"I have alluded to him, Reader". Categorising literary references in Jane Eyre (1847)

Abstract

This essay examines the use of references to real books within the narrative of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Jane Eyre is one of the most densely allusive novels of its time, which is well-documented, but there is a limited focus on the use of allusions and references woven into its narrative, as opposed to the references woven into the textual side of the prose itself. This essay aims to define the narrative book-reference and suggest which literary qualities might characterize it with a basis in the way Ruth Mead defines literary references in her dissertation Wordsworth’s Poetry of Allusion (1998). Mead’s definitions are treated as a system of categories of literary references, to which ‘book-reference’ is suggested as an additional category. Mead defines the differences between categories of references based on their physical appearance in the text and their allusive potential and therefore these are the qualities by which book-references are defined. The essay examines the five most explicit instances of book-references in Jane Eyre and the surrounding context of the scenes the excerpts are taken from, as well as relevant sections of the literary works that Jane Eyre references. The investigation finds that textually, the book-reference is defined by its physical presence in the narrative, but may be accompanied by quotations from or descriptions of the referent text. Extratextually, the book-reference may carry allusive, symbolic, intertextual, or characterising traits depending on the textual elements it is accompanied by, but it consistently has implications for the meaning of the text. The end result is a suggestion for how to categorise book-references as a type of literary reference, accompanied by suggestions for how to interpret them textually and extratextually. It is suggested that this system can be further used to analyse literary references and their value.