During the Victorian era, parts of the infrastructure, such as the stagecoach, revolutionized the ways women could travel and experience the world, to the extent that they could liberate themselves from rooted domesticity. According to Jonathan Grossman, the stagecoach, akin to the modern train, transformed the way people moved by instilling a “modern awareness of one's time as fleeting, passing.”Footnote 1 The fast-paced stagecoach, however, came with consequences, such as its unnatural speed that causes the main character in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) to experience a loss of appetite and dizziness as she travels from one phase of life to the next. Despite the anxiety-inducing, fast-paced rhythm that the transportation creates, the stagecoach system offered women, like Jane, the opportunity to cultivate independence, freeing them from the restrictions of domesticity.
Keeping the rhythm of the stagecoach that Jane establishes in mind, I suggest that Patricia Park's Re Jane (2015), a modern retelling of Jane Eyre that features a Korean American protagonist, reimagines the New York City subway as a modern manifestation of this rhythm. The subway system plays a pivotal role in the narrative of Re Jane, as the momentum of the train that Jane Re rides essentially becomes Jane, not just because it models Jane's liberating stagecoach rhythm, but also because the train embodies the various positive voices of ethnic minorities that were not highlighted in Jane Eyre. In this essay, I argue that transportation systems enable female characters to establish a rhythm of their own, breaking free from the strictures of society. Brontë employs the stagecoach to develop Jane's independence from domesticity, while Park utilizes the subway to foster Jane's acceptance of her racially diverse identity despite societal pressures to conform to one racial identity.
The first moment of this rhythmic development in Jane Eyre is portrayed when Jane is moving from Gateshead to Lowood on her stagecoach ride. As Jane mounts the stagecoach, she feels a sense of bizarreness about how the stagecoach “rattle[ed] over the stony street,” and as a result, she has “no appetite.” Even so, she becomes used to the rhythm of the stagecoach, as she hears “wild rushing amongst the trees” within her ride, but she feels “lulled by the sound, as [she] last dropped asleep.”Footnote 2 This anxiety-inducing but paradoxically also comforting stagecoach allows Jane to travel to places where she can gain independence and develop her agency.
Ruth Livesey suggests that the stagecoach symbolized conservatism for the Victorians by evoking a sense of modern nostalgia and representing locality. Livesey analyzes Jane's stagecoach rides as deeply rooted in “anti-metropolitan regionalism and preservation.”Footnote 3 Although Jane moves through the stagecoach, it is always in close connection to “unknown but friendly others,”Footnote 4 with stagecoach stops like Whitcross representing local points, unlike the train journeys, which were tied to cities. My analysis of Jane's stagecoach rides, however, emphasizes Jane's radical movements and shows that the stagecoach is a way for her to cultivate a fast-paced rhythm of her own.
Jane further develops her stagecoach rhythm when she finds out about Rochester's legal wife, Bertha Mason, and is in danger of becoming his mistress. As Jane thinks of her impending doom, she dreams that a female figure embodied by the moon speaks to her: “My daughter, flee temptation.”Footnote 5 With her decision to leave Thornfield, her body becomes a mode of transportation like the stagecoach. She states that she “knew what [she] had to do, and [she] did it mechanically.”Footnote 6 With her movement on foot becoming like a mechanical form of transportation, she successfully escapes, catches the same stagecoach that brought her to Thornfield, and runs away from Rochester.
Again, Jane uses the stagecoach at a moment of transition when she returns to Thornfield. This time, it is of her own volition as she breaks free from her cousin, St. John, who presents a lackluster marriage proposal. Rejecting his offer, Jane chooses to propel herself toward Rochester. In her return, she intentionally halts the carriage, sprinting toward Thornfield and asserting her identity as her own stagecoach, embodying the rapid rhythm that resides within her. Jane's zealous and fast-paced narrative culminates with her marriage. Although Jane no longer describes her own mobile adventures, the last words of the novel describe St. John, her cousin, who has moved to India to pursue missionary work. In concluding her narrative with a person who moves outside of the country, she envisions herself as someone who will forever hold a deep appreciation for mobility, extending her gaze beyond the confines of her domestic space.
Unfortunately, Jane herself cannot end the novel with her own personal journey, in contrast to Jane Re, who ends Park's novel by riding the train to another person's marriage, foreshadowing the beginnings of more journeys to come for her. In Park's Re Jane, Jane Re too wants to live a life outside of the patronizing and domestic space of Korean American society within Queens. Her uncle, Uncle Sang, wants Jane to only embody Confucianism-rooted Korean values, which expect Jane to be an extradisciplined and socially successful individual. However, this is at the cost of throwing away that part of Jane Re's identity that is American. Like Jane Eyre, Jane Re rebels, using the train to run away from Queens, just as Jane Eyre uses the stagecoach to run away from Gateshead and Thornfield. The train allows Jane to move away from Uncle Sang's household, but it also plays a big part in creating momentum for her own sense of cultural identity, being both Korean and American.
The presence of the New York subway system that Jane Re always rides subtly calls back to the railways in the United States that were also built in the nineteenth century, mostly by Asian American laborers. Even though the railways were built by Chinese American workers who “were employed by the Central Pacific during the peak of construction,” these workers were “deemed invisible.”Footnote 7 Karen Zairack writes that in a news report regarding the railroad, there was “very little mention . . . of the Chinese Americans who had played such a crucial role in its construction. In a well-known and widely circulated photograph depicting the celebratory ceremony they are notably absent.”Footnote 8 While the train that Jane Re rides is not the transcontinental railroad, I suggest that, symbolically, through the image of the subway, Jane Re highlights the erased and invisible bodies of Asian American laborers that created the transcontinental railroad.
The New York subway was also created by racial minorities with the additional purpose of bridging gaps between classes and ethnic groups.Footnote 9 The first subway was made in the 1900s by laborers who were “predominantly Irish and Italian, although there were also Germans, African-Americans, Greeks, and members of other ethnics groups” who led very hard lives.Footnote 10 Clifton Hood explains that workers continued to sustain injuries in building the subway, but the mayor forged on—noting that sacrifices were necessary for progress. However, progress came with sacrifices on the backs of racial minorities, and this did not seem to change whether it was for the transcontinental railroad or the New York subway.
In the New York 7 train that Jane rides, away from Uncle Sang and Queens to accept an au pair job, she gazes upon the faces of people that are like her, not belonging to one racial category. Unlike Jane Eyre's passengers in the stagecoach, who are not particularly defined, Jane Re is conscious of the passengers’ racial identities as she states: “I stared at the other slumped passengers. The faces repeated in a pattern: Korean, Hispanic, Chinese, Chinese again, Indian. You could always tell by their worn experiences that they were going home from work.”Footnote 11 The train is laden with racial and ethnic minorities, presumably from the working class, as Jane Re makes it clear their clothes and postures show that they are returning home after hard labor. The train reminds her of the roots of her own identity, which is embedded in Queens and which she cannot initially seem to fully accept. Diverging from the technologically advanced worldwide airplane or the modern Korean subway that Jane Re rides in the latter parts of the novel, the 7 train becomes a nostalgic mode of transportation. Within this train, the working class has unimpeded access to transport, evoking the accessibility of the stagecoach in Jane Eyre that catered to a diverse array of individuals. Park reimagines the portrayal of passengers within the stagecoach and applies it to the subway system to shed light on the marginalized voices and underrepresented racial minorities of both the Victorian era and within the narrative of Jane Eyre.
Julia H. Lee elaborates on how the modern railroad system, particularly in the United States, “initiates its subjects into a racial order because it paradoxically brings into proximity people whom society otherwise strives to keep apart.”Footnote 12 The train makes various subjects fit into the same train car and understand the presence of the racial “Other,” highlighting the bodies that Jane Re faces, ones that Jane Eyre does not face. The infrastructure of the railway system in America transformed the ways racial bodies could move and identify themselves.
When Jane Re is riding the 7 train with Beth Mazer (Bertha Mason's modern version), Beth tells Jane, “My colleague's doing some fascinating research on Queens. She'll just ride your train for hours.”Footnote 13 Jane confusingly thinks “your train,” as she is still in denial about where she places herself amongst Koreans or Americans. Jane is still unsure whether the train is indeed her train, as Beth attempts to separate herself from the ethnic minorities that are emphasized in it.
Jane's identification with the 7 train emerges during her ride on the late modern subway in Korea, which conspicuously lacks a distinctive rhythm of its own. The Korean subway has an “uninterrupted circle, with no final destinations,” a sharp contrast to the New York 7's train's “finite start and end.” Amid this modernity, Jane realizes her lack of control as she thinks to herself, “in New York one Karate chop to the subway doors would have forced them back open; here the heavy doors looked like they would clamp over your arm and drag you away.”Footnote 14 The modern subway parallels the transition that Victorians felt as the railway replaced the stagecoach, which had no halts or interruptions. She grapples with a lack of rhythm and feels at a loss with the subway's ceaseless loop. Resolving to regain her own momentum, she decides to return to New York.
In the finale of Park's novel, we get a rewritten version of Jane Eyre, who does not, in fact, marry her own Rochester but, instead, travels to someone else's wedding on the 7 train. This moment is when Jane Re identifies and accepts the train as part of her identity, reclaiming the lost voices of the underrepresented minorities by embracing what Beth called “your train,” her own train. Jane states that she has gotten used to the train's “herky-jerkiness, [and has] learn[ed] to accept its particular rhythms instead of fighting against them—or running away.”Footnote 15 In the end, she has finally become one with the train's complex identity by acknowledging the intricate Korean and American identity that she had initially found difficult to accept. The subway becomes a way for Jane to reclaim the rhythm of the train that was lost to her, by connecting her with the Chinese American railroad. The subway system beautifully parallels the multifaceted identity that Jane Re now accepts.
The stagecoach infrastructure not only transformed women's travel experiences but also provided them with a means to challenge the disciplinary and restrictive standards of Victorian society. Michel Foucault has shown that during the Victorian era, repetition in relation to the human body within the framework of the industrial revolution was a way to discipline the individual. But against the tide of such disciplinary systems, Jane Eyre becomes an exemplification of the liberated individual who uses the stagecoach as a means of creating her own system or, rather, her own rhythm of life. In Re Jane, the infrastructure of the New York subway system serves to highlight the presence of racial minorities that could not be amplified in other public spaces before, by means of the proximity that locates different types of ethnicities in a single closed space. The novel's depiction of the subway also reflects how the history of the railroad and train system is deeply rooted in the labors of ethnic minorities. Just as Jane Re is indebted to Jane Eyre for pioneering women's travel experiences, the subway system is forever indebted to the stagecoach system. Reading Jane Eyre and Re Jane, readers may be creating rhythms of their own, even if they are left with “no appetite” due to the fast-paced nature of modern transportation networks.
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