330

Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny, by Heta Pyrhnen; pp. viii + 277. Toronto,
Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2010, $65.00, 42.00.

When Charlotte Bront had Jane Eyre compare a passageway in Thornfield to a

corridor in some Bluebeards castle (Jane Eyre [Norton, 2001], 91), she opened the
path of intertextual inquiry that Bluebeard Gothic pursues. As Heta Pyrhnen says,
readers of Jane Eyre (1847) who know the Bluebeard story and its variants will recognize
basic correspondences: a powerful rich man with a fresh young companion, a locked
chamber that conceals his shocking secret, the exposure of his criminality, and the

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 2

 331

heroines post-revelation escape. Pyrhnens study, however, goes far beyond these
basics. The two narratives interact complexly, she argues, and in ways that have gone
unperceived; furthermore, the master trope of Jane Eyre as Bluebeard Gothic
continues to inform the fictions of female authors in manifold ways (10). After laying
out her project in the introduction, Pyrhnen devotes a first chapter to aspects of Jane
Eyre as a Bluebeard story and four additional chapters to the permutations of these
intermingled narratives, examining texts that span three centuries. Her approach is
predominantly psychoanalytic, drawing heavily on the theories of Jacques Lacan and
his followers and on Sigmund Freuds ideas about identity formation.
For Pyrhnen, Jane is not the rebel who successfully channels her rage but
instead a hysteric (in the sense that she is vexed by the question whether she is a man
or a woman [238]) who transforms her psychic anguish into somatic symptoms.
Her body, having absorbed impressions whose significance she must not probe
openly..., speaks for and in spite of her, articulating her desires through dreams,
melancholy, fits of anxious excitation, and absences of consciousness (21). First
orphaned and then bereft of her surrogate father, Jane has within her psyche a crypt-
like space comparable to Bluebeards vault: it is a traumatic, forbidden region (23).
Her incarceration in the red room marks the onset of her hysteria. Aunt Reed, the
irrational maternal superego (27), has usurped the place of that symbolic but now
degraded father, which leads to identity confusion and to fantasies of origin, as when
Jane enters physical spaces with similar configurations of furniture. Thus the bed on
which Uncle Reed died becomes the seat of obscene enjoyment (39), replicated in
such later episodes as the rescue of Rochester from his burning bed. Rochester has a
parallel red room experience, but his scene of trauma occurs in Jamaica, leading to a
castration fantasy that he contests by flouting patriarchal law (32). Jane works through
her hysteria by mer[ging] with Bertha in Bluebeards chamber (46); then, by drawing
on what Lacan calls the discourse of the master (53), she engages the reader in a
complicit bond and so secures her own identity (54), even though the hysterics ques-
tioning voice is not entirely effaced (56).
A brief review cannot convey the intricacies of this argument or the multiple
psychiatric and folkloric sources on which Pyrhnen draws. Even a truncated sample
suggests, however, that readers indisposed to such theories will find this hysteric Jane
implausible. That said, Pyrhnen draws thought-provoking parallels to the Bluebeard
story. She shows in detail how both narratives link physical spaces to mental states, and
she points up correspondences undetected by earlier critics. For instance, where the
fairy-tale husband gives his wife a physical key to his secret chamber, Rochester gives
Jane a recalcitrant human key, Grace Poole. Bront also revises the endings of the tales
in the Bluebeard cycle: in them, either the master is killed and the heroine marries a
better man, or she marries a master cleared of suspicion. In contrast, Jane marries the
guilty Rochester, but after retribution and repentance.
The ensuing chapters are less Lacanian but still apply psychoanalytic, narra-
tological, and feminist approaches to a range of adaptations. In chapter 2, Pyrhnen
considers three narratives that pick up on the witnessing aspect of Jane Eyre and the
Bluebeard tale cycle, explaining their dynamics in terms of trauma theory. Narrating
enables the protagonist to make sense of her traumatic experience and share it; her
recovery requires an empathic audience that nonetheless maintains enough critical

winter 2012
332

distance for catharsis. Pyrhnens reading of Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and
especially her comparison of Rhyss Rochester to Bronts, puts this theory to effective
use. In chapter 3, she considers the masochism and perversity of four Bluebeard-based
romances. For example, in Daphne du Mauriers Rebecca (1938), the nameless second
wife takes the path Jane rejected by following Maxim de Winter into exile. Her Blue-
beard, however, is a masochist, and her discovery of his secret, the murder of his first
wife, not only turns her into an accomplice but also fuses her with the mother figure of
the masochistic fantasy (129). To Pyrhnen the second Mrs. De Winter is Maxs exter-
nalized superego (130), homosexually attracted to Rebecca and destructively enclosed
with Max in Bluebeards repetitious circuit (135). There is no suggestion that she
becomes her traumatized husbands protector. A fourth chapter considers two novels
that expand on religious issues implicit in Jane Eyre and the Bluebeard Gothic. Here the
emphasis is on fantasies of origin, scapegoating, and sacrifice. A fifth chapter, which
draws principally on Harold Blooms anxiety of influence theory, investigates the ways
in which Angela Carters Bluebeard stories upend their predecessors. A brief conclu-
sion highlights Pyrhnens key points about these adaptations.
For readers curious to know what has been done in Jane Eyres name and
unaware of the twists and turns of the Bluebeard Gothic, this book is certainly revelatory.
As Pyrhnen says, she has signposted it throughout by explaining more than once what
she will argue and then repeating what she has demonstrated. Reiteration, however,
cannot eradicate questions about her radical reconception of Bronts much-interpreted
protagonist or the partiality of subsequent readings: in her eagerness to demonstrate her
own hypothesis, how many aspects of these texts does she ignore? Pyrhnen frequently
refers to Maria Tatars Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and his Wives (2004). One
wishes that Bluebeard Gothic had been written with similar clarity.
Sue Lonoff
Cambridge, MA

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 2

390

Peter H. Hansen (phansen@wpi.edu) is Associate Professor of History at Worcester

Polytechnic Institute. His history of mountaineering and modernity is forthcoming
from Harvard University Press in 2013.

Dane Kennedy (dkennedy@gwu.edu) is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History

and International Affairs at George Washington University. His most recent book is The
Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005). He has just completed
a new book about British exploration in Africa and Australia.

Shompa Lahiri (s.lahiri@qmul.ac.uk) is Research Fellow in the Department of Geog-

raphy, Queen Mary University of London. Her latest research monograph is Indian
Mobilities in the West, 19001947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment (2010).

Denys P. Leighton (denys@aud.ac.in) is Visiting Professor in the School of Liberal

Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. He is the author of The Greenian Moment: T. H.
Green, Religion and Political Argument in Victorian Britain (2004) and editor of Lives of
Victorian Political Figures IV. Volume 2: Thomas Hill Green and William Morris (2009).
Current projects include From British to Global Idealism: Philosophy in the Idiom of
Late Colonial Cosmopolitanism, c. 18801960 and Victorian Politics and the Plebeian
Literary Canon.

Sue Lonoff is editor and translator of The Belgian Essays: Charlotte and Emily Bront
(1996), co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights (2009), and
new features editor of Wuthering Heights: A Penguin Enriched E-book Classic (2009). She
recently retired from the faculty of the Harvard University Extension School.

Benjamin Morgan (bjmorgan@uchicago.edu) is Assistant Professor of English at the

University of Chicago. His current book project, Material Pleasures: Victorians and the
Science of Beauty, is about the scientific study of aesthetic pleasure in the nineteenth
century, from David Ramsay Hay to Vernon Lee.

Chris Otter (otter.4@osu.edu) is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State

University. He is the author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in
Britain, 18001910 (2008).

Joanne Parker (j.m.parker@exeter.ac.uk) is a Lecturer in nineteenth-century litera-

ture at the University of Exeter. She works on nineteenth-century receptions of the
past, in particular Victorian medievalism. Her first monograph, Englands Darling: The
Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (2007) was published by Manchester University Press,
and an edited collection of essays, Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehis-
toric Monuments (2009), was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Robert L. Patten (patten@rice.edu), Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities at

Rice University, writes about nineteenth-century print culture. Recently he has
published articles on Phizs oeuvre in the Princeton University Library Chronicle and on

victorian studies / Volume 54, no. 2

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.