Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast · Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin

BOOK CLUB: Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

·53 min·2 clips

The British defined religions racially, and Sikhs were labeled a 'martial race' supposedly suited to imperial service.

1. Keeping It 101's book club episode on Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele pairs plot recap with analysis of religion, abuse, and empire in the novel's Gothic retelling of Jane Eyre. 2. Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American religions, race, gender, and politics, and Elise Morgenstein First, a historian of religion, Islam, race, and South Asia, split the discussion between abuse and Sikh history. 3. The hosts call the book a 'misandrist, queer, gothic retelling' of Jane Eyre, with each chapter opening on a quote from the original. 4. Goodwin summarizes Jane's path from a childhood with her laudanum-dependent mother, through a cousin's attempted assault and her first killing, to a residential school and then Highgate House. 5. At the school, Sunday sessions called 'reckonings' require children to confess sins, and the headmaster presents himself as both the Lord and savior and the messenger of the actual Lord. 6. The hosts say Jane arrives 'pre-disillusioned' with Christianity, and they debate whether she reads as an atheist or as someone who believes she is damned for her cousin's death. 7. Goodwin argues that 'religion doesn't cause abuse' but 'can make abuse harder to spot,' and cites the mother superior scene in Doubt as a parallel. 8. Morgenstein First explains that the Anglo-Sikh wars ended the Sikh Empire in 1849 and that the British racialized Sikhs as a 'martial race,' a label that gave them privileged status in imperial service. 9. She notes that the same British authorities committed the April 1919 massacre of unarmed Sikhs at Amritsar, and the hosts question whether Jane's shift from Protestantism into a 'white mediated brown religion' echoes 'noble savage' tones. 10. Suited to readers of Jane Eyre retellings and fans of religion-and-empire history.

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