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janeyre@window
by Carmel Bird
PART TWO
janeyre@window has is in theee parts for easier downloading:
janeyre@window first appeared in Regarding Jane Eyre, edited by Susan Geason, published by Random House Australia, 1997.
janeyre@window Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996.
All rights reserved
We had a discussion about the names of the houses in the story.
I asked her whether she had used the real names, or whether she
had invented them. They are so apt. How, in life, could they be
so apt? But she assured me they were the very names of the houses,
and pointed out to me the descriptive names of many a country
house in Yorkshire as evidence -- Stonegappe, Greycliff. We decided
to represent the houses with cartoons, animations, and walkthroughs.
Starting with Gateshead, then.
In the early chapters, because she is intent on travelling far
from Gateshead, closing the gates behind her, Jane's principal
detailed description is of the red-room, although we know there
is a porter's lodge and have the sense that the house is comfortable
and reflects a certain prosperity. And later, after living at
Lowood and Thornfield, when she visits the dying Mrs Reed, she
speaks only of the 'hostile roof' of the exterior, concentrating
on descriptions of Mrs Reed's bedroom which is amber, not red.
The image that has always dominated my memory of my first reading
of the text when I was fifteen is that of the red-room, and somehow,
the passion and the details of the writing there convey to me
the sense, the feeling of Gateshead.
The verandas of Lowood, the refectory, the dormitories, the classrooms
are dominated by an atmosphere of cold and grey, bare planks and
stained plaster, and the school is built in a hollow, a forest-dell
which is a cradle for fog and fog-bred pestilence. After Jane's
companion Helen Burns has died of fever, Jane goes to the window
and looks out. 'There were the two wings of the building; there
was the garden, there were the skirts of Lowood; there was the
hilly horizon. 'Again she is looking beyond the house which is
a kind of prison. It is when she gets to Thornfield where she
is to be governess to Edward Rochester's ward Adele that she describes
the house as she approaches it.
We now slowly ascended a drive, and came upon the long front of
a house: candlelight gleamed from one curtained bow-window; all
the rest were dark. (Ch. 11) She crosses a square hall with high
doors all round, and then she goes into a room 'whose double illumination
of fire and candle at first dazzled me, contrasting as it did
with with the darkness to which my eyes had been for two hours
inured'.
A snug small room; a round table by a cheerful fire; an armchair
high-backed and old-fashioned.
The steps and bannisters were of oak; the staircase window was
high and latticed; both it and the long gallery into which the
bedroom doors opened looked as if they belonged to a church rather
than a house. A very chill and vault-like air pervaded the stairs
and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude.
A bronze lamp pendant from the ceiling, a great clock whose case
was of oak curiously carved, and ebon black with time and rubbing.
The hall door which was half of glass, stood open: I stepped over
the threshold.
Thornfield was three stories high, of proportions not vast, though
considerable; a gentelman's manor-house, not a nobleman's seat:
battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its gray
front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing
tenants were now on the wing.
We are going to have a lot of fun on the CD-Rom with the rooks
- they are like real emblems of Thornfield Hall, the other face
of fairies, in a way. And of course the text is marked by dualities
like that. There's a lot of black and a lot of white; fire and
ice; red and white; kind and cruel; good and evil; life and death;
sun and moon; winter and spring and so forth. Clarity and obscurity.
Mr Brockelhurst and Edward Rochester are both represented as big
black phallic objects against the small white labial-winged fairy
of Jane Eyre.
I talked to Jane about the coincidences between some of the people's
names and their significance in the textual themes, how apt it
is that Edward, the rock, the earth, is called Rochester, and
she, the airy fairy one is called Eyre. Then there's the cool
spiritual goodness, saintliness really, of St John Rivers.
She agreed that the coincidences were striking. She regretted
that, in the scheme of things, Grace Poole should be called Grace
Poole, but thought perhaps there was a deep irony there. I said
it was then a pity that Bertha Mason's name didn't suggest fire,
and Jane agreed. She invented the name Brocklehurst because the
real man's name was Tuttleby and she thought it was too silly
and distracting for a story. Chapters twenty-five and twenty-six
are very important not only to the narrative but to the structure
and texture, the unconscious content of the whole thing. Two key
dreams are in there, and dream has a menu on the CD-Rom. I suggested to Jane that from the moment
she fell into the fit in the red-room, the whole thing could have
been a dream, with dreams and nightmares within dreams. She agreed
with this, but laughed (e-mail laughing is <:-)>) and said she wished that half of it had been a dream. Like Alice. But although Jane enjoys the story
of Alice up to a point, she says she finds much of it sickeningly
erotic. I backed off when she said that -- I had at the time been
about to embark on some remarks about the castration imagery of
Edward's crippled hand, and the impotence of his blindess. Better
not say. The word dream is quite interesting. There was a Middle English word 'dream'
which meant mirth, joy and music, and nobody seems to know what
relation this word bears to dream as we know it. Our dream is related to Old Frisian (dram), Old Saxon (drom) and Old High
German (troum) and signifies a train of thoughts and images passing
through the mind during sleep. Jane's story was published in 1847
and Freud didn't publish The Interpretation of Dreams until the beginning of the twentieth century, and it's worth
noting that the six hundred copies of the first edition of the
latter took eight years to sell. This was probably because a frank
discussion of dreams was very unfashionable. Jane of course didn't
talk about dreams, but recounted the events that came to her in dreams without
much comment or any analysis.
She has seen Edward's face 'all kindled, and his full falcon-eye
flashing, and tenderness and passion in every lineament.' She
has left her wedding dress in the wardrobe, addressing it as 'white
dream', and she has walked in the orchard under a blood-red moon.
Her eyes are glittering strangely and she describes Edward as
'most phantom-like'. She tells him the stories of her two dreams.
It's best if you read the whole thing in Chapter 25; you'll be
able to imagine how exciting the dream content of the CD-Rom will
be. Imagine the sequences if they were done by Fellini. Dream one: She is following the windings of an unknown road, carrying
a child, conscious that Rochester is in the distance somewhere,
getting further and further away from her. Dream two: She sees Thornfield Hall as a ruin, the retreat of bats
and owls. It's a cold and moonlit night and Jane stumbles along
carrying the unknown child, who clings to her neck in teror. She
sees Edward disappearing on his horse, stands on a thin wall which
crumbles, and the child rolls away from her. Jane woke from that
dream to find a terrible apparition in her room, a large woman
with thick dark hair, wearing a straight white dress which resembled
a shroud. This woman took Jane's wedding veil from the wardrobe,
put it on, and looked at herself in the glass. Jane saw the fearful,
ghastly face in the mirror. 'It was a discoloured face -- it was
a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes
and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments.'
This was of course sensitive material for me to discuss with Jane,
but she is very resiliant, and we were able to go over it in detail.
She said the woman resembled a vampire, and agreed that it would
be interesting and OK to use some clips from various vampire movies
to illustrate the point. I said that most of these were pretty
crude and unconvincing, but she said she still thought it was
worthwhile using them. What she saw in her bedroom was much, much
more frightening than anything she has seen on the screen. What
you'd need to get, she said, was not virtual reality, but virtual
dreaming, even though the woman in her room was not a dream. The
woman tore the veil in two. 'The veil of the temple,' I said.
'Pretty symbolic.' And Jane agreed.
Edward told her it was Grace Poole, and then after the wedding
was aborted by Richard Mason, she discovered that Edward had lied,
and that the hideous woman in her room was in fact Bertha Mason,
Edward's mad wife. The way Jane described her she sounded like
the embodiment of unconscious, buried rage, and yet she had been
real.
Jane then told me about something that still makes her blush with
shame and embarrassment. When Jane Eyre went into its second edition, it carried a dedication to Thackeray.
It wasn't until after the edition was printed Jane learned that
Thackeray's wife was, like Bertha Mason, insane.
Perhaps the most intriguing and significant point in Jane's story
is reached in Chapter 35 where she asks heaven to show her the
right path (ever the pilgrim). This is a supernatural and/or psychological
event, having something of the nature of dream, but all the more
poswerful because it does not take place during sleep. Is it the
will of heaven that Jane should marry St John Rivers? The candle
is dying out, the moon is filling the room, and Jane's heart is
throbbing.
But her heart is stopped by a thrill of inexpressible feeling,
not unlike an electric shock (advanced talk, I thought, for 1847).
'Eye and ear waited while flesh quivered on my bones.' And what
she hears is the voice of Rochester calling her name. She calls
out in obedience and goes rushing into the night, returns filled
with resolve. She will not marry St John, but will set out in
search of Rochester.
I told her I had always breathed a sigh of relief at that point
because the thought of her going off as a missionary like Deborah
Kerr or Audrey Hepburn characters was too ghastly. What about
her love of ruby glass and oriental carpets and feather beds and
oak and mahogany and looking glasses and flowers and enormous
fires -- I hesitated when I said that, remembering the destruction
of Thornfield Hall. But Jane picked it up at once and said that
she could now see in hindsight that the burning of Thornfield
was not such a bad thing, that it was a violent cleansing of evil.
She is still of a most philosophical and theological turn of mind.
And I believe it is important never to overlook the powerful strain
of romanticism that runs deep in Jane's nature. This manifests
in several ways, not least in her willingness to believe in supernatural
forces, and her desire to construct the episodes of her life as
legends and fairytales, sometimes dark, and sometimes light and
beautiful. I am thinking in particular of the events retold in
Chapter 28, as they flow on form the last pages of the chapter
before. In those last pages Jane has just said what she believes
to be her last farewell to Edward, and she is unable to sleep.
Her imagination transports her sleepless mind into scenes of childhood;
she is back in the red room. She sees a vision of a glorious white
woman, moonlike, breaking through the clouds, and the woman speaks
to her, calling her 'daughter', telling her to flee. And flee
she does.
janeyre@window is in theee parts for easier downloading:
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