Introduction: the psyche in pain

Summary

The famous “red room” episode in Jane Eyre (1848) ends with Jane experiencing a species of fit and passing out of consciousness. Describing the aftermath of her terror, she explains that for many weeks “and even to this day,” she suffers the tremors of the mental anguish she was made to endure:

No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident in the red-room; it only gave my nerves a shock; of which I feel the reverberation to this day … Next day, by noon I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down; but my worst ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there; they were all gone out in the carriage with their mama … but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such a state that no calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably.

(Emphasis added)

Jane goes on to describe how the servant Bessie brings her a tart on a “brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more closely.”