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

This affinity of spirit, however, is as ineffective a palliative as Jane's Edenic musings. Shortly before she confesses her delight in Rochester's portraitures, the master of Thornfield warns his governess of the narrowness of vision she herself freely admits to in her distanced perspective on the wide world. "You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away," Rochester admonishes her in words providing a telling gloss on the water colors he recently examined.

Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rock bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you-and you may mark my words-you will come some day to a craggy pass of the channel where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master wave into a calmer current. (174-75)

Rochester's admonition coincides with Jane's desire to engage the "real" world that exists beyond the limiting confines of Lowood and Thornfield. And it recognizes the inherent danger possible in such engagement. What is intriguing about Rochester's common-sense warning is that his portrayal ofJane's situation and its possible resolutions coincide remarkably with the water colors he examined two chapters earlier.Jane is predestined, in her own mind and in Rochester's warning, either to founder perilously among rocks and crags, where she will either succumb, like the "half-submerged mast," and become "a drowned corpse" floating in green water, or to sit triumphantly like the woman "crowned with a star" amid the reflections of the Evening Star.9 Either resolution derives from the encounter with a "colossal head" resting against an iceberg, whose defining features include "a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair" (153).

Herein lie the portraits of Rochester and St. John Rivers confused.lo Jane's real predicament involves discerning which constitutes her likeness and redemption. That she discriminates between the two in resolving the existential dilemma represented by her watercolors becomes clear when, at novel's end, she returns to Rochester. The fallen figure with hollowed eye allows himself to be unwittingly teased into jealousy as Jane describes her relationship with St. John Rivers, the cold, glacial figure with "Grecian profile" who rationally attempts to coerce Jane into missionary submission. "`The picture you have just drawn"' Rochester tells Jane, "`is suggestive of a rather too overwhelming contrast. Your words have delineated very prettily a graceful Apollo: he is present to your imagination,-tall, fair, blue-eyed, and with a Grecian profile. Your eyes dwell on a Vulcan,-a real blacksmith, brown, broad-shouldered, and blind and lame into the bargain"' (565). The gods of fire and light contend in Rochester's analysis for victory over Jane. But the second watercolor depicting the triumph of the Evening Star makes clear to all but the blind Haephestus that the contest has been prejudiced in his favor.ll