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June 26, 2006

Part II: Reed-Rivers-Rochester: Jane Eyre’s Three R’s

Throughout Jane Eyre, character foils display correlative psychological types that lace together a rich and patulous plot. They operate like a system of repeated musical motifs in a story of Romantic wildness--passion, rage and madness—which are set like gems in a narrative as solid as a crown.

Two pastors bracket the book. The Reverend Robert Brocklehurst, of the Lowood Orphan Asylum, is as brimstony and sadistic as the Reverend St. John Rivers is glacial and prohibitive. Ten-year-old Jane first sees Brocklehurst as a “black pillar�: “the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital.� St. John, by contrast, is likened to a Greek statue: “Had he been a statue instead of a man …� with a Grecian face “as colorless as ivory …� St. John Rivers is a foil to Rochester, as well. Just as St. John is moral, religious and forbidding, slim and blond--Rochester is amoral, exhibitionistic, undisciplined, broad and dark. St. John, in fact, is the callous, icy, Apollonian opposite of Vulcan-like Rochester who, along with his epithetical animals, is the quintessential Dionysian, pre-spiritual man.

Unlike the bracketing pastors, Bertha Mason and Blanche Ingram are foils who coexist in time. They may be read as latent aspects of Jane Eyre herself; symbolically, they are one character projected as two stages of regression—Bertha is a vampire, who sucks her brother’s blood; while Blanche is a gold-digging vamp, sans ire. The roof from which Bertha jumps at Thornfield is foreshadowed by Jane’s description of returning to Gateshead, where her aunt is dying, in a passage redolent with spiritual transformation:
"On a dark, misty, raw morning in January, I had left a hostile roof [Gateshead] with a desperate and embittered heart--a sense of outlawry and almost of reprobation--to seek the chilly harbourage of Lowood: that bourne so far away and unexplored. The same hostile roof now again rose before me: my prospects were doubtful yet; and I had yet an aching heart. I still felt as a wanderer [Rochester’s frequent epithet for her, as: "go up home, and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold"] on the face of the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers, and less withering dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished."

The wicked siblings at the start of the novel--John, Eliza and Georgiana Reed--are Jane’s cousins, and the odious counterparts of a second set of benevolent cousins, again two sisters and a brother: St. John, Mary and Diana Rivers. As a child, Jane is utterly disowned by the Reeds. As an adult, she claims the Rivers as fellow heirs and divides her inheritance with them.

Rochester’s ward, Adele, shares Jane’s innocence. Governess and charge were both unloved children, but Adele is materially spoiled where Jane was deprived. The story elaborates the contrasting minds and educations of the two. While Adele is irritating, solipsistic and demanding, it is she who brings Jane to Rochester in the first place. She symbolically manifests Jane’s burgeoning, if tacit, regard for the illusive master, for Adele’s adoration is as clamorous as Jane’s is checked. Scorned or ignored by her guardian, the little French girl complains mightily, occasionally deflects her affection onto Rochester’s surrogate, the dog Pilot, and persists in vying for the attention of her evasive father-figure. Her flagrant physical coquetry is antipodal to Jane’s witty ripostes. The child’s premenstrual-pink dress, which she “disembowels� from its gift box, contrasts with Jane’s severe black governess togs. But the two merge, as when Adele unknowingly promotes Jane’s inchoate interests regarding Rochester. It is she who brings Jane’s watercolors to his attention, unwittingly inviting him to explore Jane’s soul.

Posted by Jane on 2:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2006

Jane Eyre: A Subjective Appreciation

A catalog recently arrived offering a new DVD release of a 1973 film of Jane Eyre, with Sorcha Cusack and Michael Jayston. I added it to my collection: Joan Fontaine & Orson Welles (1944), Susannah York & George C. Scott (1971), Zelah Clarke & Timothy Dalton (1983), Charlotte Gainsbourg & William Hurt (1995), Samantha Morton & Ciaran Hinds (1997). It would be fun to compare all these adaptations and interpretations, which are not the definitive lot: I’ve heard there were other films, including a silent one or two. The novel has amazed me my whole life. A long time ago I wrote some essays on the subject, for the Bronte Society Newsletter. Here’s the first.

Part I: Jane Eyre and the Symbolic Landscape

All of Jane’s abodes are stifling, suppressive, stagnating. As an outcast at Gateshead, she’s imprisoned in the nightmarish red-room. Lowood School is a Procrustes’ bed of conformity: any natural self-expression leads to body and spirit being racked and lopped. Even spacious Thornfield Hall seems stultifying when Rochester is away. Moore House is a haven, but more house than home. “I never had a home,� she tells St. John; she must vacate the premises at once when he pressures her into accepting a life with him, which would be anathema to her nature.

Jane does better outdoors. She jumps at the chance to get out and walk two miles in midwinter to post a letter; re-entering Thornfield, she is “loathe to quell…the faint excitement� her walk wakened, doubtless aroused by her chance first meeting with Rochester, which could have occurred only out-of-doors. Her initial impression of him is man-cum-animal. The dog-horse-man appears as a starting, rearing, heaving, stamping, clattering, barking, baying and cursing unit–the portrait of a satyr too large for any Hall wall. Returning to Thornfield she quells her “faint excitement,� having no reason yet to associate the house with the man.

Later, Jane’s three-day struggle on the moors, where she is as mythically unaccommodated as Lear, proves an ordeal almost too brutal to bear. But survive she does, demonstrating that her human nature is a match for larger Nature. Home is only with Rochester. After a temporary absence from Thornfield, she says: “I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home–my only home.� At novel’s end their home is Ferndean, and the penultimate chapter ends: “We entered the wood, and wended homeward�–homeward and Edward being one and the same.

Landscapes of the imagination, of course, symbolize inner states. Ten-year-old Jane looks at a book whose pictures she will never forget. Years later she unconsciously renders them in paintings of her own, as primary, prescient images representing her inner self. Jane Eyre, page one. Hidden in a window-seat (the source of a lifelong habit, where she is not separated, visually at least, from plein air), Jane reads Bewick’s History of British Birds, illustrated with little wood engravings of Arctic landscapes. The introductory pages of Bewick serve as introductory pages to Jane Eyre as well. The inner visions of her inner life are born here, nature images later reinvented as cathartic self-expression: “The solitary rocks and promontories…; the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice…glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surrounded the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.� Her commentary: “Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own…The words…gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.�

Eight years later, three watercolors painted at Lowood particularly attract Rochester. One is Jane’s depiction of the “half-submerged mast� of a wrecked ship upon which lurks a “cormorant, dark and large,� holding in its beak a jeweled bracelet snatched from the “frail frame� of a drowned corpse. The cormorant is a Bertha-image: “…up in the locked attic: the voice of…a carrion-seeking bird of prey.� As Rochester says, “When I think of the thing which flew at me this morning, hanging its black and scarlet visage over the nest of my dove…� Bertha snatches Thornfield and Rochester’s intended gifts from Jane. The “wreck just sinking� foreshadows Jane’s wandering self-exile. The wrecked ship hints of the incinerated Thornfield; the cormorant on the mast is Bertha on the rooftop. Moreover, Bewick’s “object of terror� to young Jane is “a black, horned thing seated on a rock, surrounding a gallows�—which augurs Bertha on the roof, her execution by breakneck fall; the madwoman as nemesis on her husband’s back.

Another watercolor, depicting a “pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar white sky� is a subject plucked right from Jane’s Bewicked imagination, “a head—a colossal head� resting against an iceberg—the very image of Rochester “cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair,� with light thrown on his granite-hewn, prominent brow, like one of Bewick’s “solitary rocks and promontories,� a “rock standing up alone.� The eye in Jane’s picture is “hollow and fixed, blank of meaning, but for the glassiness of despair,� and above the temples “gleamed a ring of white flame� which is prescient of blinded Rochester, whose hollow eye expressed only despair, whose “cicatrized visage� bore his white badge of courage, a fire-scar. And the thin, supportive hands in Jane’s drawing work out to be none other than her own, as she supports Rochester, body and soul, from beginning to end.

“Each picture told a story,� Jane says of Bewick’s History. Indeed. She remembers: “With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption.� Eight years hence, Rochester asks Jane, “Were you happy when you painted these pictures?� Jane replies, “I was absorbed [read “uninterrupted�], sir: yes, and I was happy.�

Posted by Jane on 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

June 3, 2006

Sunday Report

From Friday through Saturday, a series of cinematic storms brewed, complete with lemon-colored lightning in tenebrous skies. The thunder was loud, in surround-sound. The rain spilled negative ions in enigmatic beneficence. In the chilly air, street signs clanked like wind chimes. Tug boats, pushing scows of scrap iron, churned in the fog.

But Sunday was as good as its word. The esplanade was abloom with alliums, those stalky scallion flowers with fluffy purple heads. Because of its waterfall, the lily pond was boisterous, full of papyrus, brindled koi and emerald-necked mallards. Kids kiting in the grassy fields. Beyond the pond, that curious, stepped-up, brick-columned gazebo looked, as always, as if it's in a snit. I can't imagine what it's for, except to maybe weather in.

Powerful breezes made everything flap. The river was wrinkled and rumpled like an unmade Sunday bed. Insouciant sailboats puffed and billowed (pillowed?) like linen on a line, or the Sunday Times aspread the capacious bed. The sails mirrored the smattering of jouncing kites. A gaff-rigged ketch tacked and leaned seductively.

Plentiful joggers, bikers, skaters. Many walkers: The young looked over and the old overlooked. Sundry readers along the balustrade on benches. A man with a Day-Glo pen was marking a book on atomic structure. Another perused some recondite journal (no pictures, small print) about the latest Middle East exigency. A good assortment of paperbacks, from Trollope to Jhumpa Lahiri; and not one copy of The DaVinci Code.

I came to the glass-walled Wintergarden, with its vast marble floor and high domed ceiling. The giraffe-like palms were coddled like caged pets and emoted an air of melancholy, as confined things do. (Their fronds, while not exactly crestfallen, don’t look quite chlorophyllophilic enough.) It was good to see a crowd, as in pre-9/11 days. Tourists have come from everywhere, to view Ground Zero. The New Yorkers were distinguished by their unseasonal pallor. Also by the tentative quality of their perching as if, loath to relax, even on a Sunday; they’re wound to spring into rush hour, a mere twenty hours hence.

Posted by Jane on 10:24 AM | Comments (0)