The winner of the 2024 Patrick Scott Award for Best Graduate Paper has been announced:

Cailey Rogers, North Carolina State University

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

This paper seeks to explore how Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) engages with the creation myth in its depiction of Jane as an autonomous Eve and subsequently complicate this reading by analyzing Bertha as a powerful yet ruinous Lilith figure. My research extends scholarship tracing back to Gilbert and Gubar (1979) and modernized by Nora Gilbert (2016) that reads themes of female resistance in Jane Eyre as revisionist allusions to the traditional, Miltonic Adam and Eve story and to folklore of the villainized Lilith archetype. This pattern of scholarship notably understudies Lilith—a problematized figure of alterity—as she relates to issues of race and gender in the paragon of imprisoned yet defiant women: Bertha Mason. I consider how Brontë affords Jane-as-Eve the freedom to rise above male domination as a white, Christian woman, but denies that same feminist empathy to Bertha-as-Lilith, who is dehumanized and scapegoated into a moral boundary for resistant women. This study finds that 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 I argue that Bertha also exerts agency in her embodiment of Lilith—not just as the ostracized first wife, but also through the condemnation she faces for her insubordination against normative patriarchal structures. In exploring the feminized dichotomies of good and evil in this text, this research fills a scholarly gap by using Bertha’s Lilith to rethink Jane Eyre’s parallels to Eve, engaging in a more inclusive and holistic reading of classic myths in Victorian literature.

Cailey Rogers is a second-year master’s student and graduate teaching assistant studying English literature at North Carolina State University. She graduated from Elon University with degrees in both journalism and English literature. As an undergraduate, Cailey was the recipient of the Lumen Prize which allowed her to write a thesis focused on feminist Victorian and Gothic literature. In graduate school, Cailey continues to pursue her passion for Victorian studies and hopes to complete more research on feminist rewritings of classic myths in Victorian literature as well as the postcolonial Gothic.

Congratulations, Cailey!