Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre

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

Jane's vision of discord establishes a distinctive relation between sensory series, in which eye and ear pull each other out of their proper domains. The lines convey less an understanding of what it means to be a social discord than an emphatic sensory impression of what discord might be: the otherness within a sense that is its outside or singularizing limit; the visible within sound-an incomprehensible agitation. Rendering a relation of complementarity, unity, or synthesis of senses impossible, this disjunction singularizes each sense in relation to the other, highlighting its own powers and specificity through its inability to do what the other can do. At the same time, the relation suggests, perhaps, a kind of attraction-even jealousy-between senses: the passion of the eye for the stimulus that excites the ear, for sound; of the ear for that which excites the eye, for vision.14 Such attraction is more clearly expressed by Jane's frequent desire to see beyond the horizon, her longing "for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen" (140, emphasis added). In fact, this dynamic competition between eye and ear, voice and vision, is signaled continually in the name "Eyre."

If attempting to deconstruct the sympathetic dynamics of the text, we might read this unresolved tension as an unintended failure or necessary error that reveals the impossibility of achieving a unified identity. But one might also read in it the desire to repeat an experience of discord, an experience of sensory variation and intensity that might have been desirable if it had not been so traumatic. It 7 was traumatic, of course, because Jane is trapped within social structures that render derangement dangerously disempowering. In contrast to Sterne's narrator, who has the luxury of abandoning a subject position rendered secure by his gender, age, and class, Jane has no subject position to abandon. She has had her agency usurped by others; she is at risk of becoming an object/victim like Maria or Bertha. But in retrospect, from a position of safety, it is possible that the repetition serves desire, making the text communicate sensory intensity, giving the reader a stimulating experience of discord by clashing the eye against the ear.

The plot of the novel suggests that such moments of disjunction and disequilibrium, moments in which the narrator might be said to play with sensibility, are produced textually after they have been completely excluded from the realm of lived experience. Jane's marriage to Rochester at the end of the novel is figured as a supremely sympathetic relationship in which two are fully united and feel what the other is feeling; Jane asserts that they share one flesh, one heart, and one pair of eyes: "perfect concord is the result" (476). Their isolated home at Ferndean is entirely free of discord; even the servants are described as "decent, phlegmatic ... people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment" (474). One might wonder, then, whether writing the autobiography provides Jane with an opportunity to produce what this end excludes, to repeat the kind of experience that has been suppressed in the interests of achieving mastery, in this sense, the minor particles of sensory intensity that threaten to dis-integrate the narrative and its subject, giving voice to difference, are the very points at which desire is being repeated.