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

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

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).