Abstract

Although none of Brookner’s twenty-three novels to date actually re-write Jane Eyre as hypotext, Brontë’s novel is part of the pervasive intertextuality of Brookner’s text, addressed here as a monolithic fiction. This omnipresent intertextuality, which is the key to understanding the whole œuvre, serves to define the moral codes followed by the heroine and to make a philosophical metacommentary on contemporary culture. Brookner’s characters read and comment on Jane Eyre, the heroine takes Jane as a role model of virtue and the masculine characters are divided into those who resemble Mr Rochester and those who belong to the same category as St John Rivers. But Brookner’s text is a re-vision of Brontë’s novel, as of other novels set in the tradition of the classic realist text and of romance, which have Cartesian rationalism and Christianity as philosophical underpinnings. Brookner reverses the poetic justice of Jane Eyre, which is re-contextualised to fit a new moral landscape in which God is dead as ultimate justification for virtuous conduct. Whereas Jane Eyre can ultimately be read as a “Victorian romance” which preaches reason in the name of social order, by replacing the traditional happy ending by an unhappy ending in which virtue is punished and by foregrounding the disastrous effects of suppressing passion in the name of reason or self in the name of the other, Brookner announces the end of a philosophical humanistic tradition in which the subject / object or self / other opposition gives rise to a host of binary oppositions, the notion of centre validating the dominance of one of the terms of the hierarchy.