Rhetoric and Racial politics in Reading Jane Eyre

Abstract

The powerful image of the mad woman with streaming long black hair on the burning roof was still lingering in my mind when I read Jane Eyre for the second time in 1985. Yet, I was so taken by the romantic surface of Jane's and Rochester's love story that I did not notice the significance of Bertha as a Creole woman and forgot her in a moment. During the third reading in 1988, 1 was surprised to notice Bertha's presence in the text. Her total silence paradoxically seems to speak some meaningful message to me. What awakes me from my ignorance is not only my contact with poststructuralist and feminist theories but also my personal experience of institutional oppression and marginalization. Foucalut, as a poststructuralist theorist, has discovered the margin, the silence, and the accidents which are systematically and institutionally excluded from Western metaphysics and history. For him, the notion of truth or sanity is produced by the power structure of domination in order to oppress the unthinkable or the irrational; there is no absolute or objective truth and all "truth" is but a will to power.