Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre

"For shame! for shame! … What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre."

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (9)

Is Jane Eyre the heroine of shame? Would such a reframing of the character famously dubbed the "heroine of fulfillment" constitute its own shamefully "shocking 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 sympathy attaining pride of place in feminist assessments of Brontë'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! for shame! … What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre" (9)? This cry "for shame" 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 feelings like sympathy. In what follows, however, I want to explore the implications of this formative call "for shame" as it weaves into the presentation of Jane Eyre's interiority and personal relations, and into the novel's structure and narrative techniques, in a form not easily accounted for as either pronounced repression or covert Foucauldian discipline. For the feminist potential of Jane Eyre's voice largely emanates, I argue, from Brontë's formal enactment of a shame that mingles with and negotiates the extremes of anger's potentially antisocial alienation and sympathy's potentially oppressive socialization. The novel's initial demand "for shame" accompanies Jane's experience of being forced into the red-room and "thrust … upon a stool," yet it sets in motion a series of shameful spectacles that Jane, as character and narrator, embodies, witnesses, and stages with increasing agency, aesthetic control, and erotic investment (9). From the shamings of Jane and Helen Burns at Lowood School to the shame-charged maiming and healing of Rochester's body, Brontë employs a shame-inflected narration that intersects with physical spectacles of shame both to structure Jane Eyre and to fashion—in lieu of a sympathetic sameness—intimate relations of difference among the novel's characters, between present and past selves and, in a more formal sense, between experience and narration, story and discourse, and reader and text.

The specific cry "for shame!" reverberates throughout the pages of the nineteenth-century British novel, ushering many of its most famously mortified heroines—Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, and Maggie Tulliver among them—into its narratives and onto the literary scene, and shame more broadly initiates for others—like Jane Austen's consistently humiliated protagonists—climactic shifts in social and self-awareness.³ Tracing shame's role in Jane Eyre thus accentuates a historical entanglement of emotions and narrative that has wider—and continuing—resonance, amplifying a resounding yet critically neglected affective note in nineteenth-century literature and culture. In Jane Eyre we particularly hear this note in an empowered voice that showcases the productive, revisionary valences of novelistic engagements with shame throughout the period. Indeed, Brontë's novel offers a striking instance of shame as voice, in both the political and narratological senses of the term that Susan Lanser elaborates when she notes that voice, for contemporary feminism, often functions as...