Adorno at Ferndean: Some Considerations on Slavery and Aesthetics in Jane Eyre
Anshul Timothy Mukarji
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 3
Abstract
This paper seeks to work both with and against readings of Jane Eyre which reduce it to an iteration of colonial discourse. By taking Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as a theoretical frame of reference, it seeks to read the formal contradictions in the novel. In arguing for an attention to problems of form, it seeks to highlight how colonialism is embedded in the novel as a structuring force. Furthermore, by turning to the links that Adorno draws between form and society, it seeks to relate the novel to the rhetoric surrounding the slave trade through a brief analysis of colonial Gothic rhetoric and the discourse of free soil. Ultimately, this paper serves a rehabilitative aim: it reads the novel not simply as an exercise in imperial bad faith but as an aesthetic text capable of granting readers an insight into the socio-material world from which it emerges.
Keywords: Jane Eyre, Adorno, Atlantic, Colonialism, Slavery, Form
Anshul Timothy Mukarji (98anshul98@gmail.com) is a student in the Master’s program in English, University of Delhi. His research interests include the 19th century English novel, Romanticism, and the relationship of both to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. More broadly, he is interested in Marxist literary theory and the histories of and connections between Formalism and Marxism, with a particular focus on Critical Theory as well as traditions of anti-colonial Marxism