Eve Potvin’s presentation, “The Dame, the Cross-dresser, and Rochester: Deception and Trans Perception in Jane Eyre,” is a study of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and looks at the presence of anti-transgender tropes present in the novel. Potvin presented at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference in March 2024. In Jane Eyre, Rochester famously cross-dresses as a Romani fortuneteller to trick Jane into revealing whether she has feelings for him. Potvin’s paper argues that Rochester’s stratagem relies on cross-dressing because of its meaning in mid-nineteenth-century England, particularly because of the ways in which it is understood to be deceptive. Trans activist Julia Serano has written of the deceptive and pathetic transsexual tropes, which depict a transwoman as either deceptive or pathetic depending on the presence or absence of her penis. Thinking with Serano, Potvin posits Rochester’s cross-dressing and subsequent unmasking as a movement from deceptive to pathetic transsexual. The comedic quality of the scene is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the novel, making it sharply stand out, rendering his unmasking comedic. His unmasking stands further in analogy to his fate at the end of novel when he is blinded and disabled, which was described by Richard Chase as being a metaphorical castration. Ultimately, Potvin argues, Rochester’s comic unmasking and his subsequent “castration” suggest that we might read him “the pathetic transsexual.” Brontë’s representation of Rochester provides a window on the nineteenth-century formation of a trope that will become much more virulent in the centuries to follow.

Potvin’s research focuses on an infrequently studied scene in Jane Eyre, the cross-dressing scene, and figures this scene as being an early formation of anti-transgender tropes to present an opportunity for the study of the policing of nonnormative gender in the Victorian era. Potvin firmly anchors this interpretation in the scholarship of Richard Chase, who interprets the end of the novel to be a metaphorical castration for Rochester. By figuring the cross-dressing scene as foreshadowing this metaphorical castration, shame, communicated through castration, becomes the locus through which nonnormative gender is punished in the Victorian novel.