ABSTRACT
The chapter tends to be elided as the bridge between one episode and another, the move from Thornfield to Marsh House, from Rochester to St John, from financial and sexual exploitation of the West Indies to missionary exploitation in East India. (That’s how it is seen in the recent film.) But I suggest that Chapter 28 is crucial — not only in its portrayal of the destitution and dispossession of the social outcast, its material and existential condition — but because it makes a sustained critique of conditions where some subjects are defined as not fully human. In other words, the treatment of dereliction, starvation and beggary in the novel rescues the lost and the defeated from history, as Paul Ricoeur so finely put it when he wrote of ‘the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost’.2 But this chapter also asks ontological questions about abjection. Moreover, this chapter precipitated recurrent narratives of destitution in later novels that extended its implications. I think such narratives have more to say politically than narratives of emancipation.
