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Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's Weather Wisdom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Justine Pizzo
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Abstract

As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane's ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë‘s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women's biological “periodicity,” Brontë‘s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane's empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 84 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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