. Sterne comes to mind immediately, but so do Cervantes, Proust, Conrad, and many others. The point is that these motifs, which are the very ones in a sense constructed by Derrida’s criticism, already exist in narrative not as a hidden (hence inadvertent) element but as a principal one. Such texts cannot therefore be deconstructed, since their deconstruction has already been begun self-consciously by the novelist and by the novel. Thus this aspect of narrative poses the challenge, as yet not taken up, of what there is to be done after deconstruction is well under way, after the idea of deconstruction no longer represents elaborate intellectual audacity” (p. 193).

10. Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 132.

11. In The English Novel, Williams observes: “What matters throughout is this private confidence, this mode of confession: the account given to a journal, a private journal, and then the act of writing includes—as it were involuntarily, yet it is very deliberate and conscious art—the awareness of the friend, the close one, the unknown but in this way intimate reader: the reader as the writer, while the urgent voice lasts” (p. 70). Williams is aware that what also matters here is the dissimulation of the act of writing as act, of the performance of the reader as performance.

12. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 367, 360. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text.

13. As we will see when we turn to Daniel Deronda, this construction has figured prominently in recent feminist criticism of George Eliot. For discussions that contextualize the stereotype(s) more generally, see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Joan Rivière, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–13.

14. Jane’s performance here might lend itself to discussion in terms of what René Girard, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), calls “mimetic desire.” For a feminist and antihomophobic reframing of Girard’s model, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 21–27. The important, complicated question of lesbian (and/or female homosocial) desire and identification in Brontë’s novels requires careful analysis; unfortunately, such analysis is somewhat beyond the scope of the present study.

15. Although it does not touch directly on Jane Eyre, Nina Auerbach’s “Alluring Vacancies in the Victorian Character,” Kenyon Review 8 (1986), 36–48, might be consulted in this regard.

16. Other examples in Brontë’s fiction include Zoraïde Reuter in The Professor, and Ginevra Fanshawe, Pauline Home, and Zélie St. Pierre in Villette; Alfred de Hamal in Villette is a significant male version of this usually female type.

17. Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction, pp. 40–41.

18. Williams writes, “People still have to fight past the governess to get to the Brontë sisters. I mean fight past the image, the depressing image, that is still taken for granted.…Seen from the middle-class way round, and especially from the male middle-class way, the governess as a figure is repressive, unfeminine, dowdy.…I don’t know how much I now need to insist on breaking the image: that deforming image which obscures—and is meant to obscure—a particular and general repression” (The English Novel, pp. 62–63).

19. Shorter, ed., The Brontës: Life and Letters 1:437.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 443.

22. I allude here to Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). In Fried’s work, “absorption” comprises a range of aesthetic techniques aimed at counteracting or dissembling theatricality, which, as I understand it—particularly with the help of the polemical essay, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968)—characterizes an inferior kind of art.

23. The paradigmatic scene in this regard would be that in which Helen Burns, having been found guilty of untidiness, is transformed into an exemplary text: “Next morning Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece of pasteboard the word ‘Slattern,’ and bound it like a phylactery round Helen’s large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead. She wore it till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as a deserved punishment” (p. 105).

24. In “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23 (September–October 1982): 83, Mary Ann Doane has shown how, in the mainstream cinema, women’s “spectacles” are a dangerous signifier: “Glasses worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyses, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to the entire system of representation. It is as if the woman had forcefully moved to the other side of the specular.” Hence the necessity, Doane argues, of the moment in films when the bespectacled woman removes her glasses, and is thereby almost magically “transformed into spectacle, the very object of desire” (p. 83). Yet the danger flirted with in Brontë’s letter is more ambiguous, since Brontë’s glasses threaten not only the dominant system of representation but also, given the potentially contaminating context, Brontë herself: she does not need to take off her spectacles to risk becoming a spectacle. Doane calls the cinematic cliché of “girls who wear glasses” a “heavily loaded moment of signification, a social knot of meaning” (p. 83). By keeping Jane Eyre out of the social spaces that she herself dares to enter, Brontë tends to disguise the ways in which the heroine is caught up in such social knots.

25. Robert B. Heilman has written: “The introduction of comedy as a palliative of straight Gothic occurs on a large scale when almost seventy-five pages are given to the visit of the Ingram-Eshton party to mysterious Thornfield; here Charlotte, as often in her novels, falls into the manner of the Jane Austen whom she despised.” “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New Gothic,’ ” in The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Gregor (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 98.

26. Matthew Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. George W. E. Russell (New York: Macmillan, 1896) 1:34.

27. Brontë’s investment in this distinction is suggested in this passage from a letter she wrote to her publisher, William Smith Williams, after her visit to London:

An existence of absolute seclusion and unvarying monotony, such as we have long—I may say, indeed, ever—been habituated to, tends, I fear, to unfit the mind for lively and exciting scenes, to destroy the capacity for social enjoyment.

The only glimpses of society I have ever had were obtained in my vocation of governess, and some of the most miserable moments I can recall were passed in drawing-rooms full of strange faces. At such times, my animal spirits would ebb gradually till they sank quite away, and when I could endure the sense of exhaustion and solitude no longer, I used to steal off, too glad to find any corner where I could really be alone. Still, I know very well, that though the experiment of seeing the world might give acute pain for the time, it would do good afterwards; and as I have never, that I remember, gained any important good without incurring proportionate suffering, I mean to try to take your advice some day, in part at least—to put off, if possible, that troublesome egotism which is always judging and blaming itself, and to try, country spinster as I am, to get a view of some sphere where civilised humanity is to be contemplated.

28. Gayatri Chakvravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 244.

29. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), pp. 30–31.

30. In this chapter’s concerns with interpretive vicariousness, compulsory self-masking, and Schadenfreude, the reader may discern the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s recent work on “the epistemology of the closet.” Especially pertinent here are her discussion of the performative effects of ignorance in “Privilege of Unknowing,” Genders 1 (Spring 1988): 102–24, and her analysis of the connections in Proust between the closet as spectacle and the closet as viewpoint in “Epistemology of the Closet (I),” Raritan 7 (Spring 1988): 39–69, and “Epistemology of the Closet (II),” Raritan 8 (Summer 1988): 102–30. Consideration of this influence could open out into consideration of the question of the relationship between gay and antihomophobic strategies of interpretation, on the one hand, and novels that are (apparently) about female heterosexual desire, on the other hand. Since the question is a large and complicated one, I can only broach it here. I hope in some future project to discuss the links between “the closet,” a figure for the construction of gay and lesbian knowledge and identity, and “the attic,” which Gilbert and Gubar have established as a figure for feminist knowledge and identity.

31. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” p. 244.

32. Undoubtedly, the analogy I am proposing invites what D. A. Miller, in The Novel and the Police, p. 193, has called the “mortifying charges (sentimentality, self-indulgence, narcissism) which our culture is prepared to bring against anyone who dwells in subjectivity longer or more intensely than is necessary to his proper functioning as the agent of socially useful work.” Instead of trying to answer those charges, I refer the reader to the source of this quotation, Miller’s essay on David Copperfield, 192–220, where they are shrewdly problematized as functions of the culture of the “open secret.” In its argument—although not, perhaps, in its performance—that essay is less sanguine than the present chapter about the destabilizing effects of deconstructive practice.

33. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” p. 244.

34. Elizabeth Rigby, “Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre,” Quarterly Review 84 (December 1848): 177.

35. M. Jeanne Peterson, “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society,” in Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 11. Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) contains a chapter on the governess and Jane Eyre that builds upon Peterson’s research in ways similar to my own, although Poovey does not explicitly address the questions of the governess’s theatricality and of her significance for contemporary writer-teachers. I regret that Poovey’s fine book was published after I had written most of this chapter, and that I was therefore unable to incorporate into it a sustained dialogue with her reading of the novel. Also see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 78–79, on the transgressive potential of the governess.

36. Rigby, “Vanity Fair,” p. 173.

37. My account of Brontë’s construction of “subjectivity,” and of the madwoman’s ideological usefulness within that construction, owes much to Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, esp. pp. 186–213.

38. One thinks here of Austen’s (rather apprehensive) description of her own mode—or at least that of Pride and Prejudice—as “light and bright and sparkling.”

39. Rigby, “Vanity Fair,” p. 164.

40. A rather different, though oddly pertinent, discourse on the relations among hieroglyphics, theater, and cruelty is to be found in the writings of Antonin Artaud, and in their interpretation by Jacques Derrida. See Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), and Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 232–50.

41. Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 49.

42. Although Terry Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) advances an excessively celebratory interpretation of its subject, overemphasizing the “subversive” powers of masquerade, see pp. 90–92 for a lucid discussion of the generally conservative effects of “ ‘downward’ travesty” or “the imitation of the powerless by the powerful.”

43. For examples, see pp. 283, 380, and 407.

44. For a fascinating analysis of the painting-drawing-writing-theatricality-pain nexus, but in relation to a textual and tonal milieu as distinct from Brontë’s as that of Artaud, see Michael Fried, “Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 33–104.

45. Rigby, “Vanity Fair,” p. 171.

46. Ibid., p. 167.

47. The one most vulnerable to ridicule is the one on pp. 117–19, on how to find a job as a governess. What makes it so embarrassing to the academic critic, at any rate, is its all-too-specific staging of “careerism.”

48. Rigby, “Vanity Fair,” p. 169.

49. I am tempted here to amend a (notorious) remark of Freud’s in his case history of Dora, and to suggest that the question of whether a governess is outside-in or inside-out can naturally not be a matter of indifference. See Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 84.

50. Jane Gallop, “Keys to Dora,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Clare Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 215.