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

Starzyk, Lawrence J

Jane Eyre describes her first encounter with Rochester as an event of "no moment." Her act of kindness in helping the fallen man to his horse is merely an "active thing," significant only because it provides a welcome change to an otherwise "monotonous life."Jane's characterization of the incident as "trivial, transitory," however, is disingenuous as her subsequent reflection on how and why this encounter becomes momentous makes clear. "The new face was like a new picture introduced to the gallery of memory; and it was dissimilar to all others hanging there." Contradicting her assertion that the event was of no consequence, Jane adds, "I had it before me when I entered Hay and slipped the letter into the postoffice; I saw it as I walked fast down hill all the way home" (140).

The haunting image of Rochester foreshadows the romance that develops during the remaining two-thirds of the novel. Jane's admission that this image, "dissimilar" to all others mounted in her mental museum, represents her first encounter with a masculine figure "dark, strong, and stern" (140), evidences a young, impressionable woman ready for romance, whose bias in men is towards the Byronic. This important encounter and the way in which Jane reflexively processes the event are detailed in the chapter immediately preceding the chapter in which Rochester examines Jane's portfolio and critiques the three water colors that have received so much critical attention. The purpose of this essay is to examine a number of critical issues without which discussion of specific pictures (such as those Rochester examines in chapter 13) becomes superficial. Specifically, I intend to examine Jane's aesthetic "creed" (20), the centrality of the pictorial in the development of her world view, and the ekphrastic tendency (and its narrative implications) that makes of this autobiography the verbal exegesis of the mute images stored in Jane's museum of memory.

Our first encounter with lane reveals a young child temperamentally disposed toward and socially coerced into "double retirement." As consolation for and security against the Reed children's abusive behavior toward her, Jane "shrines" (4) herself in the window seat of the family breakfast room, drawing the red moreen curtains close to isolate herself. The gesture is highly significant for this estranged and abused child of ten: to be seen is to be threatened; to hide one's self is to be secure. Ironically, to see is an essential measure of power for it provides the gazer with an authenticating power over a "seen" otherwise consigned to insignificance, even nonexistence. Jane's self-imposed and defensive act of isolation is the introductory gesture to the more determinative act of looking at something, in this case Bewick's History of British Birds. For the "letterpress" or text, Jane "cared little," being entranced rather by the drawings of birds amid "`the solitary rocks and promontories"' (5) of formidable and forbidding places like Siberia and the Arctic regions. To a child, these illustrations, what Wordsworth calls a "dumb Art," render the accompanying prose or verse of a printed page the "lacquey" of the visual ("Illustrated Books and Newspapers" 7). Jane admits that Bewick's text provided significance to the "vignettes," specifically to a rock, a broken boat, and the ghastly moon (5). But the undeniable relationship between these discrete elements of landscape suggested by Bewick's drawings and the three water colors Rochester critiques in chapter 13 indicates that Jane stores up and employs these images as Wordsworth does-translating the picture born of the original contemplated in tranquillity or crisis into its verbal "kindred."' "Each picture told a story," Jane claims in her commentary on her first recollected experience in isolation; "mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting" (5).

Two significant criteria inform Jane's appraisal of this essentially Wordsworthian reflection: (1) interest and (2) indeterminacy. The first criterion is less a matter of self-indulgence than an issue of aesthetic judgment. In an autobiography, perhaps more than in any other literary genre, choice becomes critical as determinative of the character or personality of the protagonist. Interest, however, also becomes normative artistically for Jane who, as author of her own verbal and visual portrait, mustjustify to her audience the inclusion and exclusion of autobiographical materials. In chapter 10, for instance, when Jane passes over an eight-year period in her life (the time spent at Lowood), she justifies her omission on the grounds that "I am only bound to invoke memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest" (98) . Interest forwhom, though? The reader?Jane (Charlotte Bronte)? The ambiguity suggested by these possible answers reflects the ambiguity attending Wordsworth's contention that poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Whose emotion and tranquillity? Wordsworth's? The reader's?

Both, I would suggest, in both Wordsworth's and Jane's (Charlotte's) cases, for the ambiguity permits the ongoing juxtaposition of various images called forth by the recollection of interesting or powerful situations. Wordsworth (in "Tintern Abbey," for instance) juxtaposes "pictures of the mind" (60) rendered in the present against comparable images from the past to demonstrate how these "forms" enshrined in the "mansion" (140) of the mind constitute "the life and food / For future years" (64-65). Jane similarly traces in the course of her autobiography how the images first called forth by Bewick and transformed by experience are reflected in comparable images (particularly those of the 3 water colors of chapter 13) defining her life.

When Wordsworth acknowledges that subtle permutationsthe "kindred"-of perduring forms or ideas are the basis of his poetry, he sanctions an important aesthetic development in critical theory. The indeterminate becomes the inescapable mark of the artist. Jane's analysis of her experience behind the red moreen curtains of the breakfast room's window seat is, on its surface, as flawed as Rochester's criticism of Jane's water colors seems to be.Janejudges the mental pictures of the "deathwhite realm [s] " suggested by Bewick to be imperfect, "shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains" (5) . Rochester, remarking the insufficiency of artistic skill and science in her water colors, concludes that Jane has at best "secured the shadow of your thought" (154). Both critics agree that the water colors evidence, in Jane's words, a mind "tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork" ( 154) . The romantic aesthetic, nevertheless, understands such indeterminacy as the hallmark of an artist aspiring to greatness. The imperfect, according to the romantics' successors (artists and critics like Ruskin and Browning, for instance), signifies artistic success, perfection artistic decline. For Jane, who in her autobiography ekphrastically gives voice to the otherwise muted portrait that is the subject of Bronte's work, the indeterminate alone is interesting.

Artistic or technical insufficiency, however, explains the least important aspect of Jane's aesthetic of indeterminacy. The very nature of profound emotions recollected in isolation suggests, as Pater states in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, why the kindred emotion departs from the original from which it derives. The concurrence of mental and physical forces inevitably "parting sooner or later on their way" (218) renders every human endeavor indeterminate. In lines suggestive of the process Jane follows in mentally constructing her world, Wordsworth writes in The Excursion, that powerful events so impressed themselves on the mind "with portraiture / And colour so distinct" that

they lay

Upon his mind like substances, whose presence Perplexed the bodily sense. (13&39)

The "perplexing" or haunting character of such portraiture demands tangible expression or at least the search amid empirical reality for objective correlatives of such "presences." In detailing her encounters with significant persons or events in her life, Jane invariably resorts to "picturing" as the initial step in dealing with experience. To be pictured precedes being verbally rendered. The centrality of the pictorial in Jane's life, its primacy,2 in fact, over the verbal, is evident throughout her autobiography. Events, people, landscapes, even words function to open pictures to her mind (572). Idle moments are spent in penciling absent faces; initial encounters with new faces and situations are first composed into a picture before they are physically engaged. Events in her life are judged aesthetically as being more or less "picturesque" (114). The autobiographical text may be understood as commentary on these vignettes, the word explaining, shaping, perhaps even controlling, the unruly images housed in memory. But for Bronte and her heroine ultimate control is exercised by the visual as Jane obstetrically delivers through verbal constructs the mute images of the mind.3

For Wordsworth, as for Jane, the portraiture occasioned by intense feelings yields the gallery of memory Jane periodically inventories as she catalogues new entries into that museum. How the poet and Jane interact with the portraits lining their respective galleries, however, constitutes the artistry of the poetry and the novel. Writing of his boyhood, Wordsworth claims to have received a "precious gift."

for as he grew in years With these impression would he still compare All his ideal stores, his shapes and forms, And being still unsatisfied with aught Of dimmer character, he thence attained An active power to fasten images Upon his brain, and on their pictured line Intensely brooded, even till they acquired The liveliness of dreams. ( The Excursion 1. 140-48) Interpreted in the light of Wordsworth's reflection here,Jane's dreamlike water colors testify less to technical insufficiency than to the brooding process by which what is unsatisfactory and of "dimmer character" in the scene contemplated or mentally painted is discarded, leaving in the mind only the essentials of the situation.

This self-conscious "brooding" or reflection on a scene, event, or person may involve a precisely demarcated occurrence, as when Wordsworth is "laid asleep / In body" ("Tintern Abbey" 45-46) and momentarily loses awareness of his sister before him, or when Arnold's speaker in "Resignation" lapses into a self-absorption abruptly dissolved by the "wandering smile" (199) of the neglected Fausta, or when Hardy's Tess makes her soul go out of its body as Angel Clare spies on this young woman terrorized by "outdoor fears." In Jane Eyre's case, however, her entire autobiography may be considered a prolonged meditation on the experience described behind the moreen curtains of the breakfast room's window seat. Jane's text, like Bewick's commentary on his drawings, attempts to give significance, in Jane's case, to "the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreckjust sinking" (6) . Every important event described in Jane's autobiography, in fact, can be regarded as a "trace" of one of these three symbolically structured vignettes, and the text thus becomes the typological elaboration of these critically determinative images.4

Two imperatives, however, dictate our understanding of the relationship between the underlying sketches of rock, boat, and moon and Jane's elaborated articulation or rendering of them: (1) the Wordsworthian insufficiency of verbal impressions or explanations to realize the full import of these "shapes and forms"; (2) the confusion of images permitted by these underlying "pictured lines." All three "forms" or images may be interpreted as referring to Jane alone. They may be read as representing the complex interrelationship between Jane and significant men in her life (Mr. Reed, Rev. Brocklehurst, Rochester, St.John Rivers) .5 The three specifically identified pictures from Jane's portfolio, the most approximate of the visual analogues described in the novel, may be prophetic of her life and thus define her future. Or they may signify her past and thus explain how her present and future are determined by previous events.' The interpretative confusion wrought by such possibilities simply attests to the inadequacy of any particular rendering to mirror the full import of these quintessential elements. In the "artist's dreamland,"Jane confesses to Rochester in chapter 13, one is "powerless to realise" what one imagines (154).

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

A similar meditation on a distant prospect occurs when Jane settles in at Thornfield. Shortly after arriving at Rochester's castle,Jane follows Mrs. Fairfax to the third floor. The tapestryand portrait-lined hall had the appearance of a "shrine of memory." This corridor provides access to the battlements to which Jane regularly retreats when not absorbed in her teaching duties. Her "sole relief" from her responsibilities, where she could feel "safe in the silence and solitude of the spot and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it," the castle leads provide more than a diversionary vision of the landscape opening before her. Along the battlements, Jane confesses, "I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had learned of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach." Here, within the regions of the "mind's eye" and "inward ear," Jane casts a "tale that was never ended-a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling that I desired and had not in my actual existence" (132). At this point in her meditation,Jane contemplates how confining her existence at Thornfield is and how limitless appear the prospects for personal growth and development in a world of infinite possibilities. The juxtaposition of these conflicting portraits allows Jane vicariously to attenuate her actual situation without, however, exposing herself to the possible threats existing within the limitless view she sees from the leads.

But Jane's imaginative landscapes are not merely temporary and naive palliatives. During a conversation following their aborted marriage, Rochester interprets Jane's countenance as shrewdly evidencing the inefficacy of such abstractions. Jane's features, as Rochester reads them, seem to be saying, "My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky, and a green flowery Eden in my brain; but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet a rough road to travel, and around me gather black tempests to encounter" (399-400). Jane's three water colors depict how tempestuous reality can be and how unlike her imaginative world is the Eden ostensibly figured before her mind's eye. The prescience of Rochester's interpretation of Jane's countenance begins to reveal the real motive informing Jane's fascination with the pictorial and with thejuxtaposition of "bodily impressions" and the images of the brain from which they derive. To a woman who, throughout her story, protests against being "a discord" (13), a "solitary" (80), who finds fundamental discontinuity between her self-portraits and her paintings of others (most notably Miss Ingram), who discovers that "she is not worthy of notice" (27), existence is not a matter of being "where there was life and movement" (105), but in finding a companionable form, a likeness attesting to essential equivalency with an other. All of her paintings, whether actual or imagined, betray the absence of such equivalency. Rochester alone provides it: twice he acknowledges her as his "likeness" (319, 328). And Jane, in her earliest recollections of the man who becomes her "idol" (346, 403), admits to taking keen delight in "imagining the new pictures he portrayed" (180) .8

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

Even before encountering Rochester for the first time,Jane admits to an aesthetic bias privileging the dark. Walking toward the post office in Hay,Jane hears in the distant night the sounds of a horse coming toward her. The "metallic clatter" of the horse's trappings "effaced the soft wave-wanderings" of the nearby stream. In a striking analogy intended to explain this acoustic effacement, Jane resorts, as is frequently her wont, to the visual. "As, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint" (135). The pictorial analogy is fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its revelation of Jane's innate tendency, even in the literary genre she employs to tell her story, to revert to the visual when attempting to explain the auditory.l2 Jane's concern that her artistic attempts to embody shadowy forms or ideas invariably attest to human inadequacy is reinforced by this analogy which reconfirms Jane's difficulty in rendering effable the pictures housed in memory.

Equally telling, however, are certain aesthetic concerns: (1) Jane's tendency to efface in her paintings both the distant background and the foreground to dramatize middleground;'3

(2) her predilection for the dark and strong as opposed to the light, aerial, and ethereal. Let me briefly defer discussion of the first concern to explain the significance of the second as indicative of Jane's prejudicing the contest between Apollo and Vulcan in favor of the latter.

The effacing sound of the horse's clatter soon discloses a thirty-five year old man of middle height and considerable breadth. Jane admits to no fear in this unexpected situation. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively they that neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic. (138)

This passage becomes important not only because it explains Jane's aesthetic predilection for the dark, but also because it answers a question raised earlier when Jane self-consciously meditates on her own image. She regrets not being "handsomer," with "rosy cheeks," a "straight nose" a "cherry mouth" and a "tall, stately, and finely developed figure." She confesses to feeling unfortunate that "I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets?" (118-19). Instead of answering this question, Jane rationalizes how respectable enough her "Quaker-like" appearance is. Not until she reflects on her evening meeting with Vulcan, however, does Jane unwittingly provide the answer to her question: Her regret and aspirations regarding personal appearance result from her failure to this point in her life to find a companionable form of similar "regrettable" appearance.

Such a superficial aesthetic criterion, though, detracts from the import of the first aesthetic concern occasioned by Jane's effacing the verbal with the pictorial-the tendency to efface background and foreground with magnified or exaggerated middleground. Jane's watercolors share many characteristics: they are dreamlike, dark, brooding. Their two-dimensional quality derives from the fact that discrete elements comprising the artworks command equal attention because of their massiveness (a giant head resting on a glacier), because sources of light (the diademed lady and the Evening Star) contest inconclusively with the dark, or because individual beams of light illuminate with equal significance a cormorant, the mast of a sinking ship, and the bare arm of a drowned corpse. The paintings appear designed not so much to capture surrealistically particular moments or events, but rather to divorce these isolated middlegrounds from foregrounds and backgrounds, which typically serve to frame for the spectator a significant event, provide context for it, or otherwise yield explanatory perspective on what is essential in the painting.

If, however, as I have attempted to argue here, the "groundless" elements of Jane's watercolors represent the quintessential elements from which specific portraitures-and in fact the verbal text itself-derive (as Wordsworth's poems derive ekphrastically from memory's gallery of forms), then word is handmaiden to the visual and functions to render effable the essentially ineffable. Such a conclusion warrants a reading of the novel as the paragonal tension between mimetic forms-the visual and the verbal-in which supremacy in the contest is awarded the mute image instead of the articulate word.l4 Charlotte Bronte's predilection for the visual is evidenced, not only by the pervasiveness of pictures and the pictorial in the novel, but also by the considerable effort she devoted to painting. The ekphrastic tension I've briefly alluded to here, however, is correlative of the more significant consequence of what I've described as Jane's three "ungrounded middlegrounds." Shortly after describing vignettes from Bewick,Jane is forcibly removed from the protective shelter of the breakfast room's window seat by Mrs. Reed at the instigation of her son John. At that moment, Jane becomes "a picture of passion" (8), to be reviled, punished, to be looked at. Imprisoned in the red room for her selfdefensive outburst against John, Jane is no longer simply the spectator of events, but the object seen, first by those consigning her to the room where her uncle died, then by her self as she notices her image in a mirror. Ancient superstitions contend that seeing one's reflection signifies immanent death. Jane's most difficult philosophical problem is accepting death. As she wanders the countryside after leaving Thornfield, before arriving at the Rivers's doorstep, Jane asks herself, "why cannot I reconcile myself to the prospect of death" (421 ) ? Explaining her inability to love or marry St.John,Jane passionately remarks, "If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now" (526). Similar sentiments inform Jane's response to Brocklehurst's question concerning what must be done to avoid hell. "I must keep in good health," Jane replies, "and not die" (34).

But the most significant encounter with and meditation on death occurs when Jane, during a walk one June evening at Lowood, contemplates her sick friend Helen Burns. "How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying!" Jane muses to herself. "The world is pleasant-it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?" The thought of death suggests the following image of Jane standing surrounded by an indefinable and unfathomable gulf. Her mind recoils from the prospect of immanent death, and "for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood-the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos" (93) . The only solid ground in an otherwise groundless universe is the present, the here. The views from Lowood's upper windows and from Thornfield's battlements disclose the promise of that gulf as well as its perils. But the protective barrier of the self isolated within the present of these places also reveals an unintimidating perspective on the world beyond the present. Rochester's warning that Jane's naivete can only be remedied by plunging into the gulf ultimately provides her with the courage to enter a world of potential threats in order to discover the rewards inherent therein. Before she becomes so self-assured, however, Jane's perspective requires the effacement of what in both the past and the future potentially threatens her.

And that visual perspective requires that she continue to see and, to whatever extent possible, not be seen. A criticaljuncture in her transformative visual regard of reality, the moment in which she begins to renounce the effacement that her water colors evidence, occurs one evening shortly after returning to Thornfield from Mrs. Reed's funeral. Jane's return is bittersweet, marked by the awareness that Rochester's apparent marriage to Blanche Ingram will require Jane's dismissal, and by the realization that "you [Mr. Rochester] are . . . my only home" (308). Retiring that evening, Jane characteristically effaces the unfathomable gulf. "I, that evening, shut my eyes resolutely against the future" (308) . Some two weeks later, as day gives way to evening during a "splendid Midsummer,"Jane wanders outdoors and verbally paints a magnificent evening sky, "pure of pomp of clouds," "burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame" in the west, and, in the east, illumined by "a rising and solitary star" soon to bejoined by the moon. Concerned that she will be seen in the courtyard outside Rochester's library,Jane retreats into the orchard. "No nook in the grounds more sheltered and Eden-like; it was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers: a very high wall shut it out from the court, on one side; on the other, a beech avenue screened it from the lawn." A winding walk, terminating in the giant horsechestnut soon to be riven, yields a place where "one could wander unseen" (311-12). "I felt as if I could haunt such shade for ever," she observes. But "in threading the flower and fruit parterres at the upper part of the enclosure, enticed there by the light the now-rising moon casts on this more open quarter, my step is stayed-not by sound, not by sight, but once more by a warning fragrance" (312).

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).

The purposeful ambiguity suggested by the third of her watercolors, variously interpreted as representing Rochester or St. John Rivers, anticipates her reconciliation with both men and with what they come to signify. That the painting represents both men indicates not simply Jane's intellectual resolution of the worldly and spiritual tendencies embodied by the two,l6 but also her acceptance of the centrality of life and death in the world view her autobiography depicts. The pictorial elements in Bronte's story must therefore not be regarded as yielding a set of discrete pictures, but as indicat ing an intellectual process by which the self-reflecting self attempts to make sense of a present continuously opening onto a future and past. The portraits hung in the gallery of her mind, particularly those formative ones painted early in Jane's experience, comprise the informing principles of human development that are fully articulated by the words and deeds of her autobiography. The text of her story constitutes Jane's exegesis and ekphrastic elaboration of the surreal, amorphous, and indeterminate shapes ranged along her gallery of memory.

1 In "The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth, in explaining that poetry originates in emotion being recollected in tranquillity, adds that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind" (Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 1. 148).

2Alexander, in "Charlotte Bronte: The Earnest Amateur," persuasively argues that Charlotte Bronte's early reading, especially in Allom's Picturesque Rambles in Westmoreland, Cumberland, Durham, and Northumberland, reinforced her "fondness for the vignette, her method of analyzing a scene as if it were a painting, and her tendency to structure a novel as if it were a portfolio of paintings" (55-56).

3 For a discussion of ekphrasis as the obstetric deliverance by word of the message inherent within image, see Heffernan 1-8. My discussion of the pictorial in Jane Eyre contends that, unlike ekphrastic practice from the classics through the mid eighteenth century which privileged the word over the image, Charlotte Bronte's practice privileges the image over the word. For an insightful discussion of this reversal beginning with Hogarth, see Paulson 3-9.

4The topological interpretation I'm advocating explains such divergent readings as Allen's, who regards the events of the novel as "subjective distortions" (182); Lewes's, who finds in Charlotte's art a "reflection of [her] own emotions and struggles" (107); and Imlay's, who interprets characters and events of the novel as "projections" of Jane's internal forces which must be confronted through the expeditionary journey" that is her life (163465).

5For a detailed examination of the three portfolio pictures as prophetic, see Langford 48. Gates contends that Jane's paintings "prefigure the more skillful word painting of [her] autobiography" (36).

6McLaughlin argues that the three portfolio paintings attest to the loss and abandonment of significant figures-most notably Helen Burns and Mrs. Reed-from Jane's past (22-24) . Linder similarly contends that the changes in Jane's personality must be regarded as the "logical development" of her past (34).

7Jane's analysis of the redroom scene becomes paradigmatic of this significant bifurcation. In the "visionary hollow" of the bedroom mirror, she sees "a strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom" (12). Rather than an example of Jane's total self-involvement from which, according to Blom, she regards others as "adjuncts or impediments to her own fulfillment" (104), such moments in which the divided self manifests itself must be viewed as indicative of the process of development Jane engages in. The self must encounter its self as "other" first before recognizing the essential companionableness of that "strange figure."

8This kinship Jane repeatedly experiences in the presence of Rochester supports Rich's contention thatJane's marriage to Rochester is a "continuation of this woman's creation of herself" (106).

9Meditating on Rochester's deception, Jane describes herself as "self-abandoned.... I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come" (374).

'oAll of the critical assessments of Jane's portfolio paintings referenced above (Gates, Langford, McLaughlin) argue temporal discriminations in quintessential elements where no distinctions exist.

"For a detailed discussion of the significance of the Evening Star and moon for Jane, see Heilman.

'2Tromley insightfully remarks that "So often do scenes echo paintings that we begin to suspect we are dealing with canvas rather than the printed page" (47). 13 For a comparative discussion of Charlotte and Emily's ways of dealing with middlegrounds in relation to foregrounds and backgrounds, see Alexander, "The Art of Charlotte Bronte," 119-20.

14 For a brief history of the paragonal nature of the relationship between word and image and the tendency in Western thought, generally, to privilege the word over image in this contest, see Krieger chapter 1.

15 For a discussion of the significance of shifts in tense, see Shannon.

16. For a discussion of the novel's dialectical resolution of Jane's crisis, see Williams 4850 and Tyler 177-80.

Works Cited

Alexander, Christine. "Charlotte Bronte: The Earnest Amateur." The Art of the Brontes. Ed. Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 36-64.

. "The Art of Charlotte Bronte." The Art of the Brontes. Ed. Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 118135.

Allen, Walter. The English Novel: A Short Critical History. London: Dutton, 1955.

Blom, Margaret Howard. Charlotte Bronte. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Ian and Jane Jack. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.

Gates, Barbara. "`Visionary Woe' and Its Remains: Another Look at Jane Eyre's Paintings." Ariel 7 (1976): 36-49.

Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer

to Ashbery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Heilman, Robert. "Charlotte Bronte, Reason and the Moon." NineteenthCentury Fictionl4 (1960): 283-302.

Imlay, Elizabeth. Charlotte Bronte and the Mysteries of Love: Myth and Allegory in Jane Eyre. New York: St. Martin's,1989.

Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1991.

Langford, Thomas. "The Three Pictures in Jane Eyre. " Victorian Newsletter 31 (1967): 47-48.

Lewes, George Henry. "The Novels of Jane Austen." Blackwood's 86 (1859): 99-113.

Linder, Cynthia A. Romantic Imagery in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte. New York: Barnes,1978.

McLaughlin, M. B. "Past and Future in Jane Eyre. " Victorian Newsletter 41 (1972): 22-24.

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. Three Major Texts. Ed. William E. Buckler. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Paulson, Ronald. Book and Painting Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible: Literary Texts and the Emergence of English Painting. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1982.

Rich, Adrienne. Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman." On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York: Norton, 1979. Shannon, Edgar F. "The Present Tense in Jane Eyre. "Nineteenth-Century Fiction 10 (1956): 141-45.

Tromley, Annette. The Cover of the Mask: The Autobiographers in Charlotte Bronte's Fiction. British Columbia: U of Victoria P, 1982.

Tyler, Irene. Holy Ghosts: The Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Bronte. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

Williams, Judith. Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1988.

Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952. . Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W.J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Copyright Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Summer 1997
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved