Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette Robyn R. Wathol Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 4, Ni 1996), 857-875. teenth Century (Autumn, Stable URL hitp://links jstor-org/siisici=0039-3657% 28 199623% 2936%3A 4% 3C857%3ADGDGI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 is currently published by Rice University. ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hutp:/uk,jstor.org/abouvterms.himl. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obiained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of journal or multiple copies oF articles, and you ‘may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use, Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupsfuk,jstor.org/journalsirice.hml Each copy of any part of @ JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission. STOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org, hup//uk.jstororg/ Sat Oct 30 11:17:00 2004#136 (1906) ISS 0.8657 Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette ROBYN R. WARHOL The trope of “doubleness” is everywhere in feminist critics’ commentaries upon women writers. Figures of doubleness find their way into feminist theory through sources ranging from Luce Irigaray’s vision of female sexuality and language as emanating from “two lips in continuous contact,” to the Lacan- ian. psychoanalytic emphasis on split subjectivity, to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s image of the Victorian woman writer who withstands the “anxiety of authorship” by seeming to conform to conventional expectations for femininity while simul- taneously subverting them, to Elaine Showalter’s assertion that “women’s fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story.”! From feminist approaches as diverse as psychoanalysis, sociocultural critique, Bakhtinian dialogics and narratology, formulations like “double text” (Mary Jacobus), “doubled sight” (Sidonie Smit 1g from bell hooks), “double-voiced discourse” Lanser), and “double speaking and double seeing” (Elizabeth Langland) arise. Doubleness is figured as both feminine and feminist, as a strategy for negotiating differences between and within male and female, center and margin, inside and outside, public and private, realism and romance. To be “double” is to resist cate- gorization as one thing or the other; to invoke “doubleness” is, to address binary oppositions without resting comfortably in either of the two terms being opposed. As Frances L. Restuccia Robyn R. Warhol is professor of English and director of Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont, She is currently working on a poetics of serial Fiction.858 DOUBLENESS IN BRONTE putsit, “[F]eminism has no choice but doubleness.”* Inasmuch as feminist theory seeks to undermine Western culture’s penchant for binary opposition (and the inevitably resulting hierarchies), it makes sense that doubleness—a trope figuring binaries not as opposed, but as coexisting—would appeal to feminists seeking to describe women’s potentially subversive writing practice. With an eye to the importance of doubling for feminist crit- icism, I propose to revisit here an analytic method that relies heavily on the positing of binary oppositions, namely struc- turalist narratology. Narratology offers carefully defined terms to describe opposing features of narration, such as “seeing” (point of view) and “speaking” (voice). Feminist narratology revises the structuralist origins of this analytical method by plac- ing observations about narration in a specific historical and cultural context and by considering the impact gender can have upon narrative structures. Through close readings of passages from Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villete (1853), 1 want to show how a Victorian woman novelist exploits possibil- ities for doubleness that narratology’s categories can bring into the foreground, In so doing, 1am advocating the idea that fei nist women exert agency in their cultural productions, or—to put it another way—that Victorian women novelists like the Brontés are not so much unconsciously “written by” gender codes as they are actively engaged in rewriting them, Tam argu- ig that narratological analysis is a means of making visible women authors’ activism in exposing and complicating oppres- sive binary categories within culture. Those categories include the hierarchical opposition of masculinity and femininity in Victorian England, as well as myriad other pairings, including the opposition of realism and romance in literary history. 1 think the doubleness of “speaking” and “seeing” in Broni first-person novels can help account for a long-standing critical problem with these texts: to what genre do they properly belong? Whereas critics have argued that a tension exists in these novels between realism and Gothic romance,* I will argue that the two genres are not so much in competition as in continuous oscil- lation with each other, serving to double each other at crucial moments of both narratives. Charlotte Bronté’s novels seem to lend themselves especially ‘well to feminist tropes of doubleness, as critics of Jane Eyre and Villette repeatedly invoke dualities, oppositions, and doublings in their interpretations of the texts. To mention just a few here: Nina Auerbach analyzes the double nature of personality