No Net Ensnares Me

A guest post on Jane Eyre by Krystiana Kosobucki-Howell

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today’s guest post is definitely about both but in the format of interacting with a beloved classic novel. If you are anything like me, this essay by Kyrstiana will make you want to immediately read (or re-read) Jane Eyre — or watch the recent adaptation. So many delicious themes to think about and explore! It’s because of the support of the paid subscribers that I can pay autistic writers to share their incredible thoughts here in this space. So thank you so much!

Next week I will be sharing a bit more about my new project, but for now you can read more about it here (and get signed up if you want the first post delivered to your inbox on April 8th).

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No Net Ensnares Me

A guest post Krystiana Kosobucki-Howell

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.” - Jane Eyre

When I was little, I tore through paperbacks the way some children are always growing out of their shoes. I was a lonely, undiagnosed autistic, hyperlexic child – all my oldest friends are books.¹ I have two English degrees. In recent years, since understanding neurodivergence better, I have also come to understand the books that shaped me in a new way. 

There are lots of examples, dear to each of us in their own particular ways. The one that maybe shaped me most is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Introduced to the world in a brisk 600 pages by English author Charlotte Bronte (under a male pseudonym, for reasons) in 1847, Jane Eyre is a novel that changed what a novel means. It introduced a first-person narrator with an emphasis on observation and autonomy. It discusses social class and money, religion and ethics, romance and obsession. And to avoid burying the lede, its protagonist, Jane, is a neurodivergent icon.

I first met Jane when I was a child far too young for her, but she has stayed through every phase of my life. She epitomizes something special, something troubling, something eternally resonant about how it feels to be a neurodivergent person socialized female and shaped by religion, whose primary special interest is being very good.

The scrupulous type epitomized in Jane, but also found elsewhere in literature, is moral to her core. She has vivid inner principles and ethical standards. She is obsessed with justice, truthfulness, and honor. She is observant and analytical. She has never taken a joke in her life.

And yet, try as she might, she cannot get by on her morals. She is constantly failing according to the rules of her community. She is falsely accused (particularly of deceitfulness, which stings because she would NEVER). She struggles with emotional regulation. She falls apart when her senses are overstimulated. She is considered unusual, annoying, overly serious, sometimes even witchy or magical. She does not understand social norms and has a high barrier for entry to connection. She is often quietly queer, and her obligatory hetero relationships are always nontraditional. She is solitary in a way that is core to her – she must have dead parents, which grounds her sense of alienation in-text, but also makes her resonant for readers feeling alienated and unsupported  in their own lives.

There is a difference in literature between the characters we now read as neurodivergent who are male-socialized versus those who are female-socialized. When neurodivergent-coded men (Sherlock Holmes, Mr Darcy) are silent or terse, eccentric or unbothered by norms, nobody blames them. These characters earn respect – their idiosyncrasies are coded as genius or as misunderstood nobility. They may not have many friends, but they are safe and successful. Who are we to ostracize them for being rude when they are, respectively, either the smartest most brilliant genius crime-solver who ever did live, or a single man in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife?

The femme-coded neurodivergent character has no such privilege. Her nature is a straightjacket. When she is weird, she is shamed. When she is quiet, she is being rude; when she speaks the truth, she is also being rude. When she is insightful, she is “impertinent”; when she struggles, she is “difficult”. When she is overwhelmed and melts down, she is “attention-seeking”. When she flounders making friends, she is told to try harder. When she tries harder, she fails harder.

She is never, ever enough. 

With this personality and determination to please, Jane Eyre shows us how, in a high-control community, the neurodivergent woman is the perfect candidate for exploitation. Over the course of her story, Jane grows from a child into an adult, moves painfully from one environment to another, and proceeds through the same pattern in every community she inhabits: 

• First, she is alien.

•  Second, she studies the rules of the subculture till she knows them better than anyone.

• Third, she rises to success, a poster-child of her microcosm, a martyr for its cause.

• Fourth, she fails or burns out or is betrayed. She is forced out or leaves for her integrity.

She does it again and again. Each leaving breaks her heart and in each leaving she is brave.

She has completed this cycle twice – first as an orphaned child in the inhospitable home of relatives, and second in a high-control boarding school (where her characterization as a neurodivergent protagonist really blossoms) – before she is twenty years old. In her third home, as a governess to a child at a creepy manor house owned by a hot/mysterious gentleman and full of secrets, the plot thickens. In her new employer and friend (and neurodivergent hunk in his own right), Jane is surprised to find the first person who has ever liked her for her personality. For the neurodivergent femme who has learned that her personality is a liability, this is the dream. They plan to get married. Spoiler alert for Jane Eyre circa 1847: Jane and Rochester cannot get married because he is still legally married to his first wife, who is mentally ill and lives IN THEIR ATTIC – a secret everyone was keeping from Jane, withholding from her the autonomy of knowledge. 

Here, the difference between the masculine and feminine experience emerges. Autistic people of any gender often find social norms confusing and arbitrary. Rochester wants Jane to stay, to run away with him – social judgment be damned. Norms have no power over him. Jane does not have that option. While social rules do not make sense to her, she herself is the collateral damage. When the neurodivergent person bumps against social norms, a man shakes them off and is called a genius – a woman sublimates herself to suit them or she is called a menace.

Torn between the first person who has ever loved her and her own rigid ethics, Jane sacrifices community for the sake of integrity, and leaves once again. 

Out on her own, Jane is the loneliest she has been yet. She lands by chance in the company of kind strangers who turn out to be relations she didn’t know she had. In her new friends – two sisters and a brother – she finds people somewhat like her. They are driven, intellectual, virtuous, and kind. But eventually, even this kindred community exploits Jane. Over time, her new friend St John (himself characterized by neurodivergent intensity, ethical rigidity, social solitude, over-intellectualizing), notices Jane’s potential for the ultimate hyper-scrupulous career: A MISSIONARY. Together, they will spread religious colonialism. They will throw themselves at a sisyphean special interest. They will pave the road to others’ salvation with their own broken bones. 

 This is Jane’s moment of truth, and she does not go. She leaves St John, returns to her one true bestie Mr Rochester, whose wife is conveniently dead² and they get married and live happily ever after and I love that for her. 

But to me, Jane’s characterization is more important than her happy ending.

I am not here to draw direct lines, or to impose authorial knowledge or intent on a writer two hundred years older than myself. Charlotte Bronte did not know what it might feel like to be a neurodivergent exvangelical in the 2020s. What she did know is how it felt to be herself. She believed fiction is most compelling when it is personal, and it is not a stretch to see patterns between herself and Jane in both plot and personality.

 Charlotte Bronte died at the age of thirty-eight from untreated complications in pregnancy (hyperemesis gravidarum), which – pardon my morbidity – is a very autistic thing to happen to a person. But she changed the world. Before Jane Eyre, nobody had ever written a female protagonist who felt so fully realized, so intimate and coherent, so autonomous and clear-eyed. Her first-person narration, her exhaustive pattern recognition, her observations about human behavior, and her vivid internal moral sense introduced people not only to a new type of fiction but to a new type of woman. She made a protagonist who felt like a real person – a person who happens to be a perfectly characterized neurodivergent woman generations before neurodivergence was named. 

Charlotte Bronte knew us before we knew ourselves. She knew what a well-meaning autistic woman is to a high-control community – when ungoverned, a liability; when coerced into conformity, the best martyr ever known. She showed us the pain of choosing between community and integrity. She knew what it would feel like to tear yourself away. She showed us the loneliness of being this type of person, and also that the loneliness is survivable. She modeled the possibility of saying no.

There is an iconic scene in Jane Eyre where Jane first meets her future partner, Rochester, on a foggy dirt road. He half-jokes, half-negs, that she is so quiet that she emerges from the mist like a witch. She does not get the joke, but she sees Rochester has been injured and she helps him home. Later on, once he loves Jane, he changes his mind and compares her to an angel, a good and loving guide in a confusing and gloomy life. There is a little space in my imagination where I picture being an undiagnosed autistic child a little bit like walking in the fog, confused and upset, the way forward shrouded. 

Jane Eyre meets me on that road, and she shows me the way home. 

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Krystiana Kosobucki-Howell is an autistic artist and writer By day, she works in data for a college access nonprofit organization. By other times, she makes textiles, pottery, and essays. She is one half of Circling on Substack which explores how to create a home in which art can survive. Her special interests include artmaking, literature, money, domesticity, neurodivergence, and shedding a legacy of martyrdom. Subscribe to her Substack and find her on Instagram at @krystianaspractice. Krystiana lives in Memphis TN with her husband and her dog.

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Thank you so much for this gorgeous essay, Krystiana!

I’m curious if anyone else has been doing some deep thinking about characters in books we loved/still love?

Let us know in the comments :)

1. My oldest human friend is Lydia, who wrote about Jane Eyre on her substack recently!

2. I’m not ignoring dead wife – she is an important character. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is required reading for any fan of Jane, turning a post-colonial lens on the choice of wandering Rochester to marry a young Creole woman, the biggest flop move in a life – dare we say – full of flops.