Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Nandrea, Lorri G

If Jane's experience in the Red Room forcibly occasions relations of alterily between singular parts of a self that fail to form a synthetic whole, Jane's retrospective account of this scene repeats these relations in a manner that also compasses another kind of alterity: that between past and present selves. In the context of autobiography, the moment at which the written self is removed from history becomes the moment at which the writing self is inserted into history, firmly located in the aporiatic here and now of writing, a moment whose highly problematic nature is thoroughly explored and exploited by Sterne in Tristram Shandy and has since been further analyzed by numerous theorists, perhaps most effectively by Jacques Derrida.15

But aporiatic or not, real and fictional autobiographies commonly contain a description of the scene of writing, a logical end that folds the existence of the book into the story of the writer's life.16 Insofar as such scenes reach across the divide of the written self's symbolic death to re-establish a relation of identity and continuity between the self who writes and the self whose story is told, they structure a sympathetic, dialectically synthetic relation between past and present selves, indeed, between past and present as such. The identity, even necessity, of the present is confirmed via its relation to a past that has no autonomy, a past that has been mastered and may now be wrapped up as history, subsumed but preserved as an account of how this present came to be. As a moment in which the past is "comprehended" in and by the present, a scene of writing might be expected to crown the sympathetic dynamics of a plot driven by desire as wantof-being, a desire to synthesize the self. Such a scene, however, is missing from Jane Eyre.

Not only is there no scene of writing in Jane's autobiography, there is no story of how or why Jane became the writer she is now. Though Jane tells herself stories, listens to stories told by others, and reads, she never writes anything other than a few letters-misaddressed and undelivered letters, at that (450). While Jane repeatedly refers to herself in the act of writing-as in the line, "now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years-I see [the answer] clearly" (47)-a curious disjunction repeatedly takes place between written and writing selves just at the points that should serve as their hinge or jointure, the points of Jane's transition from one to the other. Moreover, I wish to argue that the scene of writing is not just absent from the novel in a general way; it is missing from a particular place, an identifiable location in the text: the scene of Jane's return to Thornfield, which occurs in response to Rochester's cry.

Many elements suggest that this scene will be the end toward which the plot has been progressing, the end of the story that will be the beginning of writing. Jane "felt like a messenger-pigeon flying home" (447) as she reverses the steps of her previous flight from Rochester; this simile obliquely identifies her with the position of the author/"editor," "Currer Bell," whose name suggests his/her function as a courier-a conveyor of texts from one to another. "My journey is closed," Jane states decisively upon arriving at the village inn (448), and we as readers are justified in believing her. In the novel as a whole, scenes of return have consistently drawn a spiral pattern in which Jane leaves defeated and returns victorious; she expects this climactic return to function in a similar way, and we are drawn into this structure of expectation as well. When Jane left Thornfield, she was "blind, deaf, distracted with a revengeful fury tracking and scourging [her]" (448); now, she is in complete control. As she approaches the hall, she determines that "[her] first view of it shall be in front ... where its bold battlements will strike the eye nobly at once" (448). Thus, she positions herself in such a way that "battlements, windows, long front-all from this sheltered station were at my command" (449, emphasis added). This grand statement falls flat, however; in fact, the narrator is deceiving us. "Were" is an illegitimate interloper, whose place should be occupied by "would be" or "would have been," for as the writing Jane will have already discovered, the Hall has been destroyed by fire. The written Jane, having posited meaning in anticipation of the outcome, does not see what she expects to see; in the face of what she does see, she is frozen into a death-like state of "stupid regardlessness" (449).