Endnotes

1  For Jane’s development in terms of anger and psychological doubles, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, 2000): 339, 360-1; Elaine Showalter, “Charlotte Brontë: Feminine Heroine,” New Casebooks: Jane Eyre, Ed. Heather Glen (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997): 68-77, 68; Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 140-1. For her ambiguous class status, see Poovey 127, 137, Jina Politi, “Jane Eyre Class-ified,” New Casebooks: Jane Eyre. Ed. Heather Glen (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997): 78-91, 79, and Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 96. The status of Rochester’s creole wife Bertha Mason is central to debates about the novel’s racial politics and often paired with Jane’s own references to harems and slaves. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985): 243-61, 247-8; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 28; Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996): 74, 86; and Carolyn Vellenga Berman, “Undomesticating the Domestic Novel: Creole Madness in Jane Eyre.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 32:4 (Winter, 1999): 267-96, 276. Many critics see Jane as complicit with conservative disciplinary systems of middle-class, patriarchal, and imperialist ideology. See Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995): 110; Politi 90; Joseph A. Dupras, “Tying the Knot in the Economic Warp of Jane Eyre.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26:2 (1998): 395-408, 399; and Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): e.g. 32, 35, 50.

2  In contrast to Helena Michie, I find this episode in Jane’s life to be of utmost importance. See Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): 17.

3  See, for instance, Dianne F. Sadoff, “The Father, Castration, and Female Fantasy in Jane Eyre,” in Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996): 525-6.

4  For the colonialist significance of the “Indian ink” she uses, see Meyer 93-4. For Eyre as “heir” see Nina Schwartz, “No Place Like Home: The Logic of the Supplement in Jane Eyre,” in Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996): 551-2 and Janet Gezari, Charlotte Brontë and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992): 61..

5  In theory, if not always in practice, the legal doctrine of coverture prevented wives from earning separate income or entering into contracts without their husbands’ consent. See Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 8, 22. As Joanne Bailey and others have noted, however, “in practice coverture was often ignored or bypassed.” See “Favoured or Oppressed? Married Women, Property, and ‘Coverture’ in England, 1660-1800,” Continuity and Change 17:3 (2002): 351-372, 353, 366, 368; Margot Finn, “Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760-1860,” The Historical Journal 39:3 (Sept., 1996): 703-722, 707. Courts of equity offered one exception for wealthy families (Shanley 25), but no evidence suggests that Jane’s uncle settled the money as her separate estate. See also Finn, “Women” 705-6.

6  The vast majority of women’s wills before the nineteenth century were made by widows and single women (Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England [London: Routledge, 1993]: 204).

7  See “Capabilities and Disabilities of Women,” The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review (Jan. 1, 1857), 51.

8  See Shanley 103. Even the Act of 1882 did not give wives full contractual or testamentary powers (Shanley 127). Ruth Perry has recently suggested that women’s economic standing diminished over the past hundred years, as primogeniture increasingly cut them off from family land and wealth and made them more dependent on new, marital ties. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 64, 4, 34, 40, 47, 212. For the way that common law diminished women’s claims to property, see also Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): e.g. 27-36, 129-30, 217. Other historians have argued, however, that this focus on common law obscures continuity and possible growth in women’s economic standing during this period. See Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 4; Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” The Historical Journal 36:2 (June, 1993): 383-414, 405; Finn, “Women” 720.

9  Shanley 25-6.

10  Meyer 93; Freedgood 34-5, 50; Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008): 103, 108.

11  Primogentiture is invoked throughout Jane Eyre; see John Reed’s claim that “all the house belongs to me, or will do” (8), Blanche Ingram’s motivation for fortune-hunting (136), and Rochester’s initial pursuit of Bertha’s wealth. Although other scholars have argued that women continued to receive more equitable divisions of family wealth (Erickson 63, 78), cases of intestacy favored eldest sons, and “[t]he wealthier a man was, the smaller the proportion of his estate left to his widow, and also to his daughters” (Erickson, 26, 19). Like coverture, however, primogeniture was never the only option for women, even if it was the one overwhelmingly prescribed by common law. Eliza Reed’s ability to “secure” her own fortune (200) against her brother’s gambling losses suggest that she, too, has separate and sufficient provisions, despite the consolidation of land in her brother’s hands (see Erickson 77). By similarly grounding Jane’s new wealth “in the English funds” (325) rather than in land, the novel supports Amanda Vickery’s observation that even women without “real” property might comfortably receive other, moveable goods instead. See Vickery, “Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751-81,” Consumption and the World of Goods, Eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993): 294.

12  This is one of many secrets Jane keeps from Rochester. See Lisa Sternlieb, “Jane Eyre: ‘Hazarding Confidences,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53:4 (March 1999): 473, 475, 477; Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008): 85-6.

13  Corbett 108.

14  See 337, 339. The obvious explanation for St. John’s fraternal inadequacy is that he wants Jane as a wife, a relation that would secure him a helpmeet (and double his wealth). But it is also part of his larger mistrust of contentment in blood kinship, his desire for Jane to look “beyond [… ] sisterly society” (333).

15  Naomi Tadmor has shown how kinship names defied rigid classification in eighteenth-century England, and throughout the nineteenth century “sister” served as a flexible shorthand for affective, religious, professional, and erotic alliances, as well as for biological kinship. See Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 152. According to Tadmor, individuals used kinship titles to “incorporate new members into his or her kinship group and announce their incorporation” (139); however, despite gesturing toward “much broader relationships of amity, sympathy, and fellowship” (159), Tadmor’s examples focus primarily on degrees of blood and marriage (144)—a different case from Jane’s transformation of cousins into siblings. Corbett notes, “kinship is and has always been a made thing, a human artifact, rather than (as some Victorian anthropologists would argue) a naturally occurring phenomenon based in blood” (60). For erotic uses of “sister,” see Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004): xxvii, 50.

16  “A gift that is not returned can become a debt […]; the only recognized power […] is obtained by giving” (Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990]: 126). Linda Schlossberg notes the doubly-dependent status of nineteenth-century orphan children; see “ ‘The Low, Vague Hum of Numbers’: The Malthusian Economies of Jane Eyre,” Victorian Literature and Culture 29:2 (2001): 489-506, 497-8. Jane’s insistence on reciprocity is part of a larger pattern of exchange in the novel that recalls her earlier experiences under obligations to the Reeds and reminds us that she is not overwhelmingly eager to form close alliances with women in general—with Bertha, for instance, or with Adèle—if they have not previously benefited her.

17  The novel is most likely set between 1798-1808 and narrated a decade later. See Judith Raiskin, ed., Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999): 31 n.7. Scholars also date the novel through its references to publications such as Scott’s Marmion in 1808 or the second volume of Bewick’s The History of British Birds, in1804.

18  During this time, new income taxes were also levied in order to create wartime revenue: Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England from the Earliest Times to the Year 1885, Vol. II: Taxation, From the Civil War to the Present Day. 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. and New York: 15 East 16th Street, 1888): 230, 262, 325; Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 32-3. “Inheritance” or “death” duties encompassed separate probate, legacy, and succession taxes until they were consolidated in a single Estate Account Duty in 1880-1 (Dowell Vol. 3:131; Daunton 225). Probate duty preceded distribution; legacy and succession duties were paid by the estate’s heirs. Max West, The Inheritance Tax in Studies in History Economics and Public Law, Vol. 4., Eds. The University Faculty of Political Science of Columbia College (New York: Columbia College, 1893-4): 171-310, 185. Although inheritance taxes were nothing new to England or to Europe, they had been studiously evaded for centuries, making them unreliable sources of income for a war-strapped nation. See West 181. British acts from 1694 through 1780 taxed only the documentation, and were frequently evaded through failures to record the transfer (West 207; Daunton 226). See also Jeremy Bentham, “Supply without Burden” (1795), The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, Vol. II. (Edinburgh: William Tait, and London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1843): 592. A more rigorous system was implemented in 1796. The new law taxed transfers of moveable property (not merely its documentation), at different rates depending on the relation of testator and heir. In 1805 the tax was extended to include direct descendants (Dowell, 3:134-5).

19  Nieces paid higher rates than daughters. The rate for cousins was even greater. (In 1796, a niece or sister would pay 2%, but a cousin would pay 3%. See Dowell, 3:133.) Jane lessens her cousins’ extra duty, if only rhetorically, by simultaneously shifting their degree of kinship and their tax bracket. By gifting her property during her life, she may have found a way for them to evade legacy taxes entirely. To prevent similar evasion through deathbed gifts, gifts of personal property made within a year of the donor’s death were also taxed. See West 209, also Dowell 3:131-3. Gifts in general were not taxed; several taxes on transfers of property were proposed but not passed in the first decades of the century (see Dowell 2: 218, 232, and 296-7).

20  Bentham 586. Bentham defines “near relations” as those “within the degrees termed prohibited with reference to marriage.” See Corbett (esp. ch. 3) for Victorian debates about those prohibited degrees. See also West 280-1.

21  Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. Vol. II (1848). 5th Ed. (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1862): 387 (Book 5, Chapter 2, Section 3). Mill favors inheritance tax over income tax, reinstated in 1842 after 26 years. See also Daunton 224, 229-232; West 290.

22  St. John, who cannot conceive of exchange among equals, associates Christian sacrifice with unrepayable debts.

23  Mill 5: 384.

24  Mill 380 (Book 5, Chapter 2, Section 1).

25  Mill 380.

26  See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977): 152. Mary Wilson Carpenter discusses the common reading of Romney’s blinding as “a metaphor for feminist vengeance directed at masculinist power” (55) in “Blinding the Hero,” Differences 17:3 (Fall 2006): 52-68. For Fraiman as for others, the ending of Jane Eyre is ambivalent (116-8).

27  In answer to Rochester’s comment that she “delight[s] in sacrifice” (379), Jane protests that there is nothing unequal about their exchange.

28  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Hall (London: Routledge, 1990): 16; see also Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 138.

29 See René Girard, “Mimesis and Violence” in The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996): 11-2; Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991): 58.

30  See also Carpenter 64-5.

31  Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 96, 107. See also 97-109.

32  Derrida, Gift 101, 109.

33 For this insight about the dissolution of selfhood in Jane Eyre, I am indebted to Gezari 82.

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