Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre

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

Even so, I wish to stress that the relationship between sympathy and sensibility is not one of clear-cut opposition, and the two dynamics are not easily separated out, particularly in fiction that post-dates the Romantic period.9 Just as the practice of sensibility forms an undercurrent in the history of the British novel, the traces of sensibility in Jane Eyre form an undercurrent to the major narrative trajectory of the text. In this case, a plot driven by Jane's intense desire for identity, mastery, and the ability to control significance is continually interfered with at the level of the prose-the stylistic "surfacing" of the novel-by the eccentric murmurs of another story: a narrative sensibility directed at exploding totalities, relinquishing mastery, communicating sensation, and repeating experiences of and as difference. In the reading that follows, I will focus on two (widely analyzed) scenes from the novel, as I have done above with Sterne. In this case, though, rather than presenting one as an example of sympathetic dynamics and the other as an example of sensibility, I will attempt to bring out the manner in which the two dynamics are imbricated within each scene and, indeed, throughout the novel. Rather than appearing in "pure" form, sensibility manifests itself by contaminating or subtly deranging sympathetic patterns. These patterns have themselves been prompted by a desire for mastery and self-control that would overcome the powerlessness associated with sensibility, a desire that engages Jane in a systematic negation of others and otherness. Critics have widely noted the manner in which the end of the novel emphasizes Jane's success in eliminating all possible threats to her newly attained subject position and presents us with a picture of a hyperbolically unified and autonomous subjectivity.10 From this point of view, the novel tells the story of the triumph of sympathy: the manner in which the attraction to difference and dissolution associated with sensibility has been repressed, or re-channeled into a desire for identity. But critics also remark various oddities or slippages that complicate this end; such oddities, I will argue, may be accounted for by the persistence of a wish to repeat the dangerous pleasures of sensibility. While Jane's autobiography appears to be directed at retrospectively assigning meaning to failed experience, the writing of the autobiography simultaneously allows her to return to the scene and repeat the pleasures that she missed the first time, the disempowering pleasures of sensibility.11

Perhaps perversely, Jane Eyre opens the story of her life with a violent interruption. As she silently tells herself tales to match the illustrations in a picture book, Jane's cousin attacks her; she strikes out in self-defense and is taken away to be confined in the dreaded Red Room. Left to herself there, stilled and silenced, Jane begins to fear that her kind uncle, who died in this room, might return unbidden to avenge her. Her fantasy, "consolatory in theory ... [but] terrible if realized" (48), is supported by the appearance of a gleam of light on the wall, provoking "a species of fit" (50) that ends in a scream that summons the (living) others. Jane begs to be released, asserting that she "shall be killed" if left there alone. Her appeals are denied, and a simulation of her death ensues: "unconsciousness closed the scene" (50).