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of her life” (1984, 695). Similarly, Patrick Brantlinger argues that Jane’s read-ing is an escape from the Reed family (1998, 116). Sicherman argues in general that reading was a way for women to exempt themselves from social obligations and gender norms (1989, 201–2), and Golden concurs that Jane
“indulges in independent reading, a delicious but dangerous act” (2003, 53).
Yet even if Jane is the woman reader par excellence, Brontë still insists on making Jane a viewer of images in the novel’s opening pages and, later, a pro-ducer of images as well as a reader of texts. Gayatri Spivak, in her essay famous for its exposé of Imperialism in women’s fiction, offers a brief analysis of the curious presence of the visual in Jane Eyre. Spivak notes that while supposedly
“reading” Bewick’s book in the novel’s first scene, Jane’s attention is actually more focused on the pictures in the book she holds: “She cares little for read-ing what is meant to be read: the ‘letterpress.’ She reads the pictures.” Spivak terms this practice of reading only the pictures a “singular hermeneutics” and links it to Jane’s study of the outside scene beyond the glass: both ways of
“reading” “can make the outside inside” (1985, 246).
Numerous critics have picked up on Spivak’s hint and traced a wealth of visual references in the novel. Before Spivak’s landmark essay, Gilbert and Gubar’s equally seminal reading of the novel focused attention on the blind-ing of Rochester, an event generally now read as Brontë’s radical demolishblind-ing of masculine power troped as sight.1 Jane Eyre is in fact shot through with the language of vision; the verbal texture of the novel is built on references to sight perception, both in its literal manifestation as bodily vision but also metaphorically in the sense that the entire novel might be read as a justifi-cation of Jane’s “point of view.” During Jane’s roof-walk in chapter 12, she articulates a powerful statement of the metaphorical force of seeing: she looks out across the fields beyond Thornfield and says, “Then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world”
(Jane Eyre, 95).2 Since her eyes cannot physically see beyond the farthest hill, however, Jane turns her steps inside and her sight inward: “My sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story . . . safe in the silence and solitude of the spot and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever visions rose before it”
(95; emphasis added). In this same scene, Jane articulates her loudest feminist manifesto, beginning, “Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts” (96). The vision of equality seen in Jane’s “mind’s eye” becomes, as her autobiography progresses, increasingly ful-filled; her marriage results in her becoming quite literally Rochester’s “mind’s eye,” his only access to the visual world.
Saying that Jane Eyre is a visually rich novel—both in its stylistic content and its thematic obsessions—is nothing new; its strong pictorial quality is one of the things that early critics liked best about it. George Henry Lewes,
in his review of Jane Eyre in Fraser’s Magazine (1847), was but the first of many critics to note the strong visual elements of Brontë’s novel. More recently, Lawrence Starzyk has argued for “the centrality of the pictorial in the development of [Jane’s] world view” and insisted with good cause that the entirety of Jane Eyre is a “verbal exegesis of the mute images stored in Jane’s museum of memory” (1991, 289). Similarly, Christine Alexander, in her productive research into Brontë’s early artistic endeavors, found sources for Brontë’s “fondness for the vignette, her method of analyzing a scene as if it were a painting, and her tendency to structure the novel as if it were a portfolio of paintings” (Alexander and Sellars 1995, 56). Alexander writes of Charlotte’s intense fascination for the visual arts: “It is not too strong to say that Charlotte Brontë had a fetish for pictures” (37). Elizabeth Gaskell reports that Charlotte’s school friend Mary Taylor said of Charlotte, “Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut [woodcut engraving] of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her ‘what she saw in it.’ She could always see plenty, and explained it very well” (Gaskell 1996, 109). Charlotte’s juvenilia reveal, too, her early fascination with pictures, portraits in particular. It seems unsur-prising, then, that her novels would be—as they are—so filled with pictures.
Jane Eyre in particular offers us a wealth of works of visual art.
Several of the artworks in Jane Eyre have been thoroughly discussed by critics, who have not overlooked the novel’s opening fascination with the illustrations of Bewick nor failed to see in Jane’s three strange and surreal paintings in chapter 13 a microcosm of themes and images from the rest of the novel. Bewick’s illustrations and Jane’s three watercolors are not, however, the only instances where pictures matter, although they have received the bulk of critical attention. Jane also produces a self-portrait in charcoal, an ivory miniature of Blanche Ingram, pictures of Georgiana and Eliza Reed, a sketch of Rochester, four more eerie sketches while visiting Mrs. Reed’s deathbed, and a formal portrait of Rosamund Oliver.
Jane’s artworks are generally, and I think correctly, read as symbolic mani-festations of her psyche. Alison Byerly writes, “To represent an inner reality that might otherwise remain hidden . . . the fantastic watercolor pictures painted by Jane Eyre, though not realistic in the sense of reproducing the physical world, are psychologically true to Jane’s state of mind” (1997, 93–94).
Likewise Jane’s charcoal sketch of herself when confronted by the imminent arrival of Blanche works as an indicator of Jane’s self-critical mood, as does her picture of Rochester drawn from memory during her visit to Gateshead at Mrs. Reed’s death. But I wish to argue here that Jane’s paintings can be read as more than symbolic monuments. Just as Helen Graham’s work in Anne
Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has significance beyond the biographical, so too does Jane’s work. Art in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is an expression of the heroine’s psyche, certainly, but it also works to perform a powerful social and aesthetic critique.
Charlotte Brontë would have been heavily invested in the cultural politics of women and the visual arts. She herself wished to be a painter before her eyesight failed and she turned to writing. But even after her decision to give up painting, Charlotte and all the Brontë siblings were thoroughly knowl-edgeable about the visual arts, a fact attested to by the frequent appearance of scenes of painting in Charlotte and Anne Brontë’s novels. As children the Brontës had access to numerous engravings of famous paintings, as well as several drawing masters; in her adult life Charlotte regularly visited galleries in London. Being a painter was, for Brontë, an unfulfilled fantasy; giving her heroine success in this realm was certainly one way to explore missed oppor-tunities for self-expression. The power of the painter, however, comes not only from her ability to express herself in paint; it also comes from the curi-ous ability of paintings as objects to reconfigure certain social situations. By looking at the scenes in which paintings occur (rather than simply reading the paintings iconographically), I will try to suggest ways in which Brontë uses her heroine’s artworks to comment on gender and class politics. Persisting in symbolic or allegorical readings leads us to miss the intense social and his-torical ramifications of painting that Jane’s artwork allows Brontë to explore;
pictures are conduits through which Brontë makes substantive commentary not only on Jane’s psyche but also on issues of gender, class, representation, and aesthetics. Critics who read the paintings as mere conduits to Jane’s
“real” inner self fetishize the pictures, worshiping them as stand-ins for Jane’s ultimately inaccessible true self (as Rochester, at one point, does).3 I attempt here to consider the whole aesthetic package—the picture, its circumstances of production, and the scenarios of consumption, viewing, interpretation, and judgment which Brontë offers—to suggest that women’s art not merely reveals private vision but instead participates in a public exhibition in which a female artistic force (embodied by Jane) must grapple with the dangers of sexual objectification, social disenfranchisement, and aesthetic regimenta-tion.
I also argue that Brontë endows Jane with the power of ekphrasis, a spe-cifically narrative power. Jane Eyre thus functions as a powerful defense of ekphrasis as a literary mode particularly suited to articulate female power. If ekphrasis, as I discussed in the introduction, is traditionally a way of control-ling a female image, Brontë radically rewrites this to allow her heroine control over both the production and the description of the image.4 We must always
keep in mind the fact that it is Jane describing her paintings; these paint-ings are in a sense ekphrastic exercises rather than visual artworks. In other words, the narrative voice knows that we, the readers, cannot see the artworks in question, and she seems to relish her power of stopping the narrative to describe them to our verbal vision. In Jane Eyre, she who sees and paints is also she who describes, giving the heroine an unprecedented consolidation of representational power. Since Jane’s paintings become such important texts, Jane’s descriptions of her own artworks serve to replicate Jane, to multiply the textual sites which “envoice” (to use Heffernan’s [1993] term) Jane. In mascu-line ekphrastic texts from Homer to Keats, the “feminine” art object is effaced (if incompletely) by the voice of the masculine ekphrastic subject, whose abil-ity to describe something Other (the artwork) confers a kind of power of pos-session or knowledge. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s ability to describe—and she is the only one who can—her own artwork gives her a double power: to create and to recreate in words. The relationship between word and image never becomes paragonal; rather, the two become necessary partners in the construction of an all-powerful female subject.
The scene of painting and ekphrastic description which is played out again and again in the novel foregrounds Jane’s role as a producer of visual artifacts, a maker of things that are seen.5 The various pictures Jane produces are moments—indeed, monuments—in a trajectory toward visual indepen-dence that requires Jane to generate visual images rather than simply repro-duce them. Given the preponderance of visual productions that Jane offers, the much-noted emphasis on the visual in Jane Eyre should not be limited to metaphors of eyes or vision or to pictorial representations of landscapes or interior scenes. Rather, in Jane Eyre a woman’s point of view emanates from behind the brush, so to speak; at critical moments throughout the novel, Jane represents herself as a representer, as one whose power depends on her prowess at visual representation. And Charlotte Brontë—like her sister Anne—imagines as an extraordinarily seductive medium, although Charlotte celebrates this seduction rather than offers it as a warning. This power is then compounded by the ekphrastic power that Jane wields when she translates her own works of visual representation into words, thereby controlling their interpretation.
II.
Near the end of Jane Eyre, Jane (living now as Jane Elliot in her own cottage near her cousins’ house and working independently as a schoolteacher) paints a miniature portrait of Rosamond Oliver, the beautiful daughter of the local
squire. Unlike all of Jane’s previous artwork, this portrait has been formally sat for by the subject; it is not generated by fantasy or memory. Furthermore, it is painted (again unlike her previous artwork) explicitly for others, and possibly (although Brontë does not tell us so explicitly) for financial gain.
Before finishing the portrait and giving it to Rosamund’s father, however, Jane amuses herself by perversely torturing St. John Rivers with it, forcing him to let down his defenses and admit his desire for the portrait’s original. Seeing his close attention to the image, Jane offers to paint him a “careful and faithful duplicate” (327); when he avers that this would not be “judicious or wise,”
she remarks bluntly that it would be “wiser and more judicious if you were to take to yourself the original at once” (328). Jane’s insistence that Rosamund loves Rivers causes him to indulge in a brief fantasy (precisely timed by his watch); he muses,
I see myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at Vale Hall, at my bride Rosamond Oliver’s feet: she is talking to me with her sweet voice—gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well—smiling at me with these coral lips. She is mine—I am hers . . . Hush!
Say nothing—my heart is full of delight—my senses are entranced—let the time I marked pass in peace. (328)
One can certainly understand Plato’s point of view on the danger of the visual arts. The portrait of Rosamond Oliver functions here as a traditional kind of seduction; it is a stand-in for a real object (a beautiful woman in this case) which elicits erotic desire and leads the viewer (Rivers) momentarily away from the path of truth (not Plato’s truth in this case, but Rivers’s Christian truth). Jane’s advice to “take to yourself the original at once” tells us that she wants the image to function as a conduit for desire, a conduit running from the original through the image to the viewer. The scene is reminiscent of a more farcical one in Jane Austen’s Emma, where the heroine’s attempt to create desire for Harriet Smith in Mr. Elton by painting Harriet’s portrait fails spectacularly—Mr. Elton turns his attention not on the image’s original (namely Harriet), but on the image’s producer (Emma). In Jane Eyre, too, desire fails to accrue to the image but adheres instead to the woman artist.
To rouse himself from the sensual reverie inspired by the portrait, Rivers draws a sheet of paper over the portrait, covering temptation—and in the process sees, on the covering sheet, Jane’s real surname: Eyre. The portrait of Miss Oliver becomes the way Rivers discovers Jane’s true identity, and hence her relationship to himself and her eventual legacy. Brontë suggests that art’s final purpose is not to provide an object for male delectation or masculine ekphrasis but, rather, to function as a carrier of female identity. The scene
thus works as a short parable of Brontë’s views on the purpose of women’s art: something that leads back to the self rather than (as in Tenant) works as a protective shield. The portrait elicits all the elements of a traditional ekph-rasis of an image of a beautiful woman: first, both Jane and Rivers perform the stock idealizing “blazon” with the image, breaking Miss Oliver down into component parts by detailing her lips, hair, and eyes in sequence (326–27).6 Next, Rivers’s ekphrasis transforms explicitly into enargia, a kind of rhetorical ekphrasis which uses detailed sensory description to make an object appear alive for the reader; Rivers says of the portrait, “It smiles!” (327) and goes on to detail the very physical effects it has on him. The portrait also perfectly expresses the gender politics of classic ekphrasis: the image smiles and seems to be given a voice by those describing it—yet it is eventually silenced and rejected by the viewer. In Brontë’s narrative, however, this is not simply because the voices doing the ekphrasis are exercising their masculine control over the image (although in both Rivers’s and Jane’s cases this is indeed true).
Rather, Brontë suggests that the image is silenced because the artist who cre-ated it takes over and speaks through the image. For all the power the image possesses, Jane and Rivers are able to indulge only momentarily in the fantasy of art as a field of seduction in which the viewer is sated by the depicted object.
Rivers rejects both the image of Rosamond and the woman herself; when he does wish to take a wife, it is Jane whom he asks. Not, certainly, for love or desire, but for those qualities that make her a good artist and would make her a good missionary. Rivers says explicitly, “There is something brave in your spirit, as well as penetrating in your eye . . . I honour endurance, persever-ance, industry, talent . . .” (330). What the portrait of Rosamund finally “says”
about Jane is not just that Jane is a good artist and hence would make a good missionary’s wife. Rather, this portrait’s most critical job is to announce Jane’s name—which becomes her direct ticket to wealth and family. The portrait proclaims her social position, not her psychic identity.
Similarly, Jane’s three wild watercolor paintings—the focus of the bulk of critical attention given to artwork in the novel—can be read as part of a social game rather than a psychological one. Readers first “see” these watercolors during Jane’s first formal meeting with Rochester (not their more uncon-ventional first meeting outside when he falls from his horse), who has sum-moned his new governess to appear before him in the drawing room upon his return to Thornfield. During the course of the evening he catechizes Jane thoroughly, forcing her to display her skills in music and art. He asks her first to play the piano for him, and after dismissing her playing with “Enough! You play a little, I see, like any other English schoolgirl” (109), he demands to see her “portfolio” of artworks.
Three of the items in the portfolio catch his attention: three watercolors with eerie subjects. I do not intend to offer a close reading of the paintings themselves, but it is, I think, necessary to remind the reader of the content of Jane’s pictures, so I quote the description in full:
While he is so occupied I will tell you, reader, what they are: and first, I must premise that they are nothing wonderful. The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.
These pictures were in water-colors. The first represented clouds low and vivid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam: its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed
These pictures were in water-colors. The first represented clouds low and vivid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam: its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed