The Language of Love’s Lessening. Falling Out of Love and Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Kerstin Maria Pahl

doi:10.1080/14780038.2019.1689025

Abstract

ABSTRACT Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) contains a rather uncommon phrase: ‘to unlove,’ meaning ceasing to love. Getting back one’s heart played a crucial, but often overlooked role in representations and negotiations of love. This article considers literary descriptions and meanings of falling out of love. To unlove reflected social conventions (e.g., ceasing to love the ‘wrong person’) and characterisations of a person (to unlove as a sign of fickleness). However, from a linguistic viewpoint, the term ‘to unlove’ also holds epistemological potential: the prefix ‘un-’ indicates the reversal of an event, implying that the word itself denotes progress and development.

Highlights

At Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre is miserable. Convinced that her employer Mr Rochester will marry the beautiful, but haughty and unkind Blanche Ingram, Jane Eyre muses on the futility of both her love and her attempts to get rid of it: I have told you, reader that I had learnt to love Mr Rochester: I could not unlove him merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me – because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction; [. . .]
Jane Eyre’s refusal to unlove Mr Rochester affirms that she is an autonomous person with a strong will and her constancy in love allows her to undercut social hierarchies
Her area of expertise and main research interests are British art, literature, and culture, portraiture and life-writing, history of emotions and non-emotions, and social history of art and literature

Summary

Introduction

At Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre is miserable. Convinced that her employer Mr Rochester will marry the beautiful, but haughty and unkind Blanche Ingram, Jane Eyre muses on the futility of both her love and her attempts to get rid of it:. . .] was incapable of feeling the commonest emotions of human nature,’ he slowly calms down, concluding: ‘I am afraid she will soon grow common to my imagination, as well as worthless in herself Her image seems fast “going into the wastes of time,” like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me.’[33] Hazlitt’s rendering pits unaltered love against the process of unloving by using time-bound words: ‘after,’ ‘overnight,’ ‘towards daybreak,’ ‘morning,’ ‘soon,’ ‘will grow,’ ‘fast,’ ‘going,’ ‘farther and farther.’. While St. John presents a non-imitable counter-example to both the emotionally profound characters of the book – Jane, Rochester, St. John’s sisters – and to the emotionally shallow ones – the Ingrams – he exemplifies an instance of unloving gone too far: no human being is loved by St. John anymore, so that within the narrative logic, his going abroad and nearing death keeps the threat of the non-emotional, non-relatable individual at bay.[64]. Contrasting coldness (marble) with heat (molten lead, fire), the narrator depicted his eternal deprivation of ‘natural affection’ as arising out of both torpor and ardour: rather than having emotionlessness only follow an excess of suppression, resulting in elimination, it could follow an excess of excitement, an uncontainable surplus of emotional engagement.[67]

Conclusion

Notes on contributor