This project focuses on how the ideological and stylistic strategies that Frederick Douglass used in his first autobiography influenced Charlotte Brontë’s immensely popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Subsequently, Jane Eyre’s widespread influence created a subsection of mid-nineteenth-century reform novels that contain “the rebellious aesthetic,” a narrative style in which authors imported the aesthetic aspects of rebellion from Douglass by-way-of Brontë without considering how different representational strategies might be necessary for different political projects. The first part of this project explains Douglass’s influence on Brontë, and how Brontë’s novel subsequently reproduces the aesthetics of (rather than actually imagines or incites) rebellion. The rest of this project tracks how Douglass’s rhetorical strategies were refracted through Jane Eyre into a set of novels written between the aftermath and enactment of the British Slavery Abolition Act (1833) and the end of the American Civil War (1865). Techniques created by authors of slave narratives came to shape the way white authors represented different political projects. Ultimately, when these authors attempted to portray other social issues using the style of Douglass’s narrative (mediated through Brontë’s novel), the rebellious aesthetic limited how they could imagine or portray different forms of social transformation.
Lacey Nicole Muckle (Thu,) studied this question.