The nineteenth-century transatlantic community that grew up around Brontë’s novel models current theories of transatlanticism, which assume that British culture dominated the exchange. However, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and scholarly responses to Jane
Eyre demand a new transatlantic paradigm, one which recognizes the effects of American
cultural influence, particularly through interpretations of the fairytale plot. This chapter explores the cultural significance of these American responses to Jane Eyre and the way in which these responses have affected the transatlantic paradigm of this distinctive microcosm. I argue that American material influence expands into cultural influence. The plethora of American responses to Jane Eyre in the nineteenth century influenced critical and literary interpretations of the novel, leading to consistent critical readings of Jane Eyre as a Cinderella tale.
The transatlantic microcosm that developed around Jane Eyre invested the novel with overlapping cultural messages. These exaggerated cultural responses generated a sort of mythic status for the novel in its transatlantic context. While the Brontë myth and the distinctive effects of Jane Eyre have been explored, the specific transatlantic context of the myth has not been developed. This chapter examines the cultural significance of American investment in Jane Eyre and possible explanations for the novel’s imagined and projected international meanings.
More specifically, Jane Eyre became mired in narratives of nineteenth century American identity formation. It was absorbed into the parallel tradition of male and female rise tales, related to American individualism and the self-rise ethic. The male narrative tradition has been dominated by stories like Horatio Alger’s while the American Cinderella tale has been used to describe the female narrative tradition. The Cinderella tag became especially popular for a wide range of female rise tales in the middle of the century when a variety of “Cinderella” adaptations
began appearing in popular magazines.127 The self-made man described in novels like Alger’s was important to Presidential myths, but the American Cinderella could not be attached to a similar American icon. I argue that this is why Jane Eyre and Brontë were especially attractive to an American audience looking for an example of this national ideal.
Elisa Tamarkin is one of the critics who explores the paradoxical relationship of Americans with Great Britian in the nineteenth century; she offers a good basis for this examination of the cultural aspects of Jane Eyre’s transatlantic context. In Anglophilia (2008), Tamarkin examines the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans constructed their own idealized concept of England; Tamarkin calls it “the fantasy of England” (xxxiii). She claims that this American construction of England allowed Americans to work out their national identity in an imaginary setting:
American Anglophilia [was]… a devotion that provided not so much a place where antebellum Americans found release from the burdens of their own nationality, but where their “Americanness” was lived in other languages of national expression. The England that was especially attractive to Americans was also especially mysterious, and its effects were almost entirely the product of the dedication it inspired…. Anglophilia… tells a story of English culture and society that is rooted in the character of English life but, finally, an expression of the anxieties and wishes of someplace else. (xxiv)
Tamarkin uses the 1860 U.S. tour of Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, as a microcosm for her study (3). Based upon Albert’s intense popularity and pervasive media coverage, Tamarkin theorizes that Americans used this visit to escape the oncoming Civil War as well as to express their own American identity.
127
In “America’s Cinderella” (1977), Jane Yolen claims that the American Cinderella narrative developed when the story was reprinted in “prestigious” (299) magazines for children. She particularly attributes G.B. Bartlett’s “Giant Picture Book” (1881) published in St. Nicholas Magazine with the creation of the “spun-sugar caricature” (297) of hardier European and Asian Cinderellas. The American Cinderella also appeared in popular magazines for adults, such as Harper’s and The Atlantic. These Cinderella stories for adults not only meet the standards described by Yolen, they also develop a more extensive nationalistic paradigm, particularly in their celebration of materialism and their explicitly American settings. Moreover, this chapter explores the larger literary traditions surround the
Prince Albert was the first British royal to tour the United States; he arrived shortly before the American Civil War broke out. He was received by crowds of at least thirty thousand at each stop in his tour and entertained with balls, state dinners, and military marches (Tamarkin 3). Contact with the prince was fetishized; women bribed their way into his room to “‘touch him curiously’” (Tamarkin 4). However, the frenzy incited by the Prince’s arrival was not confined to private spaces. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune describe the American’s wild reaction to the prince at public events: “you saw so many squealing gala ladies stumbling out of their ball gowns trying to press the royal flesh” (Tamarkin 4). Public reactions to the Prince were reinforced by media coverage. Popular periodicals like Harper’s Weekly registered the Prince’s movement “with extreme fidelity” (Tamarkin 4). More significantly “no item was too slight for the national record and … no one would even ask why, at the point of disunion, the American public would need to know that the prince departed from the Bay of Portland on ‘a fine day, but cold’” (Tamarkin 5). Thus, Tamarkin suggests that American interest in Prince Albert at the beginning of the Civil War was an avoidance technique.
However, Tamarkin is more interested in the way in which the Prince’s visit enabled a near-theatrical production of American identity. Newspapers like The New York Daily Tribune characterize U.S. responses to the Prince as particularly American; the enthusiasm of the crowds greeting the Prince “fitly typified the capacities of the people for a self-government founded on the immutable laws of human sympathy.”128
In another place, American reactions to Prince Albert are described as “democratic” (Tamarkin 12), implying that there is something distinctly nationalistic in American responses to the British Prince. This nationalistic enactment of American identity suggests that American affinity for Prince Albert was more than simply a
128
Excerpted from “Reception of the Prince of Wales – a Democratic Jubilee – New York Out of Doors,” New York
distraction from war; it was an exercise in nationalism on the eve of national conflict (Tamarkin 18).
Anglophilia demonstrates the counter-intuitive uses of British culture in nineteenth-
century America: expressions of love for Prince Albert are interpreted as expressions of distinctly American culture. The complexity of imagined Anglo-American relations described by Tamarkin provides a comparison for my study of Jane Eyre’s transatlantic progeny. I argue that the appropriation of Jane Eyre as an expression of American ideals is another example of imagined Anglo-American affinities. Although Jane Eyre is a British novel, Americans had an emotional and nationalistic investment in both Brontë and her novel that is comparable to the American investment in Prince Albert’s 1860 tour of the United States. However, Prince Albert retained his distinctly British identity; he was embraced as an international other against whom Americans could define their own national identity. By contrast, Jane Eyre and her creator are simultaneously embraced as symbols of British and American culture because American readers interpret Jane Eyre’s rise tale as a female representation of the American individualism. The appropriation of Jane Eyre as a distinctly American narrative was counter-intuitive, but it was part of a broader cultural moment.
In “Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity: Susan Warner’s Contradictions in The
Wide, Wide World” (1990), Isabelle White claims that Warmer “became implicated in the very
individualism and materialism against which she argued” (31). White states that the domesticity and evangelical Christianity in Warner’s novel are at odds with the individualism and materialism that the novel unintentionally supports (32). I demonstrate that the Cinderella fairy tale enables this apparent contradiction, allowing women writers in the sentimental novel tradition to embrace a nationalistic narrative that was otherwise inaccessible.
The term individualism emerged in the late 1820s, but the concept of the individual’s rights was established by the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke and incorporated into early American political thought. In The Myth of American Individualism (1994), Barry Shain further argues that American localism and regionalism contributed to international perceptions of Americans as individualistic. Shain states:
There is good reason to believe that America’s highly localist communalism (religious, social, and political) must have appeared in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as bordering on anarchical or atomistic when compared to centrally administered European religious establishments and nation-states…. In other words, America’s powerful localism probably fostered illusions that came to be described, largely pejoratively, as individualistic. … Over time, what begins as a misperception can become a myth, especially if it accords with the political interests of dominant elites. (84)
While the label of individualism may have initially been applied as a misperception, the myth was embraced and developed by Americans, who already felt the “autonomous sense of the individual” (Shain 85) was inherent in American politics. Shain’s insight may further explain the appeal of Jane Eyre with its vivid regionalism to an American audience.
The individualism of the young liberal democratic state was heavily influenced by emerging capitalism, especially by the mid-nineteenth century; it is this specific conjunction of political and economic forces that shapes the distinctive nature of American individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville is one of the prominent European commentators who notes the distinctive nature of this American ideal in the 1830s.129 While de Tocqueville’s critique of American individualism is largely negative, American authors like William James embrace individualism as an essentially American value.130 Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2000)
129
In Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville criticizes American individualism as self-serving and socially destructive.
130
In Reconstructing Individualism: a Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison (2012), James Albrecht describes the complex history of individualism in American thought. Albrecht cites James and Mills as prime examples of American investment in this ideal (127-32). For example, James states: “the individualistic view…
summarizes the values and ideals associated with American individualism: “Individualism [became a] … catchword for free enterprise, limited government, personal freedom and the attitudes, forms of behavior and aspirations held to sustain these. One influential version of this usage was Herbert Hoover’s campaign speech celebrating ‘rugged individualism’.” (240) This is distinctive from British and European individualism, which stressed “the Romantic ideal of individuality” (Blackwell’s 240) or English liberalism and “the sterling qualities of self-reliant Englishmen” (240). Thus, American individualism is marked by its specific political and economic context: the development of the young Republic and the growth of market capitalism.131 The materialism of the American Cinderella resonates with the capitalistic stakes in American individualism.
This chapter focuses on the gendered narrative that developed out of American individualism and the way that Jane Eyre became incorporated into this bifurcated narrative tradition. In Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), Gillian Brown explores the way the domestic narrative was incorporated into individualism in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville in the 1850s. These two, often incompatible, ideologies of domesticity and individualism merged in literature as well as in cultural practices, including reform movements. Brown describes the purpose of her study: “It is the organizing premise of this book that nineteenth-century American individualism
means many good things: e.g. Genuine novelty; order being won, paid for; the smaller system the truer; man [is greater than] home [is greater than] state or church; anti-slavery in all ways; toleration – respect of others; democracy – good systems can always be described in individualistic terms” (Albrecht).
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American individualism scholars often emphasize the tension between political and economic forces in this definition. Albrecht claims that “many view individualism as morally and politically suspect [because this ideology has been]… inescapably complicit with the liberal-capitalist status quo…. Through an exaggerated emphasis on individual merit and responsibility, individualism can ignore or minimize social conditions that perpetuate
inequalities of wealth and opportunity while, in political terms, engraining a laissez-faire bias against public efforts at reform that might create the conditions for a more widespread individual liberty.” (1)
takes on its peculiarly ‘individualistic’ properties as domesticity inflects it with values of interiority, privacy, and psychology” (1).
Brown’s definition of individualism within its highly gendered historic context is useful for this study: the rise of the liberal democratic state and the burgeoning market economy generated the “possessive” nature of the individualism” (2) associated with nineteenth-century American culture. This material and political reality created gendered tensions in the ideology of individualism: only men could fully engage in the democratic workings of the state and the market economy. American literature in the nineteenth-century frequently depicted the struggle of the individual as a battle between masculine freedom and the civilizing feminine force: “the runaway Huck Finn versus the ‘sivilizing’ Widow Douglas” (5). In this paradigm, the domestic sphere becomes a limitation and boundary that inhibits the individual’s expression of his own identity. However, Brown works within a tradition of feminist reinterpretations of this dichotomy, recognizing the domestic figure’s ability to rebel within the domestic sphere, challenging the male-dominated economic and legal systems (6).
Brown provides the basis for my analysis of the female rise tale that resonates with nineteenth-century American individualism. The rise tale is a specific narrative that developed out of this broader trend: the rise tale taps into the values of free enterprise and personal freedom associated with individualism in the United States. Furthermore, like the narrative tradition examined by Brown, this rise tale is gendered. The American Cinderella tale is a rise tale for women that parallels the story of the self-made man in nineteenth-century American literature. “Domestic individualism” is a phrase that Brown coins to describe a paradoxical expression of American individualism within the domestic sphere (Brown 1). However, this is not a new concept; authors and critics alike have used the Cinderella tag to describe a conjunction of
individualism in the American female rise tale since the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the cultural stakes in this tale and the American appropriation of Brontë and her novel
Jane Eyre.
In The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (1994), Carol Nackenoff provides a compelling analysis for the self-made-man rise tale, which is a useful contrast for the female American rise tale explored in this dissertation. Nackenoff claims that the author Horatio Alger became a symbol for the values associated with the characters of his juvenile fiction:
The way in which the Alger story is formulated and the nature of its promises seem to have captured the imagination. Alger heroes are part of our language of discourse about social mobility and economic opportunity, about determination, self-reliance, and success. They are symbols for individual initiative, permeability of economic and social hierarchies, opportunities, and honest dealing. “Horatio Alger” is shorthand for someone who has risen through the ranks – the self-made man, against the odds.” (3-4)
Although Alger’s life and his stories have been “debunked, maligned, and lampooned” (4), he continues to have enduring symbolic status in American literature and culture. His wildly popular stories for boys created a myth about the capitalist order emerging in the United States during the Gilded Age. His rags-to-riches rise tales “universalized aspirations that few could reasonably hope to attain” (Nackenoff 6) by constructing capitalism as an unbounded opportunity for economic and social rise through hard work. Through these stories, Alger infuses later-nineteenth-century America with fairytale potential (Nackenoff 7). Hope and fiction are merged with just enough fact to appeal to an audience adjusting to the economic changes of the new republic (Nackenoff 10-11).
This analysis of Alger’s rise tales for young boys is useful because it addresses the cultural significance of the narrative: it imbues the capitalist economy with the fairytale dream.
Nackenoff also identifies the political investment in Alger’s rise tales. She claims that the basic rise plot is an allegory for the young republic, and each individual hero’s triumph is a triumph for the nation:
Alger’s most frequent central character is a boy from fourteen to sixteen years old who is thrust into a new environment, almost always the city. The story is a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood during which the youth must undergo many trials. The completion of the passage yields a young adult whose virtue is firm; the adolescent of the Republic attains manhood. (34)
Alger was not alone in his belief that the fate of the Republic depended upon the morality of its youth (Nackenoff 38-39). Self-help manuals for young people migrating to the city abounded during mid-nineteenth century (Nackenoff 39-40). The values Alger instilled in his heroes resonated with the values that Americans believed necessary to the survival of the state, especially as young people migrated to cities and industrial centers after the Civil War (Nackenoff 42).132
What Nackenoff does not explore is the way in which the self-made ethic of Alger’s narratives is reenacted in founding myths for both the Democratic and Republican parties in the early- and mid-nineteenth century. Both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln modeled the self-made-man myth for American culture, establishing the self-made ethic as a foundational American value. This chapter explores the connection between the male-centered self-made narrative and the American Cinderella story for young women, as well as the transatlantic impact of this American myth in the microcosm of Jane Eyre and her transatlantic descendants.
I argue that Jane Eyre had the cultural potential to merge with an American myth like Lincoln’s because the novel and its author already had a powerful mythic aura in transatlantic
132
In “Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, Conduct Literature, and Protocols of Female Reading in Mid- Nineteenth-Century America,” Susanne Ashworth draws similar connections between Warner’s novel and conduct books for women. This suggests a stronger cultural parallel between the American Cinderella and self-rise narratives such as Alger’s (142-43).
culture. In The Brontë Myth (2003), Lucasta Miller analyzes the many faces of the mythic Charlotte Brontë. The complex, multifaceted life of this popular author provides concrete material for a range of biographical interpretations. This chapter examines the multifaceted interpretations of Brontë’s heroine, Jane Eyre. As a character, Jane Eyre is not as dynamic as her living creator, but she has become an object of projections and interpretations similar to the way Brontë has been regarded.
Miller explores the way in which the Brontë sisters accrued cultural caché in the collective consciousness (xiii). Miller does not specify which collective consciousness she is analyzing. She primarily relies upon British material but occasionally explores American involvement in the development of the Brontë myth. This chapter expands on Miller’s work by examining the transatlantic development of the Brontë mythology. Miller’s definition of the slow cultural process of mythologizing is useful to this study: