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George Eliot's “Janet's Repentance” illuminates her concern with the enactment of sympathy in binding the self and the other through the unraveling of the known reality and the unknown truth suppressed in the mind of the sufferer. Janet's sorrow arises from the harsh reality in Victorian domesticity involving the patriarchal husband's violence along with the issue of drinking. The agonized voice of Janet represents the cries of Victorian women resonating from their life restricted in the domain of household. Janet's confession to Tryan about her life of agony and her addiction to alcohol is a story of trauma which attests to the oscillation between a crisis of death and her ongoing experience of life as a survivor. The reciprocity of the sympathetic communication between Janet and Tryan corroborates the capability of the female confessor's traumatic narrative to connect the two people by invoking from the Evangelical minister a kind of uncanny repetition of another traumatic scene of his past which bears resemblance to the confessor's narrative of guilt and suffering. The encounter between Janet and Tryan does not simply indicate that a devout Evangelical minister guides a dejected, afflicted, and guilty woman to a life of regeneration, but it also sheds light on a bond between the two human beings with sympathy triggered by the narratives of each other's past. Thus the third story of Scenes of Clerical Life dramatizes the dynamics of confessions whereby one's own trauma is bound up with the trauma of another.
