Female (self) authorship, Jane Eyre and Foucault

Foucault begins the essay “What Is an Author?” by stating that “author,” a “notion” whose very “coming into being” constitutes the “privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas” (101). Foucault states that in this essay, he will “deal solely with the relationship between text and author” the way that the text points back to the author, and appears “outside it and antecedes it” (101). Now, for a text to “antecede” its author means that it precedes it. Thus, the opening pages of this seemingly straightforward article which would purport to answer a straightforward question to simply define, “What Is an Author?” complicates the very idea of author by way of its relationship with the subject/object nature assumed of the author/text relationship. First comes the author; then, the text. In our traditional notion, the author comes first, then the text. For Foucault, the text precedes the author. This is a reversal of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, “Existence precedes essence.” Somehow, Foucault means to show his readers–through the act of authorship–that “Essence precedes existence.” No, that’s not quite right. For Foucault here, there is no “essence” but that which we psychologically assume the author to hold within him/her to be revealed through the act of authorship. No–we construct the essence around the very idea that something has been “authored” versus simply “written” by ascribing a higher value to acts that are “authored” than those other texts–such as letters, journal or diary entries–and these (Foucault does not state this outright) have traditionally been “womanly” forms of communication, the only ways in which it was socially acceptable for women to write in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which Foucault generalizes to such a large extent in this essay.

When Foucault asks in the title of this essay, “What Is an Author” the answer seems to be: It depends (on the historical context). Instead of defining an author by way of asking/answering the following (118), “How can a subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning?” the question becomes “How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse?” Answering this question along with the following questions regarding female authorship during the “eighteenth or nineteenth centuries” (110) which Foucault invokes would yield interesting insights regarding notions of what it meant to be an author during that time; who gets to determine what authorship actually means or entails if not the males in power. He continues: “What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator” (118). “Who can assume these various subject functions?” (120).

When Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, for instance, female authorship could not exist in the same “type of discourse” that male pieces of writing could; it could “assume” functions of domesticity and not the political by “obeying” a multitude of gender roles/norms. Bronte, at first, did not “assume these various subject functions” due to the fact that females were supposed to operate as objects, not subjects–an inequality that the character Jane Eyre herself rails against:

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!” (Jane Eyre ch. 23).

In Jane Eyre, we can see above the conditions that permitted authorship/subjecthood in the questions that Foucault invokes at the end of his “What Is an Author?” essay. The assumption was that those with “beauty,” “wealth” would have more control–”to make it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you”–than would those who were “poor,” “obscure,” “plain” and “little.” Thus, I begrudgingly agree that the questions that Foucault invokes are more valuable than “What difference does it make who is speaking?” (120); in this example, it would make no sense for Rochester to say this to Jane, and it makes all the difference that a “poor, obscure, plain, and little” girl spoke up to a member of the gentry class that she was not “a machine without feelings”–as someone who her whole life had been treated that way. In this act, the character and author herself are claiming the right to authorship. For Foucault, “The author’s name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. … When one says, ‘Aristotle,’ one employs a word that is the equivalent of one, or a series, of definite descriptions, such as ‘the author of Analytics,’ ‘the founder of ontology,’ and so forth” (105-6). The author’s name, for a man such as Aristotle, does not impose the same problems that an author’s name would pose for a woman such as Charlotte Bronte. While Aristotle’s texts must contend with the over-arching premise that its author is the father-of-such-and-such, Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre anonymously under “Currer Bell.” People were obsessed with whether Currer Bell was a woman or a man; (at least) one contemporary critic stated that if Jane Eyre was written by a man, it was a work of genius, whereas if it were written by a woman, it was detestable. Nonetheless, as a 2016 article in the Atlantic put it: “Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel helped introduce the idea of the ‘modern individual’—a surprisingly radical concept for readers at the time.” (Bronte participated, then, in defining the very notion of selfhood and individuation that Foucault railed against.

Writing, in this context, seems to have constituted the (1) right to authorship, to be heard and (2) to participate in the form of self-definition that other “subjects” were able to participate in–what Foucault actually deems as subsuming in that, for him, individuation is a lie. Jane Eyre and Bronte’s, and countless other women who dared to assert themselves as authors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, were undergoing what they thought was an uphill journey from objecthood to subjecthood, but since objecthood is all there is, this was a circular, pointless journey to no end. Absence, disappearance, and effacement are all terms that Foucault uses to describe the act of writing’s effect on the one who writes (105). Writing “goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits,” Foucault writes: It creates “a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears” (102). In Freudian death-drive fashion, Foucault describes writing not as an act of creation, but of anticreation (which I do not think is what the oppressed writers of yore had in mind):

“Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement which does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer’s very existence. … This relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the remark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing” (102-3).

If people therefore seek to deploy the act of authorship as a tool for empowerment, for Foucault, they are accomplishing the opposite by killing off their own agency. “It is not enough … that God and man of died a common death [see: Nietzsche]. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers” (105). In this regard, as readers, we are not unlike my dog who is constantly looking for chipmunks down the holes in our backyard. The chipmunks dug the holes to disappear into, to evade predators like her who “watch for the openings” that they disappear into, breach and uncover for us. Foucault wants us to ask not whether the chipmunk is in fact an author, but what patterns his or her digging has uncovered, and what that says about the power struggles/dynamics between them and my dog–I mean, between the object and the subject.

Notes

1    “The author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse; the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that one can say ‘this was written by so-and-so’ or ‘so-and-so is its author,’ shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status” (106). “The author’s name … does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it, instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being” (106).

2    I am not exactly certain what this parallel construction Foucault sets up of Ann Radcliffe, “founder” of the gothic novel, versus Freud, “father” of psychoanalysis, is meant to do: is it that one is a type/genre of art, the other, a discourse of science? That those whose debts lie to Ann Radcliffe in writing in her form/genre, are different than those who participate in psychoanalysis and reject Freud’s previous views? That one cannot, then, write a gothic novel that disagrees with Radcliffe’s notions of the gothic in the same way that another type of author might dispute texts of Freud’s? In my opinion, it is interesting to note that the gothic novel founded by Ms. Radcliffe might be seen as just as discursive as Mr. Freud’s, and were it not for her gender and genre in which she wrote–the novel–versus the more respectable form of authorship in which Freud was engaged, that the tenants that make up her psychological methods of using fiction to plumb the depths of the female psyche are no less timeless or worthy of discourse than Freud’s:  

“To say that in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one will find, as in Ann Radcliffe’s works, the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world expiate the evil done to him, and all the rest of it. On the other hand, when I speak of Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made possible not only a certain number of analogies, but also (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded. To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis … means that Freud made possible a certain number of divergences–with respect to his own texts, concepts, and hypotheses–that all arise from the psychoanalytic discourse itself” (114-15).

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, pp 101-120.

Semenza, Gregroy. Graduate Studies for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities, 2nd Edition. Palgrave Macmillan: 2010.