Deep and Difficult Eyes:
The Insistence of Vision in Jane Eyre
"Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent."
-- Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects
Jane Eyre is a novel of vision and of visions. In the course of the novel -- presented by Charlotte Brontë as an autobiography, a conceit which allows the reader to take this all as hindsight -- the author/protagonist experiences much through her ocular vision and her spiritual, or intuitive vision. Dreams and drawings figure prominently in Jane Eyre, and both can be seen as realizations, or renderings (however inadequate or cryptic), of Jane's vision. In the author's realization -- that is, the text itself -- it is nearly always the visual sense Brontë attempts to engage most fully when describing a scene, a place or an event; she also makes use of the elusive nature of the visual metaphor when emphasizing elements of the story that are not what they might appear.
Jane's visions are frequent, and often profound in their accuracy. Her portraits cause viewers to turn away at the authenticity of her rendering. Jane herself turns away from her visions consistently, and the results are disappointing or even disastrous. It is through learning to not only face her visions but to accept them for what they can signify that the heroine finds her destiny.
Jane's keen powers of observation and her ability to make clear distinctions in what she sees are shown in the first chapter, when Jane sequesters herself in the window seat at Gateshead:
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to my right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. (Vol. I, Chapter 1, p.14.)
In these three sentences, many lines have been drawn: between right and left; between what is shielded by scarlet and what is illumined by glass; between even the day's near and distant aspects. The afternoon's portrait is being painted by Jane, who plants herself firmly in the middle of the window casement, both literally and psychologically. The window seat provides her with both a means to view the world and to block it out. Stationed in between the brilliant, thick curtain of red and the drab winter weather, Jane has a vantage point from which she can both see clearly and not at all, and from which she can safely interpret what she does see with no unpleasant result.
The curtain furnishes a luxuriant refuge with its vivid beauty, while the windowpanes reveal the bleakness of the world in which Jane lives; yet even these symbols hold a paradox, for behind the red curtain lurks the unhappiness and deprivation of life at Gateshead, and beyond the window, past the "pale blank of mist and cloud," awaits possibility and, perhaps, promise -- albeit at a comfortable remove. The book, a finite medium, literally gives wing to her imagination: "Each picture told a story" (Vol. I, Chapter 1, p. 15). Safe inside the window seat with a copy of Bewick's History of British Birds in her lap, Jane is in her element, balancing her seemingly conflicting ways of seeing and gaining mastery (however briefly) over her environment. It is an equilibrium she will soon lose, and the quest of regaining that equilibrium shapes her pilgrimage to and through the soul.
The comforting obscurity of the scarlet drapery is transformed into a nightmare when Jane is imprisoned in the red room at Gateshead for disobedience and a refusal to bow to the authority of her older male cousin. Trapped in the room which had housed the dying (and later dead) Mr. Reed, the only father figure Jane has known, the child eventually succumbs to terror and hallucination. Having been immersed in the otherworldly atmosphere of the scarlet drapery, its folds cease to be a shield and a safe backdrop for daydreaming, and become a kind of shroud, suffocating Jane's reason and pushing her from reality to a temporary insanity.
(It is interesting to note that a study of the chronology of events in the text reveals Jane's ordeal in the red room to correspond almost exactly to the year in which a young Edward Rochester returned from the West Indies with his unmanageable bride and sentenced her to exile in a room full of her own visions of madness. Clearly women of all ages must be "managed" in one way or another, and locking them up seems to be an effective way to do so.)
What embodies an intriguing play of light, shadow and texture in the window seat becomes a house of horrors in the red room. After hours of isolation, Jane begins to see apparitions in the shadows, and her child's interpretation of the sights before her produces the following reaction:
My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed to be the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; i was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down -- I uttered a wild, involuntary cry [...]. (Vol. I, Chapter 2, p. 24)
Jane flings herself against the door and away from her shadowy vision. Her one attempt after this incident at acting on her own desires and impulses -- when she confronts her Aunt Reed -- results in her being sent away from Gateshead to the hellish Lowood. From then on, Jane is consistently put in the position of having to interpret her visions and act upon them. Yet because she cannot, or perhaps will not, discern the messages being conveyed to her through her dreams and drawings, she remains in a state of indecision until an outside force of some kind -- the moon, a "fairy" leaving notions on her pillow, an interfering relative, or even the majesty of the law -- leads or guides her to her next step, just as someone had to release her from the red room.
Next... Image-laden dreams
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