The Negotiation of Multiple Audiences of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Abstract

This study analyzes the way a novelist interacts with multiple audiences and finally produces a literary text by showing that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an outcome of the complex and dynamic interaction of readers, writers, and texts. Standing against the linear interpretation that Jane Eyre is a feminist text, showing spiritual growth of a female character, Jane Eyre, or reflection of British imperialism and white-centered feminism, I argue that both the positive and negative interpretations of Jane Eyre derive from Bronte’s negotiation of the corporate politics of multiple readers. To show this process in an efficient way, I analyze Jane Eyre in terms of its relationship with the different types of audiences: the imagined readers Brontë fictionalizes in her mind, readers in the text addressed as “readers”, and external readers who actually read the novel.