“A Downright Eve”: Rethinking the Creation Myth Through Lilith Figures in Jane Eyre

Abstract

This article explores how Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) engages with the creation myth in its depiction of Jane as an autonomous Eve and subsequently complicates this reading by analyzing Bertha as a powerful yet ruinous Lilith figure. Scholars from Gilbert and Gubar (1979) to Nora Gilbert (2016) have treated themes of female resistance in Jane Eyre as revisionist allusions to the traditional Miltonic Adam and Eve story and, less frequently, to the often-villainized Lilith archetype. Though Brontë affords Jane-as-Eve the freedom to rise above male domination as a white, Christian woman, she denies that same feminist empathy to Bertha-as-Lilith, who is dehumanized and scapegoated into a moral boundary for resistant women. Brontë’s feminist revision of the creation myth grapples with gendered injustice and utilizes the Eve figure as a symbol of equality, but also intertwines Bertha’s “otherness” as a racialized woman with her embodiment of the subversive Lilith. Jane’s Eve has been read as a symbol of female autonomy and deliverance, but Bertha-as-Lilith is also a resistant figure who both complicates and transforms Jane’s emancipation despite being vilified and othered.