Prosthetic performatives: Reading disability’s discomfort through emotives and affect patterns in Jane Eyre

Abstract

In this paper, I explore how, in the final scenes of the novel Jane Eyre, disability is a vehicle for the involved characters to be able to designate emotional states to themselves and the other through performative emotional language usage, called ‘emotives’. Through examining this use, I argue that the exchange of emotives cannot fully alleviate the different emotional states designated through them, but rather allow for a prosthetic relation of co-dependency to form between the novel’s two main characters. Subsequently, I argue that the exchange of emotives and the use of language as prosthesis produces legible gaps in and between various performative speech-acts, which through this legibility may generate traceable patterns of affect.