4 pages-Symbolism in Jane Eyre- Research Paper

"Sympathy" in Jane Eyre

Lara Freeburg Kees

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 45, Number 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 873-897 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/sel.2005.0041

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Lara Freeburg Kees 873SEL 45, 4 (Autumn 2005): 873–897 873 ISSN 0039-3657

“Sympathy” in Jane Eyre

LARA FREEBURG KEES

Although the racial language of Jane Eyre is most often read in postcolonial or imperialist terms,1 I argue that it may instead constitute Brontë’s attempt to fi nd a replacement for both religious faith and the morality founded thereon. Because Victorian scien- tists came to read class in racial terms, Jane and Rochester resort to desperate language to explain their mutual, cross-class attrac- tion, and one of the most frequently repeated words during these exchanges is “sympathy.”2 For example, Rochester tells Jane, “‘I believe you felt the existence of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master.’”3 Although not specifi cally a racial term, several now-obsolete defi nitions of “sympathy” proliferated in the nineteenth century and bore clear racial connotations. For example, the abolitionist writers of the prior age drew heavily on Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, which depends on the right use of sympathy. Abolitionist rhetoric, evident throughout Jane Eyre, informs the novel’s racial dynamic, which becomes even more fraught in view of mid-Victorian racial scientists such as John Knox. These scientists argued that the English comprised distinct races, suggesting the biological unsuitability of marriage between the noble Rochester and his servant. Because sympathy appeared universally to motivate altruistic behavior, empiricists believed it could displace religion as a basis for moral action. Moreover, sympathy related to occult knowledge, which Jane claims in the novel’s fi nal chapters; sympathy could thus satisfy a desire for religious mystery. Sympathy becomes the nexus around which the loaded questions of race, religion, and philosophy revolve. In its manifold nineteenth-century meanings, sympathy bridges the

Lara Freeburg Kees completed her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004. This essay comes from a work in progress on how the postcolonial reading of certain Victorian novels obscures their philosophical and aesthetic complexity.

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gap among racially defi ned classes and provides a substitute for the transcendent and immanent God of the Christian faith.

I. ROCHESTER AND THE ABOLITIONIST RHETORIC OF SYMPATHY

Although the word “sympathy” today tends to mean a sense of pity or compassion for one who is suffering, Brontë draws on three main historical meanings, all of which were important to abolitionist rhetoric. When Rochester tells Jane, “‘You are my sympathy’” (p. 402), we might have trouble determining what he means. The fi rst two defi nitions of “sympathy” in the OED are now obsolete but they begin to show what Rochester and Jane mean by “sympathy.” 4 The fi rst denotes a literal, physical connection between people and things and the same connection produced by occult means: “[a] (real or supposed) affi nity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same infl uence, affect or infl uence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other.”5 A variation on this fi rst defi nition denotes the “relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between two persons) such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding con- dition in the other.”6 These physical embodiments of “sympathy” are contemporary with less literal defi nitions, such as the OED’s second defi nition: “[a]greement, accord, harmony, consonance, concord; agreement in qualities, likeness, conformity, correspon- dence.”7 We are most familiar today with the OED’s third defi ni- tion: “[c]onformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other,” with the variant “[t]he quality or state of being affected by the condition of another with a feeling similar or corresponding to that of the other.”8 This last defi nition is further removed from the physical connection, but it still requires taking on the feeling of another as one’s own.

Jane Eyre capitalizes on the various possible connotations of “sympathy.” For example, Rochester uses “sympathy” much in the way we use it today to tell Jane that she is a good listener: “‘Know, that in the course of your future life you will often fi nd yourself elected the involuntary confi dant of your acquaintances’ secrets . . . they will feel . . . that you listen . . . with a kind of in- nate sympathy’” (p. 166). Later, however, Brontë uses a meaning closer to the OED’s second defi nition of “agreement in qualities, likeness, conformity, correspondence.”9 When disguised as a gypsy, Rochester asks how Jane feels in a room with “‘the fi ne

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people fl itting before you like shapes in a magic-lantern: just as little sympathetic communion passing between you and them, as if they were really mere shadows of human forms and not the actual substance’” (p. 248). He suggests that Jane is so different from these people that she lacks sympathy with them, that there is no “likeness” or “correspondence” between them. This defi nition is something more than just fellow feeling, but it does not quite extend to the literal or physical level. But Rochester reaches that far when he tells Jane, “‘You are my sympathy—my better self—my good angel—I am bound to you with a strong attachment’” (p. 402). He here recapitulates his own earlier admission that he and Jane are literally tied together by an invisible cord: “‘it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame’” (pp. 316–7). The frequent appearance of the word and concept of sympathy in the novel prompts us to examine Brontë’s preoccupation with this concept.

We fi nd one clue to the centrality of sympathy in Jane Eyre in the rhetoric of the abolitionist movement, whose writers drew on the word’s various associations to garner support. They felt that by exercising this literal, physical sympathy, one acknowledges something within the slave that “corresponds” to something in oneself. Abolitionist writers could thus claim that the English were weakening and enslaving themselves by enslaving Africans. For example, in The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1808), Thomas Clarkson concludes that “if the unhappy slave is in an unfortunate situation, so is the tyrant who holds him. Ac- tion and reaction are equal to each other, as well in the moral as in the natural world. You cannot exercise an improper dominion over a fellow-creature, but by a wise ordering of Providence, you must necessarily injure yourself.”10 Clarkson’s equation of the “moral” and “natural” realms typifi es abolitionist warnings that depended, in part, on eighteenth-century writers on sensibility, such as Adam Smith. The fi rst chapter of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), “Of Sympathy,” distinguishes the words “pity” and “compassion” from “sympathy.” The latter allows us to take on the sufferings of others in a nearly literal way: “In every pas- sion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.”11 In Smith’s formulation, sympathy becomes the guide to moral action.12 Such action is not purely altruistic, since this

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kind of magnanimity earns one public regard, and that social reward ensures moral social behavior.13 The precedent of moral philosophers and abolitionists gave “sympathy” an added weight for readers of Brontë’s time.

Brontë would have known the earlier abolitionist movement’s pervasive rhetoric: a number of famous Romantic authors wrote for the cause, and the movement’s mottoes appeared in Punch, for example, well into the Victorian era. Eva Beatrice Dykes dem- onstrates how widespread abolitionist writings were by compiling examples from English Romantic literary fi gures who opposed slavery.14 William Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1828–30), for example, discusses the problems of assuming difference based on color. He claims that the progress of civilization tends to “extend the circle of sympathy with the circle of knowledge, to burst the barriers of tribe, nation, and colour.”15 Hazlitt explicitly equates sympathy with the recognition of human similarity that defi es color: “If pleasure and pain, good and evil were black and white, then justice and injustice, right and wrong might depend on this distinction . . . The hand does not feel pain the less because it is black? Why then should it feel it the more because it is black?”16 This kind of rhetoric recalls Shylock’s famous precedent, “Hath not a Jew eyes?”17 But the abolitionists asserted this fundamental human similarity under new conditions. In 1805, James Mont- gomery, editor of the Iris, went even further, denying the slave owner’s very humanity: “[T]he sufferer is only our brother; his lordly oppressor denies consanguinity with the slave; be it so, for thereby he bastardizes himself; the Negro is assuredly related to all the rest of the human race.”18 He accuses the “lordly oppres- sor” of having mixed blood, and his refusal of sympathy renders him subhuman.

Although motivated by admirable goals, the abolitionist rheto- ric could not really overcome racial prejudice. Charles Lamb’s “Imperfect Sympathies” (1821), for example, shows the weakness of sympathy. He writes of the similarity between African faces and his own: “In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.”19 Lamb emphasizes the human similarity that transcends race, but he later admits that his “sympathies” are “imperfect”: he fi nds himself ambivalent toward Scots and Jews. Indeed, Lamb admits, “I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual . . . I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices—made up of likings and dislikings—the veri- est thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies.”20 Lamb points out

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the weakness of asserting complementarity through sympathy; the closer he gets, the more he can see the “differences of man- kind” that prevent anything more than “yearnings of tenderness.” Sympathy’s weakness in this regard, moreover, perpetuated un- just class and racial structures. Though middle- and upper-class whites extended sympathy or acknowledged similarity to African slaves, whether the slaves felt the same sympathy with the whites was not an issue.21 The sympathizer thus remained in the position of power as the one who could choose whether or not to extend sympathy. The white abolitionists also cast the slave in terms that suited their form of sympathy, often disregarding the actual, unattractive conditions of the slave. Jane Eyre follows the pattern, as the landed and noble Rochester makes overtures of sympathy toward Jane but denies them to Bertha; Jane, the servant, does not generally resort to expressions of sympathy.

Although Bertha’s race is ambiguous, it may seem odd to suggest that Rochester uses abolitionist language toward an Englishwoman. The nineteenth century, however, came to de- fi ne class in racial terms. Sander L. Gilman presents the “three basic categories” of human likeness through which difference is defi ned as “illness, sexuality, and race.”22 Robert J. C. Young notes that race eventually superseded the other two categories to become the central issue in defi ning difference: “Race became the fundamental determinant of human culture and history.”23 This preoccupation with race does not explain Rochester’s use of abolitionist-like rhetoric toward a woman who is clearly Eng- lish. Young, however, makes the connection between race and class, arguing, “it is clear that for the British upper classes class was increasingly thought of in terms of race.”24 Moreover, until the 1860s, the various peoples that compose the “English race” were believed to have remained distinct and not miscegenated.25 Rochester’s thinking may then be very much of a piece with his contemporaries, viewing Jane as not only racially different but also dangerous as a mate.26 We can consider Rochester’s language toward Jane alongside abolitionist rhetoric, for his extension of sympathy to Jane roughly parallels the abolitionists’ extension of sympathy to the African slaves.

The association of sympathy with abolition may seem far- fetched, but Brontë includes a common abolitionist slogan early in Rochester and Jane’s relationship. During their fi rst extended conversation, Rochester says, “‘you fear in the presence of a man and a brother—or father, or master, or what you will—to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly’” (p. 170). R. J. Dingley

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878 “Sympathy” in Jane Eyre

Figure 1. John Leech’s cartoon from June 1, 1844 shows Lord Brougham hurrying off to an appointment he deemed more important than the manacled black man who appeals to him.

Figure 2. In a cartoon from May 18, 1861, Punch uses the Slave Eman- cipation Society’s motto to poke fun at Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories.

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writes in “Rochester as Slave” that the phrase “a man and a broth- er” was the motto of the Slave Emancipation Society.27 Indeed, this phrase was common enough well into the Victorian era to show up repeatedly in Punch and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and would have been easily recognized by any contem- porary reader.28 With Rochester’s speech, Brontë turns the tables on him ever so slightly, and he briefl y puts himself in the slave’s position. He quickly dismisses his avowal by saying, “‘or father, or master, or what you will,’” but his slip suggests an awareness of having lowered himself, however briefl y. It also provides an early intimation that his feelings for Jane undermine his confi dence in the class structures that discourage their relationship.

Rochester’s later allusions to abolitionist language are not as overt, but they repeatedly use “sympathy” in a way made familiar by that movement. He fi rst acknowledges his surprising feelings for Jane by speaking of sympathy in terms of that which is un- believable. He says to Jane, “‘People talk of natural sympathies; I have heard of good genii:—there are grains of truth in the wild- est fable’” (p. 187). He acknowledges the more occult defi nition of sympathy as a “wild[] fable,” though Rochester’s resistance to

Figure 3. As late as March 4, 1876, John Tenniel still uses the motto to address Ward Hunt’s slavery circular.

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these “‘natural sympathies’” shows his un-Romantic streak and his belief in the class structure that keeps similar types together. The understanding of his own native superiority is evident when he tells Jane that Bertha Mason’s “‘family wished to secure me, because I was of a good race’” (p. 389); he understands the Ma- sons’ social climbing in terms of his old family or his “‘good race.’” But where he can extend sympathy to Jane, he cannot or will not for Bertha. Brontë specifi cally uses the antonym “antipathy” as Rochester describes Bertha to Jane: “‘I found her nature wholly alien to mine . . . kindly conversation could not be sustained between us . . . I repressed the deep antipathy I felt’” (p. 390, emphasis mine). Brontë loads Rochester’s speech with three concepts that recur throughout Jane Eyre—those of “sympathy,” “nature,” and “kind.” Bertha Mason is “alien” to Rochester, and he begins to suggest that they are of different races (or even species) by referring to their lack of “‘kindly conversation.’”29 Rochester’s responses to Jane and Bertha are subjective and emotional. As Janet Todd suggests, such responses cannot engender any sig- nifi cant change toward class slavery; sympathy and sensibility instead gave “aristocracy and privilege a humane face.”30 Indeed, the British found it very diffi cult to see what was akin to them in a race they found unattractive. Even Lamb’s admission of fondness for the “benignity” of the “Negro countenance” falls victim to this problem. The passage ends thus: “I love what Fuller beautifully calls—these ‘images of God cut in ebony.’ But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them—because they are black.”31 Sympathy works better in the abstract, as we see in Rochester’s bewilderment at his own attraction for the plain, unconnected Jane.32

Nevertheless, the seed of sympathy grows in Rochester as his feelings for Jane grow stronger. His inability to conceive of a mate outside his class manifests itself in a series of “sympathetic” pronouncements about their connection. When they discuss the matter of Jane’s going to Ireland, Rochester asks her if she is “‘anything akin’” to him (p. 316), recalling that Bertha lacked any “kindly” connection to himself. He explains: “‘Because . . . I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string some- where under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of com- munion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should

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take to bleeding inwardly’” (pp. 316–7). Rochester’s dramatic il- lustration demonstrates the very literal defi nition of “sympathy” as a “relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between two persons) such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other.” This kind of connection, unbelievable to Rochester, parallels what abolitionist writers were trying to achieve. Moreover, his reference to ribs recalls the Genesis myth of how women were created and marriage divinely instituted.33 This famous passage states that the married couple “shall be one fl esh,”34 implying the unity and wholeness result- ing from marriage. Rochester’s speech harks back to myths of origin, before the human race was divided into races and classes. Brontë warns that artifi cial categories may prevent the crucial social bond of marriage.

II. “RACE IS EVERYTHING”

The presence of abolitionist rhetoric implies more than just class slavery in Jane Eyre. Brontë responds to an increasingly divided and divisive world by giving us two English characters that resort to extreme-sounding rhetoric simply to justify marry- ing one another. Although we discover that Rochester is already married for most of the text, his discussions with Jane center on what he feels to be an unbelievable connection or likeness. One gets the impression that Rochester would respond in much the same way even if he were not married. His use of abolitionist- associated language seems excessive and misplaced, since Jane is actually only the second English girl Rochester has courted.35 On their trip into town after their fi rst engagement, Rochester responds to Jane’s tart reprimands with, “‘I would not exchange this one little English girl for the grand Turk’s whole seraglio; gazelle eyes, houri forms and all!’” (p. 339). Although he never had a seraglio, Rochester has explored—and ultimately dis- liked—racial difference in his sexual partners. After his marriage to the Creole Bertha failed, he returned to England and kept three different foreign mistresses: “‘The fi rst I chose was Céline Varens . . . She had two successors: an Italian, Giacinta, and a German, Clara’” (p. 397). He attempts to court the English girl Blanche, but her name is ironic: she is a tall and dark and resembles the young Bertha Mason. Against these women, Brontë amplifi es Jane’s Englishness—her plain features and plain speech, her virtue in the face of Rochester’s desire (contrasted with Bertha’s debauchery and the foreign mistresses), and fi nally Jane’s own

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old family, revealed in the Rivers episode. Through the diffi culty of their union, Brontë implies that the Victorian understanding of race was dividing people who were otherwise naturally suited to one another. Brontë’s novel does not argue for the unity of the human race, but she does argue passionately (and patriotically) against racial science for the unity of the English.

The family relationships in Jane Eyre establish the compli- cated way in which Brontë uses race. During Jane’s childhood at Gateshead, she recalls that Mrs. Reed promised her husband that she would raise Jane as one of her own. Jane understands, though, that Mrs. Reed has no reason to like her: “how could she really like an interloper not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any tie?” (p. 14, emphasis mine). Jane apparently uses “race” here to mean that her blood ties were to Mr. Reed rather than to his wife. Jane might also be overstat- ing the difference in their dispositions by saying that Mrs. Reed is “not of her race.” But when Jane fi rst experiences romantic interest in Rochester, she refers to him as a blood relative: “I felt at times, as if he were my relation, rather than my master” (p. 180). Jane’s feeling dictates that Rochester is something like her- self, and she insists on a common point of origin by calling him her “relation.” She takes up this notion of original unity over and over again when referring to Rochester. When the Ingrams are at Thornfi eld, Jane watches the ladies, who seem unresponsive to Rochester’s conversation:

“He is not to them what he is to me,” I thought: “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine;—I am sure he is,—I feel akin to him . . . Did I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy against nature! . . . For when I say that I am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to infl uence, and his spell to attract: I mean only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him. I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered:—and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.”

(pp. 219–20, emphasis mine)

Jane subdues her passionate feelings by this passage’s con- clusion, defi ning her kinship with Rochester as having merely “tastes and feelings in common.” This defi nition, however, paral-

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lels one of the historical defi nitions of “sympathy”: “[c]onformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other.”36 These “tastes and feelings” speak to a deeper connection. Moreover, like Rochester’s discussion of Jane’s ribs, her use of “kind” evokes the Genesis creation account as well, where God decreed that “the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.”37 We have already seen that Rochester and Bertha could not carry on “kindly conversation” (p. 390). In this very emotional pileup of words, “kind” and the adjectival “akin” assert a similarity that reaches back to a mythical, original unity. According to Jane, nature itself opposes these constructed barriers: “Blasphemy against nature!” Finally, when Rochester is about to propose to Jane, he uses the same language to her: “‘Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?’” (p. 316), echo- ing Jane’s statement “I feel akin to him” (p. 219). Rochester and Jane both use a variety of terms to express their mutual love, but when their feelings become the strongest, they express kinship or a shared race. The assertion of kinship supersedes the mere “relation” she declared earlier: it hopes for an Edenic unity that existed before different races came into being.

Brontë’s use of racially loaded language manifests the nine- teenth-century’s fi xation with defi ning and classifying race. The characters choose language that was increasingly used to prove that even the English “race” was segmented rather than unifi ed. In 1850, John Knox declared that “[r]ace is everything: litera- ture, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it.”38 Knox’s zeal echoes the Victorian need to understand race scientifi cally, and Jane Eyre bears out his statement as Brontë represents the strongest emotional attachments in terms connoting race. Jane asserts that she and Rochester share the same race, while she and Mrs. Reed do not, even though all three are English. 39 This language sounds odd to modern ears, but Knox repeatedly avows the existence of distinct races within England itself. He explicitly rejects nationality as a unifying force: “I have long been in the habit of viewing them [the ‘dominant races’], not as nations, but as races.”40 Racial difference precludes nationality, as Knox writes in the introduction, “Englishm[e]n cannot be made to believe . . . that races of men, differing as widely from each other as races can possibly do, inhabit, not merely continental Europe, but por- tions of Great Britain and Ireland.”41 His need racially to classify individual Britons refl ects what Nancy Stepan calls “polygenism,” or the notion that the human species is distinctly subdivided.42 Jane’s passionate outcries suggest that race has indeed become

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“everything” to her: as class barriers come to be defi ned racially, they keep her and Rochester apart. She must redefi ne “race” to justify two English people marrying each other.

At the end of Jane Eyre, we fi nd out that both Rochester and Jane come from old English families, so the desperate need to justify their attachment ends. Signifi cantly, the words “sympa- thy,” “kind,” “akin,” and “race” never recur once Jane discovers her inheritance. It is clear that Brontë associates these racially loaded words with class structure and its implied racial difference. While Jane turns out to be “‘of a good race’” herself (p. 389), she is still impelled to tell her story, arguing through most of it that she and Rochester are beyond race. Brontë illustrates the peril of these constructed human dividers that might have prevented an otherwise suitable match. When Jane refers to her shared race with Rochester, she may implicitly reject the polygenism that racially divides the English, as do the passages that reiterate an original, Edenic similarity between the lovers.43 She does not want to “secure” Rochester for the same reason Bertha Mason’s family does. She does not want his “good race”; rather, Jane wants to yoke herself to something of her own kind. In the confusing and contradictory world of Victorian racial science, Jane struggles to reach beyond race, but it is only through racial language that she can articulate this fundamental unity.44

The change from understanding humanity as basically uni- fi ed to one that is naturally divided explains the dramatic qual- ity of Jane’s pleas for her likeness to Rochester. The shift from monogenism to polygenism changed the way in which humanity was fundamentally conceived. Racial science thus challenged the belief in divinely created and unifi ed humanity. According to Stepan, “The changes that occurred in racial science were at the same time rather more than a move towards racial typology and polygenism. It involved a change from an emphasis on the fundamental physical and moral homogeneity of man, despite su- perfi cial differences, to an emphasis on the essential heterogeneity of mankind, despite superfi cial similarities. It was a shift from a sense of man as primarily a social being, governed by social laws and standing apart from nature, to a sense of man as primarily a biological being, embedded in nature and governed by biological laws.”45 Jane’s quest for unity shows the Victorian uncertainty in the Christian faith, shaken in part by increasingly divisive ideas of race. Brontë’s language evokes this “science” used against itself to argue for similarity, albeit a very localized, English similarity. Because racial differences were being apparently proven through

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science, Brontë must formulate a new trope of union, one that can justify a governess marrying her master.

III. JANE, SYMPATHY, AND THE RHETORIC OF THE OPPRESSED

Where Rochester uses the rhetoric of abolition, Jane’s pas- sionate outcries more often mirror the language of the oppressed. Early on Jane tells John Reed, “‘You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!’” (p. 8). This is the cry of a mistreated child, yet she continues to fi ght against inequities, as when she proclaims her equality with Rochester later in the novel: “‘I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal fl esh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!’” (p. 318). Jane demands an equality with Rochester that transcends the social “custom” and “conventionalities” that keep them apart, and her distinctly religious vocabulary suggests that this equality goes beyond “mortal fl esh.” It is an equality of “spirit” that transcends temporal race, class, or gender inequities. Just as sympathy effects no lasting social change, however, neither do Jane’s declarations of equality. Jane establishes a system of equality based on innate qualities of mind rather than on out- ward appearances. In creating her meritocratic ideal, she must still determine others to be her inferiors, especially the beautiful Blanche. She does not escape the impulse to elevate herself over others, and her system also seeks to divide rather than to unify. Moreover, Jane determines the worthiness of others based on her own feelings about them. Much as with sympathy, her attempt to redefi ne human categories still depends on subjectivity.

In declaring herself Rochester’s spiritual equal, Jane echoes both white abolitionist writers and former slaves, such as Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who wrote for the abolitionist cause in his 1787 work, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffi c of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.46 Jane’s speech to Rochester also depends on the notion of a single human species, a notion that Victorian science would challenge. When Cugoano concludes his work, he does more than argue that all humans are equal. He uses one of the cornerstones of English culture, the

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Book of Common Prayer, to suggest that slavery is un-English as well as un-Christian and inhuman. He reminds his readers that baptism erases distinctions among people: “No name, whether Christian or Pagan, has any thing to do with baptism; if the re- quisite qualities of knowledge and faith be found in a man, he may be baptized let his name be what it will . . . And it may as well be answered so to that question in the English liturgy, What is your name?—A Christian.” 47 The answer for every baptized person is the same. Jane similarly clamors for a religious understanding of unifi ed humanity, but hers is a more diffi cult argument in face of Victorian racial science.

Just as sensibility and sympathy prove ultimately insuf- fi cient as moral guides, so too are these claims for equality. Although Jane speaks from the subaltern’s position, she denies her oppressor’s equality with her. For example, Jane upsets the power dynamic by refusing to extend sympathy to the visitors at Thornfi eld: “What was the gallant grace of the Lynns, the languid elegance of Lord Ingram,—even the military distinction of Colonel Dent contrasted with his [Rochester’s] look of native pith and genuine power? I had no sympathy in their appearance, their expression” (p. 219). The “grace,” “elegance,” and “distinction” of the others are all false indications of quality, pitted against Rochester’s “native pith.” Jane prefi gures Rochester’s claim (as a Gypsy) that she could have no more sympathy with them than with “shapes in a magic-lantern,” that their false show creates an illusion with which normal human sympathy is impossible. Her judgment still resonates with eighteenth-century thinkers, since one can use sympathy to judge another’s merits and to estimate their character as a prerequisite to fellow feeling. Similarly, Cu- goano, like Montgomery, claims that those who continue to deal in slaves “must eventually resign their own claim to any degree of sensibility and humanity.”48 While Cugoano implies the failure of sympathy that slave dealers bring upon themselves, Jane refuses sympathy to others outright because they lack Rochester’s “na- tive” qualities. Both suggest that human sympathy depends on the individual will to extend or receive it.

Jane’s assertion may stem from a desire to establish a new hierarchy, one based on innate qualities rather than on social position. Just before Jane goes to meet the “gipsy,” she thinks about her lack of jealousy toward Blanche: “Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox: I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fi ne person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren

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by nature; nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no un- forced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own” (p. 232, emphasis mine). Blanche’s handsomeness masks her qualitative inferiority to Jane. Jane’s intent here is similar to Rochester’s and to the abolitionists’. She looks beneath the surface but to uncover inner qualities rather than “sympathy.” Jane’s and Rochester’s two systems collide when she tells Rochester, “‘you are a married man—or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you—to one with whom you have no sympathy’” (p. 318). Jane uses “inferior” again to describe Blanche, and she combines her qualitative ideal with Rochester’s understanding of “sympathy.” She effectively translates her idea of meritocratic love for him in terms of sympathy by fi rst telling him that Blanche is his infe- rior and then proving her inferiority through his own felt lack of sympathy with Blanche. Rochester responds on Jane’s own terms when he proposes, saying, “‘My bride is here . . . because my equal is here, and my likeness’” (p. 319). The two ostensibly negotiate a way around the class system, one based on internal merit or sympathy.

Like the rhetoric of sympathy, Jane’s new meritocracy can- not escape the allure of the power structure. Jane is oppressed by the class system, but she wants to have power over others. What garners our sympathy is Jane’s plucky insistence on her supremacy to the handsome, showy, but shallow Blanche Ingram. Jane’s basic impulse is still to defi ne some kind of superiority; she would just prefer that it not be based on looks or class, the two things she lacks. At this point, we can see that Jane and Roch- ester try to erase the constructed inequalities that face them. In doing so, however, they resort to the impulse that created those inequalities in the fi rst place: the desire to put and keep oneself in the position of power, either through money, birth, or personal character. Moreover, both these systems depend on the subjective, personal intent of the human moral agent. In other words, both systems evince the subjective morality which, it can be argued, Adam Smith perpetuated in the prior century.

IV. THE DECAYING CHESTNUT TREE AND THE UNITY OF TWO

Brontë’s depiction of Jane and Rochester’s relationship es- tablishes two things: for Brontë, humanity was characterized by a fundamental disunity, which affected even the English; and

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personal relationships were becoming increasingly problematic. Brontë does not reach any conclusions about this problem. She simply depicts the diffi culties of two people negotiating their love. However unwittingly, she demonstrates the failure of any system, either Rochester’s sympathy or Jane’s qualitative ideal, that de- pends solely on human nature to sustain it. Midway through the novel, Brontë creates a powerful metaphor for this philosophical problem. Before Jane runs away from Thornfi eld, she talks to the chestnut tree split during a storm. It is still alive but decaying:

Descending the laurel-walk, I faced the wreck of the chestnut tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centre, gaped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the fi rm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; though community of vitality was destroyed—the sap could fl ow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter’s tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree—a ruin; but an entire ruin. “You did right to hold fast to each other,” I said: as if the monster-splinters were living things, and could hear me. “I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet; rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more—never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.”

(pp. 348–9, emphasis mine)

Although Jane takes comfort in the tree’s continued life, she acknowledges that the tree cannot produce life for itself or for other animals. The tree will no longer bear leaves or fruit or see nesting birds. Her only consolation is that each withering half will have a “comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.” This image becomes metaphoric for the problems Jane Eyre addresses: the tree was once whole, living, productive, and beautiful but is now split and decaying. Like the tree in William Wordsworth’s “Ode,” this chestnut also “speak[s] of something that is gone.”49 Although the chestnut’s halves can sympathize with one another, Brontë’s work implies that sympathy was unnecessary when the tree was whole. She also warns that the tree may not survive the coming

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storms. The divisiveness of racial science and its religious con- sequences portend England’s own decay, and sympathy becomes the pallid substitute for unity.

Sympathetic attachment attempts to patch up not only class divisions but also what was lost in the Victorians’ diminishing confi dence in the Christian faith. Jane struggles throughout the novel with questions of faith and belief, and the more spiritually minded characters accuse her of replacing God with people. Helen Burns tells her, “‘you think too much of the love of human beings’” (p. 81), and St. John Rivers similarly observes that “‘human af- fections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you’” (p. 454). Moreover, Jane calls the Thornfi eld garden “Eden-like” in the chapter in which she and Rochester become engaged the fi rst time (p. 311); signifi cantly, the Genesis passage that describes God walking through the garden occurs just after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit.50 When she remembers the night before she ran away from Thornfi eld, Jane acknowledges that Rochester “stood between me and every thought of religion” and that she “could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol” (p. 346). Rochester similarly replaces the transcendent Christian heaven with romantic love for Jane, as we see in his story to Adèle Varens:

I said I should like to go [to wherever the fairy was to take him]; but reminded it, as you did me, that I had no wings to fl y. “Oh,” returned the fairy, “that does not signify! Here is a talisman will remove all diffi culties;” and she held out a pretty gold ring. “Put it,” she said, “on the fourth fi nger of my left hand, and I am yours, and you are mine; and we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.”

(p. 337)

Signifi cantly, both characters at these points are doing wrong, and Brontë knows it: Rochester is already married, and Jane has “made an idol” out of a human being. But their reworkings of Christian tradition suggest that they are not fi nding the answers there.

Although Jane and Rochester are punished through Jane’s deprivation and Rochester’s mutilation, they never return to any kind of orthodox faith. When Jane hears Rochester across the moors, she says that nature “was roused, and did—no miracle— but her best” (p. 536). Although Jane carefully avoids the blas- phemy of assigning miraculous power to nature, the austere faith of St. John Rivers does not suit her either. Jane fi nds a middle

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ground, where religious experience becomes wholly personal: “I mounted to my chamber; locked myself in; fell on my knees; and prayed in my way—a different way to St. John’s, but effective in its own fashion. I seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His feet. I rose from the thanksgiving—took a resolve—and lay down, unscared, enlight- ened—eager but for the daylight” (p. 537, emphasis mine). At this climactic point in the novel, Jane fi nds some balance between St. John Rivers’s god and the idolatrous love she bore for Rochester. She fi nds, in effect, a personal religion, one in which she can pray “my way” to a vague “Mighty Spirit.”

At this moment Jane combines many of her beliefs that are scattered throughout the novel, and here the more occult defi ni- tions of sympathy begin to replace orthodox religious mysteries. Although Jane is punished for caring “‘too much [for] the love of human beings,’” she still holds out both the personal and “nature” as transcendent, as we see when she leaves Thornfi eld to attend the dying Mrs. Reed. Jane reveals another signifi cant personal truth: “Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs: and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key . . . Sympathies I be- lieve exist: (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives; asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffl e mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man” (p. 276, emphasis mine). “Sympathies” assume a religious, transcendent value. Brontë justifi es Jane’s personal belief when “sympathies” lead her to the Riverses, who were indeed “long-absent . . . rela- tives,” and when they earlier caused her to feel “akin” to Rochester. By assigning transcendent value to “sympathy,” Brontë illustrates the more occult defi nition: “A (real or supposed) affi nity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspond- ingly affected by the same infl uence, affect or infl uence one an- other (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other.” Jane’s prayer to the “Mighty Spirit,” Rochester’s audible cry across the miles, Jane’s belief in presentiments, and her un- derstanding of the “sympathies of Nature with man” all coalesce into a “mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.” She desires something transcendent, but the novel presents this mystery in personal terms.

Brontë addresses the problem of faith by having Jane rely on personal relationships as moral guides. Indeed, Jane Eyre

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dramatizes what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “failure of the En- lightenment project.”51 MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment failed to fi nd a “rational justifi cation for morality” which was free of assumptions about the ultimate ends of man.52 He examines eighteenth-century philosophers, David Hume and Adam Smith in particular, whose moral theory depended on observation, rea- son, and especially feeling.53 The new sense of a secular moral- ity became increasingly based in moral rules, rules unsuited to answering ultimate questions. In Jane Eyre, Jane and Rochester fall in love and must go against these societal rules to understand why those restrictions prohibit the joining of two people who seem otherwise suited to each other. Love plunges the characters into a host of problems they cannot resolve using these rules. Brontë’s characters use the language of sympathy to create a world unto themselves, against the constructed prohibitions of race and class. This elevation of personal interaction is readily apparent in other Victorian works,54 as in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” where being “true / to one another” replaces faith in a world from which the “Sea of Faith” has receded and which has “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”55

Brontë, in portraying two characters who must justify their marriage, demonstrates her perception of the age’s philosophical problems. Long-standing relationships such as marriage become the central interest because they often ironically illustrate the devastating failure to “only connect.”56 If, as MacIntyre argues, the Enlightenment fails as a philosophical system, this failure must play out in the lives of individuals. MacIntyre shows this philosophical trajectory culminating in G. E. Moore’s 1903 Prin- cipia Ethica, a work that profoundly infl uenced Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf.57 What Moore would ultimately claim is that personal relationships and “the contemplation of what is beautiful in nature or in art become certainly almost the sole and perhaps the sole justifi able ends of all human action.”58 This theory is no stranger to the Victorian period; it recalls Walter Pater and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as antecedent artists. Instead of reaching a grand conclusion or sense of human unity by the end of Jane Eyre, Brontë settles for a kind of unity of two, forming a system of lovers closed against a divisive world. As in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1885), a formerly theological system is made human and secular. As MacIntyre argues, and as we can infer from these Victorians, personal relations may not suffi ce.

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MacIntyre demonstrates that morality, taken out of a religious or teleological context, becomes a rule-based system for most Enlightenment philosophers. He distinguishes between morality based on rules and on the classical understanding of the virtues. He cites, among others, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as an example, which we examined earlier in the context of sympathy and abolition. In this work, Smith equates virtue with “rule-fol- lowing” and bases those rules on human emotions.59 What Mac- Intyre notes, though, is that a system based on human emotion becomes too subjective: “What is abundantly clear is that in ev- eryday life as in moral philosophy the replacement of Aristotelian or Christian teleology by a defi nition of the virtues in terms of the passions is not so much or at all the replacement of one set of criteria by another, but rather a movement towards and into a situation where there are no longer any clear criteria.”60 Rules, without a larger context in which to function, provide no guide for ultimate questions, and moral systems perilously depend on the individual will. Moore throws off the rule-based morality to which the nineteenth century clung and articulates a basis for morality that is entirely grounded on interpersonal relationships and on aesthetics—interests we can clearly see in To the Light- house (1927), where Virginia Woolf uses the Ramsays to explore marital love and the function of beauty. In Jane and Rochester, we see the attempt to reinterpret the rules, especially when they rework the Judaeo-Christian myths of Eden and heaven.

Brontë struggles through the ideological change that occurs between Jane Austen, for example, and the Modernists. MacIntyre calls Austen “the last great representative of the classical tradition of the virtues,” and he shows that she reinterprets the Aristote- lian view of the classical virtues for her time in a way that Brontë does not.61 Brontë’s characters rather work out this transfer from the teleological to the personal, and the passion with which she represents their struggle is symptomatic. The chestnut tree metaphor suggests the system’s ultimate failure, as Brontë wor- ries about the future of a country so divided against itself. It is important to note that much of Jane’s and Rochester’s discourse on these topics occurs before Jane runs away from Thornfi eld, before she and Rochester repent of their wrongs. Both characters are chastised by forces of nature, but Brontë does not provide a conclusion to their struggle. She depicts the racially defi ned class structures that form an element of Victorian culture and thought, but Brontë gives us more than a proto-egalitarian work: she dramatizes the precariousness of dividing a country falsely. Granted, Jane turns out an heiress, and Brontë does not have

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to resolve the problem of class confl ict, but she spends the bulk of her time trying. The characters’ passionate confl ict evinces the philosophical diffi culties that undergird it. We are left to hope that each half of the chestnut tree will indeed have a “comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.”

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf compares Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and concludes that “Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands.”62 She charges Brontë with having succumbed to her “indignation” and with being “at war with her lot.”63 Woolf’s comment is emotionally perceptive, but she grounds her observations primarily in an argument for the state under which women write. What she does not discuss is that she has grouped together three writers, Austen, Brontë, and herself, who were not just women writers but writers within a tradition that was itself in upheaval. To say that Brontë wrote “in a rage” because she was a woman is to pin down Jane Eyre too closely. 64 Neither did Brontë write “in a rage” because of class, gender, or race inequalities or because she unwittingly surren- dered to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “imperialist narrativization of history.”65 Brontë’s novel pierces to the heart of a world divided against itself, struggling to understand changing social structures, what exactly “races” are, and most fundamentally, what it meant to be human in such a world.

NOTES

1 The postcolonial readings stem primarily from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous thesis that Jane Eyre proves the “imperialist narritivization of history” (“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in Femi- nisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl [New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1997], pp. 896–912, 897). But, as Erin O’Connor recently argued, Spivak’s view has “overwritten” the novel with the “postcolonial narrative of literary history,” denying the “genre’s thematic subtleties, structural indeterminacies, and genuine intellectual rigor” (“Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism,” VS 45, 2 [Winter 2003]: 217–46, 220).

2 Frequent references to the word and concept of sympathy will be found throughout this essay. When I have placed “sympathy” in quotation marks, I mean to indicate the word; when it appears without quotation marks, I refer instead to the concept. Some form of the word “sympathy,” including “sympathize,” “sympathetic,” etc., appears thirty-two times in Jane Eyre. Its antonym, “antipathy” appears nine times in similarly various forms.

3 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 400. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

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4 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sympathy,” 1a. 5 The OED’s fi rst example of this defi nition is from 1579, and the last is

from 1883 (although a secondary connotation, dealing with the stock market, existed as late as 1912).

6 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sympathy,” 1b. 7 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sympathy,” 2. The fi rst example of this defi nition is

from 1567 and the last from 1847, the year of Jane Eyre’s publication. 8 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sympathy,” 3a–b. The OED’s fi rst example of this

third defi nition is from 1596. The defi nitions are all thus roughly contem- porary.

9 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sympathy,” 2. 10 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplish-

ment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (Wilmington DE: R. Porter, 1816), p. 23.

11 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfi e (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 10.

12 As Robert Heilbroner writes, “How does it happen that man, who is a creature of self-interest, can form moral judgments in which self-interest seems to be held in abeyance or transmuted to a higher plane? Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer, and in this way to form a sympathetic notion of the objective (as opposed to the selfi sh) merits of a case” (The Worldly Phi- losophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 7th edn. [New York: Touchstone, 1999], p. 47).

13 “The all-wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren; to be more or less pleased when they approve of his conduct, and to be more or less hurt when they disapprove of it. He has made man, if I may say so, the immediate judge of mankind; and has, in this respect, as in many others, created him after his own image, and appointed him his viceregent upon earth, to superintend the behaviour of his brethren. They are taught by nature, to acknowledge that power and jurisdiction which has thus been conferred upon him, to be more or less humbled and mortifi ed when they have incurred his censure, and to be more or less elated when they have obtained his applause” (Smith, pp. 128–30).

14 Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought, or, A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed (Washington DC: Associated Publish- ers, 1942).

15 William Hazlitt, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930), vols. 13–5, 14:121.

16 Ibid. 17 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Riverside Shake-

speare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2d edn. (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1997), pp. 284–319, III.i.59.

18 Qtd. in Dykes, p. 110, original emphasis. 19 Charles Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas,

7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903), 2:58–64, 62. 20 Lamb, p. 58. 21 Janet Todd, e.g., criticizes antislavery poetry for arguing social reform

from an emotional point of view:

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When they wrote their most infl uential works, the major English radical writers were severely rational. Like their conservative critics, they saw sensibility as dangerous and self-indulgent. It was the mode of an apathetic middle class which enjoyed dab- bling in philanthropy, especially when it involved groups far from home, such as African slaves. It did not mount a general attack on the social problems of an unequal and unfree society and it did not encourage political response: indeed, by giving aristocracy and privilege a humane face, as it did in the fi ctional pictures of semi-feudal harmony, it often reinforced the legiti- macy of the ruling classes.

(Sensibility: An Introduction [London: Methuen, 1986], p. 131) 22 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality,

Race, and Madness (Ithaca NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 23. 23 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and

Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 93. 24 Young, p. 96. 25 Later, however, according to Young, it became “increasingly common

. . . for the English . . . to defi ne themselves as a hybrid or ‘Mongrel half-bred Race’, often, after the unifi cation of Germany in 1871, in a spirit of opposi- tional rivalry to the Germans, who regarded themselves as pure Teutons” (p. 17).

26 Young argues that the dominant view between the 1850s and the 1930s was that “unions between allied races are fertile, those between distant either are infertile or tend toward degeneration” (p. 18).

27 R. J. Dingley, “Rochester as Slave: An Allusion in Jane Eyre,” N&Q 229, 1 (March 1984): 66.

28 Punch artists assumed instant familiarity with this motto and its subject. See, for example, Figures 1–3. M. H. Spielmann cites Figure 3 as an example of Punch artists repeating an idea; he suggests that the phrase was extremely familiar (The History of “Punch” [New York: Greenwood Press, 1969], pp. 164–5).

29 The word “kind” in Jane Eyre also bears racial connotations that Jane and Rochester both exploit. For example, after Jane divulges that Mrs. Reed hated her because Jane was “an interloper not of her race” (p. 14), she asserts that she “doubted not—had never doubted—that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly” (p. 15, emphasis mine). While she certainly means that Mr. Reed would treat her benevolently, the word carries added weight, coming immediately after her assertion that she is not of Mrs. Reed’s “race.” Moreover, she famously declares her kinship with Rochester in similar language: “‘he is not of their kind . . . I feel akin to him” (p. 219). Brontë’s use of “kind,” much like her use of “sympathy,” evokes several older meanings of the word, including “[n]atural, native”; “[h]aving a specifi ed character by nature, or a specifi ed status by birth”; and “[w]ell-born, well-bred, of gener- ous or gentle birth” (OED, 2d edn., s.v. “kind,” 1, 3c, 4a).

30 Todd, p. 131. 31 Lamb, p. 62. 32 Just as “sympathy” refers to an emotional or irrational connection,

Rochester also attempts to explain his attraction to Jane by referring to her as a supernatural being. This rhetoric reaches its height in Rochester’s fl irtation

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with Jane following their fi rst engagement. According to Jane, he calls her “‘provoking puppet,’ ‘malicious elf,’ ‘sprite,’ ‘changeling,’ &c.” (p. 345).

33 Gen. 2:21–4 (KJV; all subsequent references to Genesis are to this version).

34 Gen. 2:24. 35 Benjamin Disraeli puts the case just as strongly in his contemporary

novel Sybil (1845), set in the midst of the Chartist agitation. Charles Egre- mont talks to a stranger in the depressed town of Marney. They discuss the new queen, and the stranger asserts that Queen Victoria “reigns over two . . . nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwell- ers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” When Egremont asks him what he means, the stranger replies, “THE RICH AND THE POOR” ([Ware UK: Wordsworth, 1995], p. 58, emphasis mine).

36 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “sympathy,” 3a. 37 Gen. 1:24. 38 Robert Knox, The Races of Men. A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea and

Blanchard, 1850; rprt. Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969), p. 7. 39 Part of what Jane questions is also the class barriers that came to be

defi ned racially, but her use of racial language also recalls scientifi c studies such as Knox’s that articulated biological differences among the English.

40 Knox, p. 58, original emphasis. 41 Knox, p. 25. 42 Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960

(Hamden CT: Archon Books, 1982). Around 1840, the thinking on race was changing from trying to “extract regularities” and generalizable principles to uncovering difference (Stepan, p. xvii). Stepan terms this change a shift from “monogenism” to “polygenism” (p. 1). The former asserted that all humans were “members of a single human, biological ‘species’ and united in a single brotherhood by their common humanity”—an idea that “had its roots in Christian theology” (Stepan, p. 1). Polygenism asserted that distinct human species existed. Knox’s work was infl uential among polygenists (p. 41).

43 Whether or not Jane Eyre supports or rejects polygenism is unclear, probably because Brontë had no such racial project explicitly in mind. Jane clearly rejects the false notion of racially defi ned class because it keeps her from Rochester. At the same time, she is eager to assert her difference “in kind” from the novel’s tyrannical women such as Mrs. Reed and Blanche. She sometimes refers to her difference from these women as a question of merit (especially with Blanche) and sometimes as one of race (with Mrs. Reed).

44 Brontë only tries to argue for the racial unity of Jane and Rochester; she does not argue for the unity of the whole human race. As Stepan notes, Brontë (and the monogenist scientists) still recognizes the “superiority” of whiteness over the potential miscegenation of Bertha Mason (p. 4).

45 Stepan, p. 4. 46 Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and

Wicked Traffi c of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain” in Thoughts and Sentiments

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on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 1–111.

47 Cugoano, p. 110. He refers here to the custom of renaming the baptized person and notes that renaming does not alter the nature of that person’s soul, an argument with obvious parallels to Victorian racial distinctions.

48 Cugoano, p. 10. 49 William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” in The Poetical

Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–47), vol. 4, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 4:279–85, lines 51, 53.

50 “And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” (Gen. 3:8–9).

51 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d edn. (Notre Dame IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 62. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.

52 MacIntyre, p. 50. 53 Prior to David Hume and Smith, this line of moral sense theory begins

with the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Etc. (1711) and continues with Francis Hutcheson’s Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections and Illustrations Upon the Moral Sense (both 1728).

54 The desire to make personal relationships determinants for human action prefi gures Modernist writers such as E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Helen Schlegel of Forster’s Howards End (1910) says, “I know that personal relations are the real life, for ever and ever,” while the more thoughtful Margaret muses that modern life “throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before” ([New York: Norton, 1998], pp. 22, 186). These works show what MacIntyre argues, that the personal and the subjective never suffi ce to answer ultimate questions.

55 Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1867), in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, 2d edn. (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 253–7, lines 29–30, 21, 33–4.

56 The epigraph to Howards End (Forster, p. 3). 57 MacIntyre, p. 14. 58 MacIntyre, p. 15. 59 Smith, p. 235. 60 MacIntyre, pp. 235–6. 61 MacIntyre, p. 243. Aristotle’s teleological view is that “Human beings,

like the members of all other species, have a specifi c nature; and that na- ture is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specifi c telos. The good is defi ned in terms of their specifi c characteristics” (MacIntyre, p. 148, original emphasis).

62 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), p. 80.

63 Woolf, pp. 72, 73. 64 Woolf, p. 73. 65 Spivak, p. 897.

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