ABSTRACT
In The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell quotes from Harriet Martineau’s obituary of the famous author to relate how the latter once told her sisters that they were morally injudicious to make their heroines beautiful as a matter of narrative course. In response to their protest that they could not otherwise make their heroines interesting, Charlotte was said to have replied, ‘I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours’ (235). The result of Charlotte Brontë’s determined undertaking was, of course, Jane Eyre, the proto-feminist heroine she created, notable as much for her lack of beauty and nondescript looks as for her intense subjectivity. Indeed, the two are inextricably and paradoxically linked: the realist effect of plain Jane’s subjectivity-her rich interior life-is predicated on, and heightened by her physical shortcomings. Jane’s appearance belies her psychological complexity: that she is not an eye-pleasing beauty merely serves to emphasize her inner worth and the ‘depth’ of her character.1 The fact of Jane’s plainness is interesting, I suggest, both for its enabling of the impression of individual subjectivity and for its connection to a wider nineteenth-century discourse on domesticity conspicuous for its emphasis on feminine inconspicuousness. Such a discourse, comprising popular writing like conduct literature for women, disclosed the symbolically resonant ways middle-class women were imagined (and imagined themselves) in relation to the English nation. Discourses, it must be noted, do not simply reflect or describe an external ‘reality’. Instead, they ‘constitute [objects] in specific contexts according to particular relations of power’ (Lidchi 185). The discourse of domesticity constituted middle-class women individually within the private space of the home, and
collectively as the feminine essence of a nation, in contradistinction to women from other class backgrounds and racialized women from the empire. As the Victorian writers of conduct literature for women were wont to assert, English women were distinguishable from their female counterparts in other nations both civilized and ‘barbarous’, by their superior ability to provide the comforts of home. Domesticity as a continually renewable discursive practice with its own rules enjoined women in daily work for a nation persuasively imagined as a community of households. The normative and ideal notion of the English woman coalesced around the white, middle-class woman’s body whose performative habitus took the form of a useful, productive body, retiring and averse to eye-catching display. That the struggle for class hegemony was often intertwined with the claim to represent true Englishness is evident from the way the bourgeois woman’s aversion to display is staged for contrast against the spectacle of wealth and race afforded by upper-class and nonwhite women respectively but not always mutually exclusively.
