Jane Eyre
...I. "Speak I Must"
With the childhood declaration, "Speak I must" Jane resolves to narrate her own story (68), to explain and vindicate her life, to exercise her voice and participate in the "joyous conversational murmur" (198). In spite of her extreme youth, her habits of quiescence and submission (resistance was "a new thing for me," she readily admits [44]), her need to be loved and approved, even if only by her oppressors, Jane stands up for herself and for fairness. "I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale," Jane warns Mrs. Reed. "People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful! ... If any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty" (69,68). Jane experiences her first moment of self-narration, in conflict with the official version of her life given by Mrs. Reed, as a moment of "unhoped--for liberty," "the first victory I had gained," "the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt" (69).
No wonder, then, that Jane Eyre has come to occupy a position of privilege in the feminist canon.[1] The novel is read as a "revolutionary manifesto of the subject" (Cora Kaplan 173). Jane's value as a feminist heroine is "figured in the ability to tell (if not direct) her own story" (Poovey 140; see also Homans, Peters). The story of Jane's voice, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, is "a pattern for countless others ... a story of enclosure and escape ... of [the] difficulties Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and overcome" (33839).[2] Reading Jane's voice as a "challenge [to the] limits on female authority" and "the trope par excellence of power" (Lanser 177, 183), a tradition of feminist criticism has constructed its romance with Jane Eyre by reading it as a model of resistance, not...
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