Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (post 4): Two of Jane’s alternate personalities—empathic (when her friend dies) and emotionless (first interview with Rochester)

In the first quarter of the novel, I have found the two most memorable scenes to be, first, when Jane’s friend at the boarding school dies, and second, the first extended conversation between 18-year-old governess Jane and her new employer, Mr. Rochester, who is described as twice her age, but not middle-aged.

At the boarding school, half the children are sick, and some are dying. Jane hears that her occasional, but true, friend, is quite ill. Jane visits her friend, and finds her all alone in her sick bed. Jane gets into bed with her, so that her friend will not be alone. And when Jane awakens the next morning, her friend, lying next to her, has died.

In the first extended conversation between Jane and Rochester, what I find most striking is how Jane stays on a factual, emotionless plane, no matter how hard Rochester tries to provoke an honest emotional response. My first thought was that Jane was acting that way due to class and gender hierarchy, and that she was just trying to avoid problems. But she is not described as having emotions hidden behind an emotionless front. No, she seems genuinely attuned to only matters of fact.

Now, it is easy to rationalize this inconsistency in the way Jane’s personality is portrayed. The above two situations are different in many ways. But we have the concept of personality, because there is usually a basic continuity. We don’t expect a girl who is very empathic at age eight to be very unempathic at age eighteen.

However, in multiple personality, such discrepancies between alternate personalities are typical. A person has only so much of any quality—e.g., empathy—and if one personality has more than its share, another personality will have less.