“Drear flight and homeless wandering”

This chapter establishes Jane Eyre as a compulsively nomadic heroine, for whom nomadic subjectivity as defined by Braidotti proves essential for achieving her status as sovereign subject. It explores how moments of spectral nomadism shape nomadic consciousness, while determining the heroine’s capabilities for distinguishing between nomadism’s auspicious and inauspicious manifestations. It examines nomadism in the novel in the context of the Vagrancy Act of 1824 and the Aliens Act of 1793 and contends that Bronte’s heroine does not gratify reader expectations shaped by sedentism, whereby the great house as a sedentarizing space confers status and wealth as a reward upon the woman selected as marriageable by the patriarch. It argues that Ferndean as her destination, described as an “ineligible and insalubrious site,” is a repudiation of the manor house as a bastion of sedentism.