Epilogue and Conclusion: “Jane Eyre Fever,” Virality, Endemicity, and Contagion

Charlotte Brontë’s novels were written, published, and read, in a period in which contagious diseases were visibly present, politically contentious, and symbolically resonant whenever they appeared in the literary text. The questions contagion invites—what is our responsibility to the poor; how should contagion be managed; what does health mean, or look like, in the face of contagion; what are the risks and benefits of connection and interaction?—pervade her novels. Yet Brontë herself has often been presented in biography and some scholarship as somehow detached from contagion and all its metaphorical possibilities and political implications: accounts of her own health and death, for example, historically emphasized their connection to the weather, or her exceptional difficulties in pregnancy. Such accounts play a part in constructing a vision of Brontë as a unique, or at least exceptional, individual to whom the logic of contagion does not apply and who also did not understand the potential or implications of contagion, even though her representations of contagion and contagious diseases strongly suggest otherwise. Paradoxically, perhaps, this version of Brontë has circulated in contagious ways, and so too has her work—specifically and especially Jane Eyre. This chapter concludes the book by tracing some of those contagious and viral transmissions of ideas about the writer and her novels in popular culture and merchandising.