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"The gallery of memory": The pictoral in Jane Eyre
Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1997 by Starzyk, Lawrence J
This landscape isolates Jane in much the same fashion that Turner, in a painting like "The Goddess of Discord," frames the protagonists of his visual dramas. Brilliant light (the "furnace flame" of the red-jeweled setting sun) contends with the dim light of some "modest gem," like an evening star or the rising moon. The particulars of the landscape distract from the purpose of walking down winding parterres-the effacement into the nothingness of not being seen. The momentousness of the situation results from the effacement of self attained when brilliantly defined elements are diminished in significance by an intrusive element-the fragrance of Rochester's cigarunamenable to senses-sight and sound-ordinarily used to describe the scene. And the momentousness is underscored by the sudden shift in tense from the past to the present: "my step is stayed.""5
Rochester later observes in his admonition to the naive Jane that such Eden-like scenes exist only "in [her] brain" (399) . The comment intended to persuade Jane not to leave the deceitful Rochester is not completely accurate, though, since Jane in the Midsummer-Eve scene here described finds in nature the objective correlative of the portraiture held in memory. Jane experiences her first visit to this Eden-like setting on the wintry evening she helps the fallen Rochester. In every instance, whether an actual or an imaginative confrontation with a scene,Jane focuses on the moment when the middleground "efface [s] the aerial distance" (135). In the first of her actual experiences with the Eden-like,Jane "put [s] down my muff on the stile" (139) before assisting the fallen Rochester, whose dark masculinity constitutes a portrait "dissimilar to all other [pictures] hanging" in her "gallery of memory" (140). In the second Edenic experience, the scent of Rochester's cigar renders the landscape momentous, prompting Jane to stay her course in the presence of the threat symbolized by the fragrance. The sexual references suggested by muff and cigar unmistakably intimate the resolution of Jane's continued transformation in her visual and verbal portraitures of the elemental forms and ideas residing in her "gallery of memory." The fear of death, the consequent reluctance to commit to life despite the curiosity to do so, the effacement of threats posed by the past and the future, the correlative preoccupation with the present, particularly as represented by the "shades" into which she retreats, comprise the elements of the dynamic motivating another lady's retreat from shades, shadows, and the seemingly protective ideals of the mind's museum of forms. Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, despite her love of the secure realm of the tower's shades, surrenders to the alluring and threatening world beyond her framed purview when Lancelot's image appears in her mirror. The sounds of weddings and funerals filling her tower compel her to understand the inextricableness of life and death. To be born is to die; to live is to surrender to death. Jane discovers this, and reconciles herself to this perplexing paradox, on both the physical and spiritual levels. Her relationship with Rochester produces a son and vision for her "likeness," the blind Rochester. But it also engenders vitality of a spiritual order, as Jane admits when allowing St. John Rivers to have the last word of her autobiography-"Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus" (579).
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