The Colonial Other in Bronte's Jane Eyre and Conrad's Heart of Darkness Danial Abufarha College

In Marina MacKay’s The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel, she discusses the types of characters used in a novel in light of the humanists and structuralists debate. She explains that humanist critics tend to give characters a human dimension that one can identify or even sympathize with (MacKay 74). They describe characters as “hypothetical” human beings that exist outside the text, hence they tend to form emotional attachments to invented people. Contrariwise, structuralist critics trivialize the inclination of some people to emphasize the characters’ plausible or life-likeness humanity, regarding that as “critically irrelevant” and simple-minded (MacKay 74). The structuralists, or formalists, are more concerned with the architecture of the novel, arguing that characters are a mere function in a narrative. In the discussion of the colonial Other, Bronte’s Jane Eyre portrays the colonial Other as a function, whereas in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the colonials are portrayed as both functions and persons. This can be seen in Jane Eyre’s relentless demonization of Bertha Mason, and Marlow’s ambivalence towards the natives.

Given the depiction of the colonial Other in Bronte’s realist novel, Bertha Mason would be analyzed, in...