A significant gap in current criticism surrounding Charlotte Bronte’s novels has led to a superficial rendering of her primary characters, situating them as mere autobiographical products of a certain place and a certain time. My study, “‘The Events of My Insignificant Existence’: Traumatic Testimony in Charlotte Bronte’s Fictional Autobiographies,” fills this gap by establishing Bronte’s primary characters as complex individuals who cannot be oversimplified and defined by their gender or their historical moment and who are not limited by their creator’s frame of reference. To provide a deservedly deeper and more illuminating explication of her work, this study furthers a critical understanding of Bronte’s narrative structures in her fictional autobiographies – The Professor (1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853) – through the application of trauma theory, a theoretical stance that has yet to be utilized in analyzing any of her novels.
Bronte’s primary characters are each defined by a traumatic event that took root on a sub-conscious level, causing their moral and psychological growth to decline, if not cease, as evidenced by repetitive patterns of behavior that occur throughout the novels. These patterns are indicative of an originary trauma and reveal that not only are the narrators discontented in their life choices but they are writing their autobiographies as a means of providing testimony to their continued struggle with trauma in an attempt to master that trauma and experience a true revelation of self. This study covers each novel, looking at the narrator’s autobiographic representation of life events as traumatic testimony with the public forum of the novel allowing the reader to serve as witness. Approaching Bronte’s novels in this manner (through trauma theory) sheds insight into the traumatic stimulus of these works, mirrored in the characters who, as individuals, reveal the truth of their lives that is not entirely represented in their fictional autobiographies and that is completely overlooked in previous critical studies.