Jane Eyre: Arts in the Novel of Charlotte Brontë
I want to demonstrate the way in which ‘art’ is seen as an expression of the inner self. The main character Jane Eyre’s psychology, through Charlotte Brontë’s verbal art and the narrator ‘I’, comes to show the complicated art of Brontë’s novel. I focus on the relation between the external and the internal worlds. Through arts, the reader can see that there are at least two kinds of paintings and portraits: one aims to represent what the external world looks like, while the other serves to depict one’s own thoughts and imaginations.
Critics mentioned about the role of the eye, visual objects and visual arts in Charlotte Brontë’s novels. Among them, Peter J Bellis, in his article ‘In the Window-Seat: Vision and Power in Jane Eyre’, argues that through Lacan’s usage of the gaze, the reader can see the social meaning of Jane’s gaze. Crucial moments of the gaze in the novel, according to Bellis, come to define the relation between the inner and the outer spheres in Brontë’s writing. For example, Jane’s window seat at Gateshead in the breakfast room, behind the curtain, shows a ‘boundary’ (Bellis 640) between her imaginary world and the external world. The curtain allows her to have ‘visual access to the outside world’ (Bellis 640). On the other hand, it also keeps her eye on ‘the book in her lap’ (Bellis 640).
For Alison Byerly, Jane’s approaches to visual images show a strong sense of ‘an imaginative truth’, in a way in which visual arts─including illustrations in a book such as Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds or Jane’s own landscape sketches─are ‘artificial, theatrical world[s] of exterior representation from the real world of inner feeling’ (Byerly 97). George Levine, in his ‘Realism, or, in Praise of Lying: Some Nineteenth Century Novels’, also claims that ‘realism’ is a ‘notion of mimesis in literary art’ (Levine 355). Literature, in the sense of realism as a form of verbal arts, has its feature of recording reality, as the reader can see in Henry James’s novels. And yet, art can also be seen as a mimesis of nature. It is also artificial. It is a lie in Oscar Wilde’s sense, since ‘[e]very detail is chosen and arranged by the novelist’ (Levine 356), creating a reality which belongs to the novelistic world.
Charlotte Brontë’s sense of reality comes from a tension between the inner desire─’inner urgencies’ as in Robert B Heilman’s term─and the ‘observed outer life’ (qtd. in Levine 361). I would suggest, Jane Eyre’s inner world represents a power of her own, allowing her to overcome class differences and the boundary between imagination and reality. The master/slave dialectic is particularly significant, when one sees Jane’s paintings as representations of her non-linguistic power. When Jane is with Rochester, she cannot say things which are against Rochester. In the realm of the symbolic order, language comes to reveal class and gender differences, as Jane is the governess and Rochester is the Master. A governess is somehow treated as a high-level servant, who has ‘a use value and an exchange value’ (Allen 111). Jane needs to earn money from the Master. As Jane needs to go back to Gateshead to see the Reeds, Rochester becomes her ‘banker for forty pounds’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 223). The governess, at this moment, is an object which has exchange values. The position of Jane, in the realm of the symbolic, is the Other, the passive and the oppressed.
Jane is happy and ‘self-satisfied’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 128) when she paints. Representing the imaginary, Jane’s portfolio contains her fantasy of ‘artist’s dream-land’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 128), affecting Rochester deeply while responding her works of art in the library. Through visual arts, Jane and Rochester become spiritually united, in a way which gender and class differences are dismissed. Visual elements in Jane’s paintings, such as the ‘vision of the Evening Star’, the ‘grassy hill with a large expanse of deep blue twilit sky’, and ‘a bust-length view of a woman’ (qtd. in Kromm 379), all come to reveal the Romantic sense of love and tranquility through nature, transcending the realistic and the mechanical external world to a ‘pre-social’ self, as the self is ‘free also to progress, move through the class-structure’ (Eagleton 39).
The relation between space and psyche is significant, in a way which Jane’s inner world is accommodated through the environment, as the interior comes to serve as a private space, revealing Jane’s shifting moods. For Charlotte Brontë, I would argue, the interior which the self is located in not only show as physical surroundings, but also a sense of inner reality. Visual objects characterise Jane’s mood and her ‘faculty of reflection’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 320). For instance, Jane ‘pauses’ her ‘strange fears’ ‘in the centre of the obscured ceiling’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 316) in her room, during the night before she leaves Rochester. The ceiling is transformed from a visible object to an imaginary cinema screen, revealing Jane’s imagination and her childhood memory with a cinematic technique, known as flashback─a cinematic way which Marcel Proust also uses in his auto-biographical novel, Remembrance of Things Past. The childhood memory of the red-room ‘trauma’ (Moglen 48) at Gateshead comes back to Jane, as her room in Thornfield at that moment is no longer ‘a heaven’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 317), although it used to be. Leaving Rochester, Jane is ‘weeping’ in her mind (Brontë, Jane Eyre 318), reminding the reader her ‘silent tears’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 22) after the nightmarish mood of ‘humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression’ (Brontë, Jane Eyre 18) in the red room, as the visual objects in the ‘interior space’ (Malane 91) re-define the room as a mental space.
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