Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre

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

Using this distinction permits one to glimpse and trace out affective patterns that may be implicit in various works of nineteenth-century British fiction, including Jane Eyre, but that have not previously been clearly articulated or rendered legible. In this respect, my argument seeks to augment rather than contest two recent studies of affect in Victorian fiction.

Ann Cvetkovich's in-depth exploration of the "politics of affect" in Victorian discourse usefully brings out the double-edged effects of the representation and communication of feeling for oppressed groups, including women, homosexuals, and the working class. With an eye to historicizing the "uses" of affect for present-day activists, she asks whether and how the narrative strategies of sensation fiction compromise political projects by individualizing social problems. Audrey Jaffe's focused study of sympathy in Victorian fiction explores the manner in which sympathy, while appearing to erase differences and cross class divides, actually aids in the construction and maintenance of middle-class identity. In many respects, while the arguments of both critics are firmly rooted in careful examination of the specific historical features of the Victorian period, their studies complement recent criticism of the eighteenth-century novel of sympathy, which has tended to emphasize sympathy's ideological function in maintaining existing power structures.8 My own argument seeks simultaneously to broaden the concept of sympathy to encompass larger critical categories (as outlined above), to recover out of the eighteenthcentury discourse of feeling a submerged idea, sensibility, and to highlight its divergences from the dialectical, individualistic, hierarchical properties of sympathy that do indeed support capitalist power structures. Moreover, I wish to argue that Bronte's novel, like Sterne's, can be seen as a point in a cross-period constellation of intermittent and partial articulations of sensibility, dark doubles of the "central tradition in English fiction," which connected together might form a kind of counter-history of the British novel. In a critical climate dominated by period-specific historicist studies and demonstrations of the manner in which power usurps subversion, it seems worthwhile to attend to a strain of writing that seeks to inscribe (or inscribes by accident) alternatives to the historically predominant subjectivities, sexualities, and modes of relation that have constituted our primary analytic categories.