Class and Classrooms: Teaching Jane Eyre with Adele Grace and Celine

Class and Classrooms: Teaching Jane Eyre with Adele Grace and Celine Margaret D. Stetz (bio) In an influential 2019 essay, Carolyn Betensky calls on teachers of Victorian fiction to address seriously the racism in these texts—not only the examples of it that are pervasive and central to the narratives but also "racist references" that are fleeting and seemingly offhand (723). "Casual racism" of this sort, she writes, "abounds in Victorian novels," but this is no reason to treat it casually in our pedagogy (724). Especially for students of colour, who are subjected to being "treated as a racial other" in their daily lives, seeing "casual Victorian racism" accepted in the classroom "as merely routine without further discussion amounts here to an act of aggression" (736). At the same time, such a lack of attention signals to white students that merely noting the presence of historical racism is sufficient, without considering its relevance to their own lives and its continuing power in shaping current-day attitudes. If it is up to us as faculty members to deal responsibly with casually racist moments in Victorian texts, then it is even more urgent to confront racism in novels where it functions as a crucial structural element. For decades, many of us who teach a canonical work such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) have tried to do this by assigning Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) alongside it, as I do in Jane Eyre and Its Legacies, an undergraduate course crosslisted at the University of Delaware between the Department of English and the Department of Women & Gender Studies. As Carine Mardorossian writes in "#Metoo in Wide Sargasso Sea," Rhys's account of the early life in the Caribbean of the fictional Bertha Rochester, the so-called Madwoman in the Attic, "makes visible the inseparable workings of racialized and gendered oppression in the colonial context" (146). To second Andrea Kaston Tange that a "feminist reading of Jane Eyre today must necessarily be a post-colonial one" (46) is to appreciate the capacity of Rhys's narrative to help students comprehend that necessity in a visceral and memorable way. Wide Sargasso Sea encourages readers not merely to recognize "Rochester's and Jane's . . . blindness . . . [to their] privileges of race and colonial domination" in Brontë's novel but also to consider their own racial blind-spots (Tange 46–47). At the same time, it should be obvious that one such fictional text is not enough. To foreground race and racism not only in Jane Eyre but also in other times and contexts, the reading list for my Legacies course has included, over the years, a number of Jane Eyre-influenced novels by women of colour, such as Simi Bedford's Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991), Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005), and Patricia Park's Re Jane (2015). I also have the students watch Sandra Goldbacher's 1998 neo-Victorian film, The Governess, about a young [End Page 40] Sephardic Jewish woman confronting nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, in order to counter the assumption that everyone in Jane Eyre's Britain would have been an Anglo-Saxon Christian (and, of course, to encourage them to think about anti-Semitism today, on both sides of the Atlantic). None of these splendid works, however, does enough to raise awareness about another troubling issue—that is, the casual classism that masks the importance throughout Jane Eyre of working-class women, while effacing their personalities and erasing the stories of their lives. For American students, in particular, class consciousness is often a little-explored matter. Regardless of their race or ethnicity, few of the middle-, lower-middle-, or even working-class undergraduates whom I teach express any interest in or concern about the many servant characters who populate Brontë's fictional landscape, let alone about the women like Céline Varens (or the Italian "Giacinta" or the German "Clara") for whose sexual services Rochester paid and who feature in the history of his earlier amatory exploits that he shares with Jane. For their lack of curiosity about those at the bottom of the Victorian class system, my students are not to blame. They are guided by Jane...

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