A Washy Draught and a Husky Morsel: Feeling, Judgment, and the Autonomous Self In Jane Eyre

Abstract

Victorians Journal 139 A Wa»hy draught and a Husky Morsel: Feeling, Judgment, and the Autonomous §elj In Jane &yrp by Patrick Fessenbecker When Charlotte Bronte’s fiction endorses self-control as an ethical ideal, that endorsement is equivocal and qualified. Bronte was acutely aware of the way selfcontrol could be inhibiting and of the difficulty of capturing clearly just what selfcontrol is. According to The Professor-. Look at the rigid and formal race of old maids ... selfcontrol is so continually their thought, so perpetually their object, that at last it absorbs the softer and more agreeable qualities of their nature; and they die mere models of austerity, fashioned out of a little parchment and much bone. (171)’ It is possible, in other words, to take self-control too far. Through their devotion to principle and careful self-management, old maids have lost some quality essential to human life. Bronte’s metaphors describing this essentially psychological claim are richly physical: the petrifying process of self-control eliminates what is soft and “agreeable,” emptying them out like costumes hanging on a stand, mere “models” of “parchment and bone” rather than fully realized people. This implies there are two related failures: if there is an interpersonal dimension in the loss of one’s agreeableness, there is an intrapersonal element as well. Too much self-control turns one into a model, making authentic action drawn from an inner humanity impossible. Self-control requires, then, a careful balancing: paradoxically, moral agents must control their self-control and prevent it from overwhelming the “softer” parts of their nature. A fascinating passage from Jane Eyre returns to this idea at greater length; comparing Georgiana and Eliza Reed, Jane remarks, “here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid and the other despicably savorless for the want of it. Feeling 1 The sentiment is Crimsworth’s (The Professor)', how a character articulates the balance between feeling and judgment says as much about who they are as it does about Brontg’s views. My thanks to D.D. Morse and Amber Pouliot for their suggestions on this essay. 140 Victorians Journal without judgment is “a washy draught indeed, but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition” (201). Again, Bronte uses physical metaphors: feeling without judgment will be diluted and weak.2 Yet judgment without feeling is similarly flawed: it cannot be digested, either by agents who exert such judgment or by those who must live with them, thus preserving the inter / intrapersonal dimension ofthe reflections on self-control in The Professor. In one sense, the basic idea that Bronte touches on here was common throughout the nineteenth century: a number of writers argued that moral judgment could not replace feeling but must exist in a dialectical tension with it. Bronte’s version ofthis idea is significantly different from that of George Eliot, for instance, who is less interested in ideal moral judgment than in genuine authenticity.3 For her, autonomy lies not in the mastery of feeling by judgment or the overcoming of judgment by feeling but in the interaction and balancing ofthe two. Of course, this conflict is the great philosophical problem of Romanticism, particularly the alternate philosophical models created by Kant and Rousseau. If, for Kant, autonomy depends on the ability of rational agency to master inclinations, for Rousseau it depends on the expression of certain powerful inclinations, despite our rational attempts to repress them.4 Rousseau is thus the starting point for what Charles Taylor calls the “Expressivist Turn”: “This notion of an inner voice or impulse, the idea that we find the truth within us, and in particular in our feelings—these were the crucial justifying concepts of the Romantic rebellion” (368-69). The tension between these views is deep and has persisted into contemporary thought. Yet post-Kantian writers like Schiller and ultimately Hegel did not want to abandon the role ofrational judgment entirely; instead, they—like Charlotte Bronte—sought to find a model for balancing the two. In her depiction of autonomy, then, Bronte participates at a 2 OED adds that “washy” can mean feeble or lacking in force, a potentially interesting dimension of the claim—perhaps...