Content provided in partnership with
Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Nandrea, Lorri G
Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity had [sic] not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, longabsent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man.
Jane Eyre
Surprisingly few critical studies of the status of sympathy and sensibility in Victorian fiction have been written; the discussions that do exist most often occur in the context of criticism on Dickens, Gaskell, or George Eliot.1 Yet, as the passage quoted above suggests, the problem of an extra-linguistic "sympathetic" mode of communication pervades Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. At times, the novel explicitly engages a definition of sympathy as "fellow feeling"; this aspect of the text can be connected to Victorian debates over charity and social morality, class consciousness, the growing concern over the "vices" of selfishness, egotism, and greed, and the connected search for ethical modes of relation to others. On another level, however, Bronte recovers the contours of an eroticized physiological sensibility that hovers at the edge of the literary and philosophical problem of sympathy. In doing so, Bronte seems to reach back across the Romantic period for older models of feeling, and, in fact, the novel contains numerous allusions to eighteenth-century texts; Helen Burns, for example, reads Samuel Johnson's novel Rasselas (81).
In the eighteenth century, the terms "sympathy" and "sensibility" were often used interchangeably: the differences and relationships between them were neither clear nor fixed. Yet beneath this slippage of terms, one can discern two very different configurations of the relationships between minds, bodies, and language. Each configuration corresponds to particular techniques of representation, but also inscribes distinctive assumptions about identity, history, and sexuality. Disentangling these dynamics raises new questions about the relations between desire and narrative and also offers a way to re-conceptualize certain formal conflicts in Victorian fiction.2
The difference between these two dynamics may be illustrated by contrasting two scenes in Laurence Sterne's novel, A Sentimental Journey. In the first, Sterne's narrator Yorick goes to visit a beautiful and virtuous young woman named Maria. Several years before, Maria's lover abandoned her, and she has never recovered her sanity; she wanders about the countryside playing on a pipe and weeping. Yorick is aware that his desire to seek her out is somewhat puzzling. "'Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures," he writes, "-but I know not how it is, but 1 am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them" (137). After sitting weeping with the suffering girl, he adds, "I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. / I am positive I have a soul..." (138).
Sterne seems self-consciously to present this scene as a paradigmatic instance of "sympathy." As Edmund Burke defined it in 1757, "[s]ympathy must be considered as a sort of Substitution, by which we are put in the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected" (44). As David Marshall points out, the concept of sympathy was entwined with the act of representation. Philosophers of sympathy such as Smith and Shaftsbury acknowledged that "we cannot know the experience or sentiments of another person"; thus, to feel sympathy, it was necessary to "represent in our imagination copies of the sentiments that we ourselves feel as we imagine ourselves in someone else's place and person" (Marshall 5). Consequently, the vivid depiction of emotionally overcharged scenes became a way of transacting feeling between text and reader; the literary text encouraged the reader to sympathize by imagining him/herself in the place of the suffering victim, or, more often, in the place of the suffering witness of the suffering victim. The reader, in effect, is moved by the spectacle of another's suffering through a process of emotional reflection; he or she imagines and then mirrors the feelings of a model. Sympathy is thus quintessentially mimetic and to some extent defined the project of mimesis in late eighteenth-century British fiction.
But another discourse of feeling, which contests the mimesis of sympathy, can also be discerned in eighteenth-century texts. Contemporary medical discourse, which was not cleanly separated from either philosophy or literature, often promoted a concept of "communication" based on the belief that nerves responded directly to internal and external stimuli of all kinds, like the strings of a musical instrument. As the prominent physician George Cheyne wrote in 1724,
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur