"The gallery of memory": The pictoral in Jane Eyre

But Jane's entire life becomes an attempt to accomplish the impossible, to realize the unrealizable, to make effable the ineffable. Like so many of Browning's most memorable figures (Fra Lippo Lippi, Pictor Ignotus, Andrea del Sarto, for example), condemnation befalls the character who has attained, and redemption is bestowed on the person who struggles but misses the mark. Jane's primary philosophical problem is learning to deal with this "paradox / Which comforts while it mocks" ("Rabbi Ben Ezra" 37-38). The carefully delineated moments of meditation that occur in the novel pictorially dramatize the struggle Jane undertakes.

At two critical moments, first when Jane contemplates leaving Lowood and next as she settles in as governess at Thornfield, Jane finds a vantage point from which to regard her still unrealized prospects. Following Miss Temple's marriage and departure from Lowood, Jane meditates on the "transforming process" ( 100) that occurs as she must now put off all she had borrowed from her teacher and become intellectually independent. Her choice of vantage point is significant.

I went to my window, opened, and looked out. There were the two wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks: it was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two: how I longed to follow it further. ( 100-101 )

The Tennysonian aspiration of pursuing an ever-vanishing horizon, the Macaulayan gospel of inevitable progress inform Jane's ambitions here and elsewhere in the novel: she is a true Victorian. She is also the quintessential romantic, a figure, like many of Caspar David Friedrich's, who stand over against the universe. Like Friedrich's Woman at a Window, like Arnold's speaker in "Dover Beach," Jane engages the world before her from the protective security afforded by the framing window from which she looks. As she approaches the window, she recalls "that the real world [unlike the limited Lowood] was wide" (100).

A critical discontinuity evidences itself in this moment when Jane enthusiastically embraces the distant prospect of the "real" while simultaneously remaining secure from whatever threats it poses. This Friedrich-like picture fails to acknowledge the artist in the present recollecting this event from her past. Jane's autobiography permits a complex narrative stance from which discrete temporal occurrences ultimately must be regarded as con-fused. The self, which in the past securely gazed upon a distant prospect of indefinable promise or peril, is now looked upon in the present by its self. The young governess, framed by the window and contemplating her self as Rochester's wife, indicates a principal function of the pictorial in Jane's world: the comparison of impressions wrought in historical moments with the "ideal stores" of personality from which they derive.7