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

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1997 by Starzyk, Lawrence J

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