“I am not an angel”: Madness and addiction in neo-victorian appropriations of jane eyre

Abstract

Three neo-Victorian transformations of Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847)-Margot Livesey’s The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012), April Linder’s Jane (2010) and Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall’s web series Autobiography of Jane Eyre (2013-2014)-underscore how female characters who suffer from substance use disorders are understood to be mad, revealing anxieties specifically centred on women, sexuality and motherhood. These women are scapegoats, releasing the community from responsibility to protect them due to the perception that addiction is a form of insanity. This stigma runs deep enough to justify first neglecting and then murdering female characters who are addicts, whose deaths enable the romantic consummation of the heteronormative couple.