What We Call a String: On Love, Dependency, and the Self
What does it mean to think deeply? To dig into the darker areas of the mind in search of something. Ambition, I think, believes or imagines a core, a kernel, a cluster of meaning, and so we think deeply in hopes of detaching that thing from the mud of our mental world, in hopes of viewing it in isolation.
We do this with objects. Situations. Questions. Emotions. People. Memories. Meaning. We think them in our minds like an artist’s sun, finding shape in its substrate that lends itself to recognizable, turning abstract, unknowns into representations.
Perhaps this is the wrong way about it. Perhaps in the process of developing understanding we are, in many ways, quashing form—imposing a shape. What if we were instead to leave the object unanswered and instead let it sit, unmeasured, unresolved, yet followed in its raw, uncut, and uncontainable form? Is not-knowing less intellectual, or… truer?
What if we followed its threads and connections instead?
In Jane Eyre, Rochester says he feels a string extending from his heart to Jane’s. This is generally and easily understood as metaphorical—a poetic expression of the unmistakable emotion of love he feels for her.
But what if it’s not? What if the string is not a bond but a bondage?
He has a version of Jane he has known as an object. But where is her story in that string? It does work for his mind, his sense of himself, his subjectivity. And what does that mean for Jane?
Again: bondage, but recursive. She’s objectified in Rochester’s need for her. The string then represents not her love, but her dependence on others for a sense of herself.
What if Rochester’s string isn’t about connection at all, but about control? Not love, but the need to stabilize himself through someone else? Maybe what he calls a bond is really a mirror, a way to see his own meaning more clearly, even if it means blurring hers.
In this sense, the string is not love but the toxicity that must be purged before two people can actually partner. It distorts their independence. Their later separation—the dissolution of that string Rochester described—is essential. If their relationship is to gain a healthy footing, that severance must occur.
Does Jane Eyre end happily? Maybe. That’s a college thesis and then some. But perhaps the better question is this: What happens when we mistake dependency for connection? How do we (unlike Jane and Rochester) avoid relationships that nourish the ego but starve the self? Can we learn to recognize and interrogate not just the objects of our affections, but the strings that bind us to them, and to the narratives they sustain?
Are they binding? Toxic? Supportive? Fragile?
Do they deserve severance—or reinforcement?
Theory at a Glance
Rochester’s metaphor of a string binding him to Jane appears, at first glance, as a romantic affirmation of intersubjective connection. Yet, reframed through a poststructuralist lens, the metaphor reveals itself as a figuration of mauvaise foi—Sartre’s notion of bad faith—where the subject externalizes responsibility for self-definition onto another. The string is not merely affective tether but epistemological violence: an attempt to render Jane legible through his own need. In Lacanian terms, she becomes the objet petit a, the object-cause of his desire, structured not by her autonomy but by the symbolic lack she’s made to fill. Thus, what masquerades as love may in fact be a form of ontological subjugation where the other’s subjectivity is denied in favour of narrative coherence.