Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and subaltern agency: resolving a structural paradox

Geoffrey Cannard

Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is considered a radical critique of the practice of structuralist criticism. But with its republication and examination in Rosalind Morris' edited collection, it becomes clear that the legacy of Spivak's essay is a clamoring affirmation of structuralist assumptions. And as a bastion of structuralist silencing, by way of analogy, the subaltern even spreads its silence to potentially problematic literature, texts for which it ostensibly provides an explanation. This is very much the case with Wuthering Heights, a novel sanitized by the application of the subaltern such that it becomes as didactic as Jane Eyre, an allegory for the journey of the inevitably exploited subaltern to an allegory for the journey of the inevitably exploited woman. The stasis of exploitation imposed by such analogy is unacceptable. This thesis resists the effacing tide of structuralist assumptions. Rather than apply the subaltern to Wuthering Heights, here Wuthering Heights serves as a critique of subalternity. The events Emily Brontë portrays in the novel are founded on a material exploitation of narrative; characters take structuralist assumptions as objects and means to their personal intersubjective performance of self. Thus the paradox of subaltern silence is reconciled to the delirium of subaltern speech, a reconciliation here pursued to the foundations of the structuralist movement. vi Deleuze, defining structuralism, attempts to enfold Lacan's formulation into his own. But the two systems are irreconcilable. By juxtaposing Lacan and Brontë's long subsumed critiques of the Subject, this thesis arrives at the reformulation of subjectivity Spivak demands: simultaneous narratives present material for various statements and significations by subjects, providing not a perfect conduit for subaltern expression, but a negotiation with interpretations that fulfills the term "intersubjective." Reading for simultaneous narratives in the singular thread of a text is easier said than done, however. Thus this thesis proffers an example, in which Jane Eyre, constantly subjected to reliance on the Subject by critics and even Charlotte Brontë herself, is multiplied into a material plurality, an intersubject which effects agency, though an agency incongruous to that agency made impossible by the Subject in the formulation of the subaltern.

Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and subaltern agency: resolving a structural paradox

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