Name In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Steven Earnshaw deconstructs the significance of “name” in Jane Eyre in his article, “‘Give me my name’: Naming and Identity In and Around Jane Eyre.” Earnshaw asserts that, “a focus on the framing provided by the title page with respect to name will offer further insights into the importance ‘names and naming’ have for the author, and insights into how ‘names and naming’ are being carefully handled in this mid-nineteenth-century context” (174).
Earnshaw addresses the peculiarity of publishing a heroine’s maiden name alongside her first name as a title in 1847. A single woman was of no significance without her husband’s last name to establish her character and substance. Earnshaw suggests Bronte used her title to have readers appreciate Jane, “as a single female
The gender neutral “Currer” could have been chosen to prevent gender biased reads of Bronte’s work; Earnshaw expands on this and relates it to the framework of the title: “taken in conjunction with ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘An autobiography’…the frame serves to create an uncertainty around ‘gender’, since it refuses to close down this aspect of it with regard to the ‘control’ or supervision of the character ‘Jane Eyre’” (177).
As a child, Jane is drawn to names: “It is a way of sensitizing the reader to the importance of names beyond the belief that a name is a rather random and empty signifier” (Earnshaw 178). Earnshaw’s logic flows out of deconstruction, and though a name is a construct, Bronte’s constructs are layered with purpose and meaning. There is only one Jane Eyre, but a multiplicity of possible meanings for the name Mrs. Rochester. It is this multiplicity that prevents Jane from taking the name and being “born again” into this new identity. ‘Mrs. Rochester’ is a name that is already owned and soiled by the mad Bertha