“On the authority of his tombstone”: The Double Bind of Memory in Jane Eyre and Great Expectations

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations are nineteenth-century English Bildungsromane featuring a tension between futurity and memory. As novels of formation recounting their protagonists’ progress towards selfhood and social integration, they are underlain by teleological structures. Yet, as they adopt the autobiographic form, these novels are predicated on memory, which is essential to convert an alleged sequence of lived events into a neatly-structured first-person narrative. In these retrospective texts, the very possibility of memory appears to be questioned and disrupted by the orphaned condition of their main characters. Such a disruption is foregrounded from the very beginnings of the novels, as the orphans, left to grapple with shreds of memory, engage with memory objects. The memory object is caught in a double bind, for it is the starting point of the narrative, which it pre-exists and authorizes. Yet, while doing so, the memory object is also reconstructed through it. To address this issue, this paper first focuses on the seemingly incompatible functions of the memory object as both authoritative pre-text and textual reconstruction. Then, it is shown that this reconstructing bias affects the subject, which is recast as object, thereby fusing remembrance and self-fashioning. Ultimately the essay examines how the protagonist’s progress paradoxically proceeds from the past as Pip and Jane must accommodate the objects of memory in the narratives of their lives.