Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities

At first when I started reading this book I wasn't much interested. It was recommended to me as background for a paper I'm revising, but it isn't actually connected to my argument. However, some of the source material is interesting, and I've gradually become intrigued by her argument. I was thinking about it today while discussing Persuasion in my British lit survey, but I couldn't yet articulate my ideas. Basically, Gagnier argues that whenever we read realist fiction we're only interested in those characters with subjectivities similar to our own. We'll read about poor people, as long as they have the values and self-concepts of the middle classes. "If literature does not give 'us'--the status quo--ourselves, we do not identify with it and it is not canonical" (136). This creates a problem when a writer wants to realistically present Others. How can you create sympathy within the bounds of convention and reader expectation? Perhaps Gagnier's view is too totalizing, though. Surely there isn't just one middle-class subjectivity. To be fair, she doesn't claim this. Instead she argues that there is basically just one *representation* of middle-class subjectivity that we accept as self-conscious and interesting et cetera. I'm especially intrigued for what this means for my reading of Jane Eyre, where I'm looking at sympathy for and victimization of those who experience sexual assaults. This is the part of Gagnier's chapter I get stuck on: "What the study of literature and other narratives and their reception show, however, is that as long as we need to see the other as 'one of us' we will not approach solidarity. Rather we need to sympathize with others precisely in their differences from ourselves [. . .] " (137). If we interpret characters according to stereotypical notions of individuality and consciousness, then how is this even possible? On the other hand, perhaps we already do it already: we see what is similar to us, and then we see what is different. In either case, I'm not entirely sure how the reading practice Gagnier suggests differs in any substantial way from what I already do. Perhaps later chapters will clarify.