presence of Orson Welles in Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1944), The

Ellis and Kaplan comment generally that "Orson Welles . . . always dominates whatever scene he is in," and conclude that "cinematically, Jane is placed as Rochester's observer . . . we retain Jane's point of view, but her gaze is fixed on Rochester as object of desire, an odd reversal of the usual situation in film where the male observes the woman as object of desire in such a way that the audience sees her that way, too. Interestingly, the reversal of the look does not give Jane any more power. . . . Jane's look is of a yearning, passive kind as against the more usual controlling male look at the woman"(89). Yet in this instance we see not Jane's look but her looking. Her affect at this moment is hidden from us. We can, however, readily see her position within the frame, what seems to me to be a commanding position in a middle space where Jane-as-narrator mediates the events to us even as Jane-as-subject witnesses them with us.

Ellis and Kaplan's "yearning, passive" Jane is further complicated in my final example, a series of shots late in the film (figures 8-11). Here Jane leaves Rochester. She is devastated by their interrupted nuptials and the discovery of Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason. She still loves Rochester, though she will no longer live with him. Yet at the very moment in which the film might have emphasized her melodramatic position as wounded lover, the very Wellesian mise en scene instead reasserts her power within the narrative and her power over it. In figure 8, the departing Jane has grown much larger than the bereft Rochester. In figure 9, Jane begins to open the door, and Rochester is Lilliputian in comparison to her; he has shrunk almost to the size of a thought in her mind, a regret in her heart. In figure 10, Jane has opened the door wide enough to walk out, and in the process she has eclipsed Rochester altogether, excluding him from the frame, a striking visual demonstration of authorial control implied by her position in the frame. The Rochester she leaves behind (Figure 11) seems both devastated and powerless. Here again, the mise en scene suggests not only her power within this narrative but her power over this narrative, indeed her own complex homo-and heterodiegetic relationship to this narrative.

With the above examples, I have tried to make a persuasive case, based on historical and stylistic evidence, for specific and important instances of Welles's creative presence in a film officially credited to another director. The obvious objection to my analysis is that a large part of my evidence is circumstantial or speculative. I sympathize with the objection. My argument is frankly inferential. Authorship is rarely absolute, especially in so collaborative a medium as film, and while it is clear that Welles was a vital creative presence on and off the set of Jane Eyre, attributing specific shots to his directorial authorship in this case is risky-risky, but worthwhile, I think, if we want to recognize and analyze the film's successes as well as its failures. The result, of course, is an incoherent film, but the film's coherence would be difficult to defend in any case. That the film ends quite conventionally cannot be denied. Nor would I deny that the whole in this case is not as great as the sum of its parts. Welles's Rochester has his moments, as does Fontaine's Jane, though neither performance can be fairly judged a complete success. In many respects the film is a mess. But not in all respects.