Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre

Abstract

Is Jane the of shame? Would such a reframing of the character famously dubbed the heroine of fulfillment constitute its own shamefully conduct?1 Widely understood as a model of engaging and empowered female voice, Jane Eyre's distinctive I has often seemed bolstered, especially, by the emotional display and pull of that voice. Not just feeling, but specific feelings have captured critical attention, with anger and attaining pride of place in feminist assessments of Bronte's novel and of novelistic feeling in both Victorian and contemporary culture. From Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential reading of Jane Eyre's anger as exemplary of rebellious feminism to more recent critiques of the normalizing triumph of sympathy staged by the novel's end, the fraught yet potent agency, self-assertion, and emotional invitation of Jane Eyre's autobiographical narrative, and especially her voice, have been understood to thrive on anger or sympathy.2 Yet what are we to make of that emotion which inspires the first diegetic mention of Jane Eyre's surname and punctuates her physical imprisonment in the metaphorically rich red-room as a young girl For shame! shame! . . . What shocking conduct, Eyre (9)? This cry for suggests that shame constitutes both an introduction of Miss Eyre to the reader and an interpellation of Jane into the contours of gendered interiority and social relations. We might imagine it as the invasive voice of society threatening to repress the more authentic self-expression of the angry Jane, or, perhaps, as an affective force imposed from outside the individual that exposes the disciplinary violence inflicted by all emotions, even those seemingly more personal and salutary