1. (Un-)Becoming Animal in Anonymous’ The Woman of Colour (1808)

Anonymously published, The Woman of Colour is a fairly recently re-discovered epistolary novel, re-published by Broadview Press in 2007. Written in 1808, it was published to respectable acclaim ‘in a year that was, quite literally, bursting at the seams with new long prose fictions’ (Dominique, 2008: 20). It received three reviews in contemporary journals, more than Mansfield Park, for example, which ‘was never critically reviewed by Austen’s contemporaries’ (see Claudia Johnson, cited in Dominique, 2008: 19). With the exception of E.M. McClelland’s mentioning the novel in 1967 and his subsequent work Impossible Purities (chapter 1), Dominique tells us that the novel has been largely forgotten about, including in such contexts where critics have sought to chronicle stories that centre on and/or are written by black women. The Woman of Colour is told through the eyes of Olivia Fairfield, a Jamaican, mixed-race heiress. Olivia travels to England to marry her cousin Augustus Merton, which is the condition stated in her dead father’s (a white plantation owner’s) will for her securing her inheritance. If the cousin rejects marriage, the money will go to Augustus’ already-married brother on whose benevolence Olivia will depend.

Narrating her journey across the Atlantic and her experiences in England to her governess in a series of letters, Olivia’s account subverts and openly challenges some of the racial hierarchies that sustain the slavery system. It illuminates and valorises the position of a black woman by picturing her as a fierce critic of biological racism, and she is positioned in a female tradition of doing so. Olivia’s mother, Marcia, is brought to Jamaica from Africa as a young woman and is purchased there by Olivia’s father. A proper novel of sentiment, The Woman of Colour ennobles Marcia, the slave, through attributing to her refined forms of emotional expression and kinship with African royalty (Marcia is described as ‘sprung from a race of native kings and heroes’; Anonymous, 2008: 54). In a similar vein, plantation owner Fairfield (attracted to Marcia for these qualities) is characterised as a particularly benevolent, humane master whose equally refined character transforms Marcia into a grateful slave: ‘his kindness, his familiarity, his humanity, soon gained him an interest in [Marcia’s] grateful heart!’ and she ‘fell a victim to gratitude’ (54). As the two are joined in romance, Mr. Fairfield’s interest in Marcia makes him want to share religion and knowledge, ‘pour[ing] into her attentive and docile ear, those truths for which the soul of Marcia panted’ (54). The unintended effect is that Marcia realises the extent to which their unwed union violates the Christian faith, refusing any further intimacy and thus challenging the logic that puts her into the subordinate position. In her daughter Olivia’s words, ‘The scholar taught her master—The wild and uncivilised African taught a lesson of noble self-denial and self-conquest to the enlightened and educated European’ (54–55).

As these lines already suggest, Olivia has an astute awareness of the extent to which colonial discourse strategically flexibilises the being of black(ened) others. These others are posited as ‘wild’ and, as such, as blurring the human-animal divide whilst remaining sufficiently ‘human’ to need saving by white men from heathendom and instil admiration and lust in white masters (who would commonly not consider themselves as committing sodomy; see Seshadri’s [2012] discussion of Cavell, Kindle Locations 193–94). Indeed, the sentence beginning ‘The wild and uncivilized African etc.’ carries a note of cynicism, subversive appropriation, and trickster discourse, as the fact that Marcia is an intelligent, moral woman—more so than her master—and capable of teaching him, exposes how (and which) colonial dichotomies are upheld in line with the interests to white power. As such, Olivia can be seen as countering the posthumanising forces of colonialism (which time and again will blur human-animal-boundaries in the interests of whiteness) and as acting herself as a counter-posthumaniser of sorts: she stresses continuity and kinship between the white ‘master race’ and those inferiorised in exactly those places where black people are positioned as allegedly animal or ‘more animal’. Accordingly, whilst the novel also affirms a number of imperial myths that play into the hand of white paternalism (such as the tropes of the grateful slave and humane slave master), Olivia has already begun to unsettle some of the conceived discursive strategies that are part and parcel of colonialism’s seat in white supremacy. This sense of unsettling is heightened as readers learn that Mr. Fairfield will not marry Marcia though he loves her, because he worries about the social repercussions of such a move—another moment in which the ideological colonial force of selective flexibilisation manifests itself. In any case, Marcia dies giving birth to Olivia, thus relieving Mr. Fairfield of the vexed marriage question, and he receives Olivia as his daughter whose status in the white-human family network is thus more securely anchored than her mother’s. In a number of situations, Fairfield exhibits his ‘generous intention’, such as when instilling a high opinion of her mother in Olivia and also when seeking to ‘secure to his child a proper protector in a husband [in England], and to place her far from scenes which were daily hurting her sensibility and the pride of human nature!’ (55). While receiving her father’s comparatively ‘progressive’ (and this is, of course, a very relative term) views on race and kinship positively on the whole, Olivia nevertheless remains critical of the marriage proposition. As she tells her governess, Mrs. Milbanke, she would much rather stay in Jamaica, her ‘native island’ (56).

As the plot unfolds, Olivia begins to increasingly overtly trouble various aspects of the taken-for-granted norms of valuation in place at the time of the novel’s publication, including perceiving England as a superior attraction or centre by default and the father as a naturally righteous authority. During her passage to England, Olivia is wooed by a besotted suitor, Mr. Honeywood, who, when wondering if he will ever see her again, is told: ‘We can speak with certainty of nothing […] and you must remember, that from the moment when I set my foot on your land of liberty, I yield up my independence—my uncle’s family are then to be the disposers of my future fate’ (66). Olivia here expresses awareness of her conjoined racial and gender inequality as perfidious, laying open her impatience with the fact that England, celebrated as a ‘land of liberty’, bestows liberty only on a select few. She also clearly signals that these matters of personal freedom and dependence weigh more than those of the nature that Honeywood is pursuing, i.e. romantic or domestic entanglement. This sense repeatedly re-emerges during the novel. Arriving in England, Olivia learns that her intended husband, Augustus Merton, is a decent though preoccupied man whom she can love and who is kind to her. Augustus’ father, too, appears to be fond of his prospective daughter-in-law. By contrast, Augustus’ brother, George Merton, and his wife, Mrs. George Merton, are a source of continuous hostility that Olivia repeatedly challenges. In the so-called ‘rice scene’ (Dominique, 2008: 28), Mrs. Merton’s servant carries in a plate of rice that Mrs. Merton has specifically ordered for Olivia’s breakfast, and Mrs. Merton explains that ‘I understood that people of your—I thought that you almost lived upon rice […] and so I ordered some to be got,—for my own part, I never tasted it in my life, I believe’ (Anonymous, 2008: 77). Preparing Mrs. Milbanke for her rebuke, Olivia’s letter reads ‘this was evidently meant to mortify your Olivia; it was blending her with the poor negro slaves of the West Indies! It was meant to show her, that, in Mrs. Merton’s idea, there was no distinction between us—you will believe that I could not be wounded at being classed with my brethren!’ (original emphasis). Again, Olivia exhibits sharp insight into how Mrs. Merton seeks to reinforce the social and racial distance between herself and Olivia as the descendent of a black woman. It is Mrs. Merton’s clear intention to move Olivia down on the scale of both entitlement and privilege by associating her with her black ‘brethren’, triggering shame, dread, and self-subordination in Olivia. Keenly aware of this, and again moving ‘post’ colonial views of privileged white human being, Olivia communicates her pride in her kinship and rebuttal of Mrs. Merton’s affective-racial politics:

I, perfectly unabashed, and mistress of myself, pretended to take the mischievous officiousness, or impertinence (which you will), of Mrs. Merton in a literal sense; and, turning towards her, said,—“I thank you for studying my palate, but I assure you there is no occasion; I eat just as you do, I believe: and though, in Jamaica, our poor slaves (my brothers and sisters, smiling) are kept upon rice as their chief food, yet they would be glad to exchange it for a little of your nice wheaten bread here;” taking a piece of baked bread in my hand. (Anonymous, 2008: 77–78; original emphasis)

By eating the bread and emphasising that her ‘brothers and sisters’ would very much enjoy doing likewise—clearly also a Christian rebuke—Olivia illuminates how absurdly and yet cruelly alleged culinary preference is instrumentalised here for the sake of distinguishing superior from inferior human being. The scene is followed by Olivia also challenging the racist views of little George, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Merton, who rejects Olivia and her maid, Dido, as ‘nasty’ and ‘dirty’ (80). Again referencing the Christian belief-system, Olivia suggests that black and white are created equal, and illustrates this to the child in the following way: ‘“Those black slaves are, by some cruel masters, obliged to work like horses,” said [Olivia]; “but God Almighty created them men, equal with their masters, if they had the same advantages, and the same blessings of education”’. To this, little George replies: ‘“But what right have their naughty masters got to make them slave like horses? for I’m sure they can’t like it—I shouldn’t like to work like mamma’s coach-horses, and stand shivering for hours in the wet and cold, as they do”’ (80; original emphases). Olivia here clearly holds on to the human-animal distinction, insisting that black slaves share human kinship with white masters, both groups having been created as ‘men’, which delegitimises their treatment ‘like horses’, or animals. For little George, this is when the penny drops, but it does not drop in line with Olivia’s own rationale. Little George is unable to grasp the concept of racial equality in and for itself, or through empathising with the slaves. It is through empathising with the horses—with them ‘stand[ing] shivering for hours in the wet and cold’ (like his Mama’s horses)—and as such through ‘becoming animal’, that he can understand the injustice of slavery. He learns to relate to fellow black humans after relating, first, to the horses that pull his mama’s coach. What might be read as childlike innocence—or, perhaps, veganist egalitarianism—in little George, is probably more aptly understood as a case of early-internalised racism. Little George’s gut instinct betrays how colonialism fosters empathy unevenly, making those internalising its logics as children channel their fellow feeling more easily towards horses than black(ened) colonial subjects. In this scene, then, if Olivia seeks to equalise white and black people as humans (thereby herself moving the posts of privileged humanity ‘post’ conceived notions of white privilege), then little George acts even more overtly as a posthumanist, something that he can only do because he has been exposed to racist-colonial ideology from an early age. His kinship is here extended to think ‘white human, horse, black human, and back’, flexibilising those categories according to—and beyond—Olivia’s instruction. This passage, then, can be read not only as a poignant reminder of the centrality of moving the posts of privileged humanness of early nineteenth-century colonial discourse (Olivia), but also of the pitfalls of thinking posthumanism without proper attention to questions of racial inequality. Differently put, and harking back to those posthuman theories that centre on human-animal relations, (white) posthumanist readers, when reading little George’s response, might be inspired to ask themselves one question: why is it that, at least for the past two decades, fellow-feeling with animals has come so much more naturally and easily—has filled so much more page space—than fellow-feeling with black or brown people?

Olivia marries Augustus Merton and they live together happily enough for a while when it materialises that Augustus is already married to a wife whom he himself had presumed dead (a jealous ploy of Mrs. Merton and her friend, Miss Danby). Olivia lays no blame on Augustus and wishes him, his wife, and their two-year-old son (also unknown to Augustus) well. She secures a small annuity from George Merton in exchange for relinquishing her fortune without giving any trouble. After living on her own for a while in Wales (and rejecting Honeywood a second time), Olivia decides to go back to Jamaica to engage herself in charity work, as she would have initially preferred to do. This decision has been read as a self-directed and empowering move (Dominique, 2008: 41), and alternatively as one that conveniently rids the narrative, and those vexed white protagonists, off Olivia’s presence (Salih, 2010). The novel has also been read as staging how slave money is purified by moving through the realm of female domesticity and marriage, rather than being transacted directly between men, in this case, Olivia’s father and Mr. Merton (Reed, 2019). In this way, men can uphold public personas, even self-identities, of benevolent and virtuous virility despite contact with (and thriving from) money yielded through the toil of black and brown bodies. I would add that, despite its considerable political significance of voicing abolitionist counter-discourse, The Woman of Colour can similarly be seen as engaging in a misogynist replacement of colonial crime by positing Mrs. Merton as a power-hungry, monstrous female who, of all the white characters in the novel, acts in the most hostile and morally corrupt way toward Olivia. This implies that it is really women like her, and not the colonial system or white men, who inflict damage on the protagonist—another moment in which white virility and male virtue are protected and even celebrated. In a different context (a discussion of Le Fanu’s Carmilla), Amanda Paxton (2019) has aptly spoken of the ‘parasitic nature of hereditary patriarchal lineage, with its dependence upon the female body as a host for offspring’ (6). In The Woman of Colour (and other novels with similar plots), this ‘offspring’ would be the economic and symbolic advantages bestowed on white patriarchy through the travels and travails of the bodies of Olivia and Mrs. Merton.

Despite these issues, The Woman of Colour is surely a remarkable novel for its time, lead as it is by a black female protagonist who eloquently and persuasively challenges racial stereotypes. The novel carries a historical, critical posthuman impetus that criss-crosses colonial-normative perceptions of the ‘human’, challenges as nonsensical the system of hierarchisation that it supports, and forges continuities between white masters and their black(ened) counterparts. While Olivia’s diversification of the human, from today’s perspective, could be considered more antihumanist, it is important to stress that her resistance against white signification and identification stretches privileged humanity considerably and beyond the established status quo at the time in which the novel was written. Meanwhile, little George’s affective experiments—learning empathy with slaves through empathy with horses, which comes to him more naturally—resonate with current notions of posthumanism insofar as his ruminations extend his human being beyond white humanity and into the non-human. Little George ‘becomes animal’ to establish a connection with Jamaican slaves; understanding that animals—horses—suffer, he can grasp that slaves must be suffering, too. As suggested, this kind of posthumanisation is the blood-child of colonial racism, betraying George’s more intuitive relationality with horses from which he then extrapolates.

With its own discourse on (post-)human being, The Woman of Colour can do much to diversify posthumanist thought. The novel is not only a strong reminder that (critical) posthumanist inquiry can indeed gain much from historicising ‘posthumanisation’ and ‘posthuman being’, but also that this necessarily requires a (further) flexibilisation of the still-powerful dichotomy of anti-humanism vs. posthumanism, a dichotomy that remains ill-suited for grasping, specifically, colonial forms of posthumanisation and its strategic fluctuation between humanising and animalising the colonised. In addition, the dynamics described in The Woman of Colour trigger important questions regarding posthumanism’s own normalised, primary relationality with, to put it in Haraway’s words, ‘plants, animals, microbes, people’ (Haraway et al., 2015: 557). Clearly, colonial literature pursues its own customary movements into the realms of the non-human and/or ‘animal’ whilst exhibiting a non-relationality or less-relationality (á la little George) toward black(end) or otherwise ‘deviant’ bodies (the poor, the mad, the queer, the less able-bodied, women). As such, posthumanist relationality and its seemingly progressive prioritisation of ‘plants, animals, microbes’ over ‘people’—where stripped of a historicising, critical discourse on posthumanisation and (post-)human being—risks resonating with, and invigorating, the uncanny colonial echoes steadily borne toward the present from Europe’s imperial centuries.

2. Becoming Jane’s Animal in Jane Eyre (1847)

‘In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face’. (Jane’s description of Bertha Rochester; Brontë, 1999: 295)

“It is time some one undertook to rehumanise you” (Jane to Rochester; 386)

Even though published almost forty years before Jane Eyre, The Woman of Colour is considerably more progressive in its depiction of a Jamaican creole heiress than, what retrospectively reads as, this theme’s adoption in Jane Eyre.¹⁰ The novels share the instalment of a creole, black(ened) woman as a transactress of wealth; while The Woman of Colour presents this woman’s own perspective, Jane Eyre turns her into an object of signification whose agency is limited to haunting the fringes of white subjectivity. As is well-known, Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre is likened to an animal, demonised, and blamed for white suffering (Rochester’s, Jane’s), while her demise in the flames of Thornfield paves the way for white romance to finally, belatedly, flourish. By committing suicide, she removes herself—like Frankenstein’s creature, and like Olivia—from the centre of white action. She thereby enables Rochester to finally become Jane’s husband and found a family with her who has returned from her rambles abroad a more empowered, self-assured, and financially ‘independent woman’ (385), having lately inherited her uncle’s fortune made on a plantation in Madeira and from black(ened) bodies such as Bertha’s. As also seen in other Brontë novels (most prominently Wuthering Heights), the demise of the racialised other means that negative feelings in white bodies subside, facilitating white reconciliation, romance, and reproduction (see Koegler, 2021 [forthcoming]).

Scholarly treatment of the Brontës’ and particularly Jane Eyre’s imperial entanglements is long-standing and extensive.¹¹ These entanglements include white feminist appropriation of the slavery trope (white women as slaves in a patriarchal system)¹² which was criticised by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as early as 1985 in her intervention ‘Three Women’s Texts and A Critique of Imperialism’ (1985). Spivak challenges Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s canonical interpretation ([1979] 2000) of Bertha as Jane’s ‘dark double’, an uncanny reflector of what is, in truth, Jane’s own abject confinement in a hetero-patriarchal, classist system. Spivak argues that this interpretation re-inscribes the colonial logic of instrumentalising creole women, as Bertha is turned into a mere apparatus of Jane’s (and by extension white feminism’s) identity consolidation and ‘soul making’ (247). Because Bertha’s own subjectivity and suffering are concealed—and with them the colonial structures that enable her instrumentalisation—Jane and white feminism get to save face, cleansed as they are of colonial complicity (to strike another connection with Reed’s argument). As such, Brontë’s novel ‘dramatizes how intolerable such figures [like Bertha] are within British social order, even in service of imperial acquisition’ (Reed, 2019: 528), whilst also, and perhaps paradoxically, revealing the extent to which their presences sustain imperial ‘soul making’ in the homestead, including white feminism. It is through the very staging of threateningly aggressive, racialised incomers—figures that are doubly ‘revolting’, dreaded and rebellious (Koegler, 2021 [forthcoming])—that white English identity and domesticity can retain a virtuous ‘eyre’, selflessly carrying the white man’s or white woman’s burden. As a case in point, not only is Bertha Rochester figured as maliciously disrupting her husband’s first attempt at conjugal bliss with Jane—he is, after all, already married—‘Rochester is [also] imagined as a captive of his wife’ (Reed, 2019: 526). Throughout his self-pity of being married to an ‘insane’ woman, Rochester takes on the role of Bertha’s unjustly suffering victim, despite the steep inheritance he gains from the marriage and despite his own family’s initiative in sending him to procure Bertha in Jamaica. Rochester figures as Bertha’s victim despite showing no sympathy for her struggles that he, undoubtedly, exacerbates by keeping her incarcerated in a room without natural light and without sign of care or sympathy. Like Jane, Rochester is unable to relate to the black(ened) other whom he can never perceive of as sharing the same humanity or, should we say, posthumanity?

As critics have pointed out, Jane, Rochester, and Bertha ‘become animal’ at different stages in the novel, though to different, at times diametrically opposed, effects. Spivak critically remarks that ‘Bertha’s function in Jane Eyre is to render indeterminate the boundary between human and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law’ (249)—and I italicise ‘indeterminate’ as this word again reinforces the observation of a flexibilisation of human-animal categories (rather than a clear fixing of racial[ised] others on the side of the ‘animal’). And yet the occurrence of this flexibilisation is not limited to Bertha alone. As scholars have frequently suggested, Jane, too, repeatedly slides into non-human territory under the gaze of more powerful others—the Reeds, and also Rochester himself who repeatedly calls her ‘elf’, ‘sprite’ etc. Summarizing some of the relevant passages, Isobel Armstrong (2019) writes:

Animalism is attributed to both women: the same feral language appears: ‘Rat! rat!’ (Jane, p. 14), ‘some strange wild animal’ (Bertha, p. 338). ‘Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room’ (Jane, p. 20). ‘She parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors’ (Bertha, p. 338). (239)

Following these examples, for Armstrong, there is a ‘constant attempt [in the novel] to calibrate Bertha and Jane; [an] attempt to compare the two women as species-being and its understanding that human subjecthood can be arbitrarily taken away from both women’ (246). But does the novel really equally “weaken [their] entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law’ (249) as Spivak has suggested of Bertha? In her contribution to The Brontës and the Idea of the Human (2019), Jan-Melissa Schramm suggests that

any attempt to conceptualise Jane Eyre as a powerful contribution to the paralegal advocacy of women’s rights runs aground on the representation of Rochester’s incarcerated first wife, Bertha Antoinetta Mason. On seeing her for the first time, Jane fails to perceive her shared humanity […] A line is drawn, then, between the young woman who can be enfranchised and empowered by the ever more polite rehearsal of her tale, and the entrapped young woman in the attic whose humanity the text refuses to recognise and whose voice the reader is never allowed to hear. (182)

As Schramm here indicates, not only is feminist celebration (and calibration) of the text severely complicated by Jane’s inability to relate to Bertha, the novel itself also clearly positions Jane and Bertha differently in relation to power, including the power to signify. Jane Eyre strikes its readers with its sheer absence of critical perspective on Jane, positively celebrating its protagonist and sympathising with her in moments of difficulty. This means there is no indicator that readers should question Jane’s positioning of Bertha as, e.g., ‘blackened’ and ‘purple’ with lips ‘swelled and dark’ (Brontë, 1999: 250), as an ‘it’ that ‘grovel[s], seemingly, on all fours’, that ‘snatch[es] and growl[s] like some strange wild animal’ (258), a ‘clothed hyena’ that stands ‘tall on its hind-feet’ (259). Following Rochester’s challenge, ‘see what sort of being I was cheated into espousing, and judge whether or not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy with something at least human’ (258)—and it is, of course, Jane that is ‘at least human’—Jane’s descriptions also legitimise Rochester in both incarcerating his first wife and seeking to marry Jane though he is already wed. As such, without any checks and balances, Jane’s positioning of Bertha becomes programmatic signification, and even exceeds Rochester’s in the extent to which it animalises Bertha. For sure, Rochester shows no sympathy for Bertha’s condition, treats her like a non-subject and an intolerable-though-sustaining source of his own white pain. And yet it is still notable that he refers to Bertha Rochester as his ‘embruted partner’ (emphasis added) and that Jane will be told by the local inn-keeper upon her return to Thornfield that the ‘lady’ of the house burned down the estate. It is in Jane’s own, chilling descriptions that Bertha is particularly—thoroughly and unrelentingly—animalised.

If Bertha thus becomes Jane’s animal, Rochester meets a similar fate. Returning from her rambles to the neighbourhood of Thornfield, and in a conversation with the inn-keeper, Jane learns that Rochester ‘grew savage – quite savage’ (378) after she left him. When first seeing Rochester again, Jane’s description of him echoes her description of Bertha as a ‘figure’ ‘in the deep shade, at the father end of the room’ (258) insofar as Rochester is a ‘figure’ who comes ‘out into the twilight’ (381).¹³ This figure, however, Rochester’s figure, is quickly identified by her as ‘my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other’. She also fondly remarks, ‘It is time some one undertook to rehumanise you’, and ‘parting his thick and long uncut locks’ continues, ‘for I see you are being metamorphosed into a lion, or something of that sort’ (386); and finally: ‘the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well for all this; and making too much of you’ (386). As these expressions of heartfelt, intuitive care suggest, Jane easily relates to Rochester’s ‘animality’ whilst Bertha is entirely forgotten—lost to darkness and distance like a bad dream. As such, the consequences of the three characters’ animalisation could not be any more different: Bertha is loathed, dreaded, abjected. When she dies she is not mourned. Jane and Rochester, by contrast, fuss over each other’s animalness as they also do over each other’s injuries. Under Jane’s fond care, Rochester quickly recovers: is quickly ‘rehumanised’. While all three share a sense of ‘posthumanness’ and ‘hum-animality’, the radically different consequences of this are neatly organised along racial lines. In particular, Jane Eyre shuns the notion of a shared entitlement to well-being and happiness, attention and care and, in so doing, also actualises rivalling mental health discourses of the time to the detriment of the racialised-animalised Bertha Rochester. As Michel Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization (1988) about asylums such as Bethlehem, until the onset of the nineteenth century,

violent madwomen were chained by the ankles to the wall of a long gallery; their only garment was a homespun dress. (p. 67). […] The notion of a “resipiscence” is entirely foreign to this regime. But there was a certain image of animality that haunted the hospitals of the period. Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast. (Foucault, 1988: 67–68).

This understanding of madness would become gradually outmoded in Britain over the first decades of the nineteenth century, making way for the rise of the asylum—organised around the idea of more humane treatment and the possibility of cure—with the 1840s being a time of particularly intense public debate, frequent government reports, check-ups, and continuing reform. The treatment of Bertha Rochester, increasingly reprehensible even in Brontë’s time, has triggered much criticism and perplexity, and yet can be explained by linking her representation with research on how black(ened) others, Africans in particular, are frequently figured in nineteenth-century literature: as ‘prehistoric’ or ‘anachronistic’ versions of Western man (see McClintock, 2001). As Anne McClintock has suggested, this understanding is one way of ‘guarantee[ing] difference within the Enlightenment idea of universality. Through the progress narrative and the trope of anachronistic space, Europeans could retain belief in the idea of a universal mankind (represented and managed by Europe) while at the same time retaining the idea of difference and hierarchy’ (18–19; original emphasis). As a result of such normalised colonial anachronism, Brontë can plausibly hold Jane’s and Rochester’s own slippages into the realm of madness to a different standard of scientific knowledge, to a new and emerging standard that is ‘more humane’, based on the idea that mental illness is reformable and curable¹⁴ and does not foreclose relating. (Indeed, Rochester’s animal madness makes him more, not less, lovable to Jane.) By contrast, as a result of Brontë’s double-standard, Bertha can be legitimately and permanently othered, can be incarcerated and physically restrained. As Foucault writes of the classical understanding of madness, here vividly applied, ‘Unchained animality could be mastered only by discipline and brutalizing’ (1988: 70). Whilst heavily involved in trying to understand and ameliorate each other’s injuries, Jane and Rochester feel no moral obligation to do the same for Bertha in order to help her heal.¹⁵ This means that the novel rehearses, like so many other novels of the nineteenth century, affective non-relation with the colonised. Posthumanism, fundamentally interested in learning to relate to heretofore discounted ‘lifeforms’ (to use, again, Haraway’s formulation), can draw significant insights from these failed, exploitative practices and politics of relating. Again, as in the context of The Woman of Colour, the pitfalls of ignoring how colonial racism tips the balance for the thriving or perishing of select ‘lifeforms’—indeed, for deciding whose ‘becoming animal’ should be regarded fondly and whose should be condemned—become starkly apparent.