Translating Charlottes. Clare Boylan’s “The Secret Diary of Mrs Rochester”: Between Red Rooms and Yellow Wallpapers

Abstract

In her short story “The Secret Diary of Mrs Rochester”, Clare Boylan playfully uses a variation of the postmodern trend of “writing back” Victorian classics to create a sequel of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Shedding light on Jane’s married life, Boylan makes a parody of Brontë’s language and narrative conventions making Jane an eccentric. In particular, the presence of closed spaces in the story replicates the claustrophobia of the red room in Jane Eyre, and from this point of view Boylan’s story bears parallelisms with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Intertextuality and metanarrative perspectives of both stories draw attention to the textual space of the story and the elusive text that is being written/read. The “secret diary” assumed in the title is not the text that appears on the page. In both stories the protagonist and first-person narrator is engaged in writing an elusive text while confined in a secluded space.