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April 1, 2008

The Attic and the Sea: what lies above, what lies beneath

Here are rough notes comparing two 19th-century romantic epics, Jane Eyre (England, 1847) and Moby-Dick (America, 1851). Both novels are narrated by first-person observers: Jane Eyre and Ishmael are both young, articulate, intellectual and introspective loners. Both are orphans. Both are survivors. While the one novel is landlocked, the other takes place on the open seas, yet both are saturated with extensive nature imagery.

Rochester and Ahab are heroic, abstruse, charismatic, fascinating. Both move in fugal (if antipodal) rhythms: Rochester’s repeated travels away from his wife hidden in the attic; Ahab’s unremitting travels toward the elusive Moby Dick, both objects of hatred and perceived malice. Both men are larger-than-life, but while Rochester is a tragic hero in the classic sense, Ahab is not: Rochester undergoes change through the stages of hubris, peripeteia, and hamartia. His reversal begins when Jane runs away, and climaxes when Bertha sets Thornfield on fire. (Fire figures too in M-D, viz. the corpusants, in ch. 119, "The Candles.") He recognizes his error in cajoling Jane to be his mistress when marriage is no longer possible [“I did wrong” ch. 37]. His hubris, in the end, is humbled. But Ahab’s arrogance lasts to the salty end: “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…" ch. 135].
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Bronte’s and Melville’s protagonists are autocratic and dominating, both are older (38 and 58) than the narrators (about 18) but not wiser. Both men are missing limbs. The time frame from their disfigurement to the climax is one year for each. (While Ahab is already crippled when we meet him, Rochester is injured at the end of the novel, but both amputations are central, not incidental, to the plot). Both men bear lightning-like scars, and both are compared to lightning-struck trees.
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In ch. 25 of JE, the chestnut tree (whose name is cognate to “Rochester” and “chest,” or heart) is struck by lightning. JE address the tree “as if the monster-splinters were living things.” She says:

I faced the wreck of the chestnut-tree; it stood up black and riven: the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly…vitality was destroyed—the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead…a ruin, but an entire ruin... scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet...[but] you will never have green leaves more…

The image is repeated at the end of the novel in Rochester’s “cicatrised visage,” “scorched eyebrows,” and “crippled strength,” his arm “a mere stump—a ghastly sight!” Jane Eyre says:

His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever: his port was still erect, his hair was still raven black; nor were his features altered or sunk: not in one year’s space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding … dangerous to approach in his sullen woe….“I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard,” he remarked….“You are no ruin, sir—no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous.

~ The “scar of fire on [Rochester’s] forehead” is similar to Ahab’s scar. Compare the passage above with M-D, ch. 28:

He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.

The reference to "cast Perseus" reminds me of: "[Rochester had] thought himself [Celine's] idol, ugly as he was: he believed, as he said, that she preferred his 'taille d'athlete' to the elegance of the Apollo Belvidere."

Other findings: Each virile hero sheds a tear at the end: JE: “As he turned aside his face a minute, I saw a tear slide from under the sealed eyelid, and trickle down the manly cheek.” M-D: “From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” (ch. 132). And while JE is very much about finding one’s home, M-D is about escape from home. I’m going to contemplate an analogy between Rochester and his ward Adele, and Ahab, who becomes a father-figure to Pip. And here is a parallel communion between Rochester and Jane, and Ahab and Pip: Jane Eyre, ch. 23: R. to J.: “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you…as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and 200 miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.” ~~~Moby-Dick, ch. 125: Ahab to Pip: "Thou touchest my inmost centre boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.”
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I may be reading too freely into this literature, but that’s part of the fun of reading. I do understand the biblical significance of Ahab’s name, but can’t help forcing a Sanskrit/Latin analogy, regarding “A-hab” as “not-habiting.” Maybe it’s just as well I don’t have a PhD.

Posted by Jane on April 1, 2008 12:46 PM

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