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janeyre@window
by Carmel Bird
PART THREE
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
The fine details of this moment when Jane, the eighteen year-old
governess, recent bride-to-be of Edward Rochester, slips from
the hope of comfort and prosperity to become a woman of the hedgerows,
are exquisitely, painfully drawn. She makes up a parcel - some
linen, a locket, a ring. In her purse she puts twenty shillings,
and, carrying her slippers so as not to make a sound, she steals
out. The image of her getting oil and a feather and oiling the
key and lock so as not to make a noise has always seemed to me
to be particularly poignant. 'Without one sound' she passes through
the doorway.
The great gate is locked, but little Jane, who seems at this moment
to have no substance, opens a wicket and out she goes. This is
the ritual of crossing the thresholds like a ghost. She uses the
words 'deadly sad', and they are perfectly apt. Her past is a
mixture of the deadly sad and the heavenly sweet; her future is
'and awful blank'. And of all the exits and entrances of Jane's
life that the user can examine, this moment of flight is probably
the most painful, and possibly the most powerful. It is when Jane,
with all her possessions in her parcel, becomes that most helpless
and vulnerable of creatures, the homeless woman, the vagabond,
the beggar. She leaves behind the pearls that Edward gave her,
since they belong to the 'visionary bride' who has now melted
into air, and she herself, it seems, melts into air.
And because she feels that in her flight she has betrayed her
beloved Edward, she hates herself, and the depths to which she
briefly falls become a metaphor for that self-hatred. She knows
herself to be the instrument of evil to the one she wholly loves.
She falls in the mud, crawls forward, spends all her money on
a coach ride to take her as far away as possible.
And so she comes to Whitcross, a white crossroad in her life.
She has left behind in the coach her parcel of belongings, and
so now she is utterly destitute. She really is a pitiful beggar-woman.
In a few days she has been stripped of the bridal finery, emblem
of safety and success, and has taken on the bedraggled garb of
the road where there are probably only two careers open to her,
the thief and the whore. We'll have material here about modern
women's refuges and homeless women at the end of the twentieth
century. People are still buried in pauper's graves in modern
cities you know. The female psyche is still to some extent haunted
by the fear of the bag-lady, the knowledge of how easy it is to
slip below the surface of society and disappear. Jane's story
ends differently because she stumbles, guided, she believes by
God, into the haven of the home of St John Rivers.
As she wanders about getting more and more hungry and desperate,
she characterises herself as a bird of the air, a biblical creature
to whom God affords nourishment and nest. In the birds themselves
the reader senses hope for Jane. She is guided by God, guarded
by Nature. She nestles into the 'breast of the hill' and goes
to sleep, hoping to die, to decay quietly and mingle with the
earth. She wakes up and goes on. She hears a church bell, sweet
announcement of her salvation. The sounds of birds, clocks and
bells will be available on the CD-Rom, as they are underlying
themes in the music of the narrative.
She tries to barter her silk scarf and her gloves for a piece
of bread, but they are rejected; she begs the swill for the pigs.
But eventually she sees 'a pretty little house' with 'a garden
before it, exquisitely neat and brilliantly blooming'. The door
is white, the knocker is glittering. I can't help thinking of
mirage and hallucination brought on by starvation -- things are
too bright, too sudden, too sharp. But the householder is no help,
the mirage fades. Finally Jane goes to the parsonage, only to
learn that the parson is away, and she wanders off onto the moorland
where she hopes to die, and where crows and ravens can pick her
bones. This of course a thoroughly romantic version of what might
happen. The light that finally leads her (Lead, Kindly Light)
to the safety of St John and his sisters appears now, 'shining
dim and constant through the rain'. Rough stones, prickly hedge,
and she finds a white gate, a wicket gate, the counterpart of
the wicket by which she left when she left Thornfield Hall. She
enters and there is the friendly gleam of the light, shining through
-- bliss -- 'the lozenged panes of a very small latticed window'.
What she sees through this window is pure cosy fairytale -- no
palace ever looked finer to a Cinderella than the parlour of this
long, low house. The beacon of the candle, the red of the firelight, the walnut dresser with pewter plates, the
clean, sanded floor, two ladies in deep mourning, a dog, a cat.
And an elderly woman who is knitting a stocking. I suggested to
Jane that at this point we might supply the user with a pattern
for knitting a stocking, and she thought it was a good idea as
many modern readers of the book and users of the CD-Rom would
probably never have thought about this very important aspect of
life in the time of the story, and the stocking is a detail that
emphasises the warmth, simplicity, domesticity, safety and love
of the house to which Jane has at last come.
The whole pattern with pictures and diagrams and explanations
will be on the CD-Rom, but here is a sample: For one stocking
you get 8 ounces of 4-ply and four no.14 needles. Cast on 80 stitches,
26 on one needle and 27 each on two other needles. Knit 2, purl
2 all around for thirty rounds. Now begin the leg. Knit plain
for eighty rounds. Then begin to decrease to shape the calf. Knit
to within three stitches of the middle, slip one, knit on, draw
the slipped stitch over, knit one, purl one, knit one, knit two
together, knit the rest of the round plain. Knit eight rounds
without decreasing, and then repeat the decrease row. Repeat this
procedure eight times, reducing the number of stitches to 63.
Knit 63 rounds. After this you come to the heel the foot and the
toe, instructions for which will be on the CD-Rom.
To protect herself, to cut herself off from her past, Jane gives
a false name to her saviours, and ironically, by not saying she
is an Eyre, she conceals from them and herself for the time being
the family link that exists between them all.
The homeless bird is, without knowing it, home. She is in the
bosom, not of the Nature, she so lately craved, but of her own
family. I have spoken to Jane of the incredible coincidence of
this fact, of how, of all the places she could stumble into she
came here. She speaks of the guiding light, of the hand of God,
of the wisdom of the Moon itself, and she says also that because
this is the way it happened, she has simply set it down as it
was, and left the power of her words to convince the reader of
her veracity. In a sense, she says, the facts are so fantastic
that nobody would invent them.
We also discussed the way she lay in her bed and heard the Rivers
comment on her, and how St John pronounced her plain to look at.
I asked her how she felt about that, and she said it has never
really troubled her, and that she has even felt her story to be
more interesting and accessible to readers who can more easily
identify with a plain character than with some great beauty.
I said I thought that she might have even understated her own
appearance, and she said that this was possible.
There's a point about her clothes. The black silk frock and the
shoes and stockings she wore for the journey had been through
a lot, and the sisters had restored them as best they could. This
was a very nineteenth century detail, I thought. Nowadays the
easiest thing would be to get her some new things. Easier than
cleaning the old ones up.
Life, for Jane, from this point on, is not free of trials, but
she is on an upward curve. She is restored to her old firm self,
and is never again in danger of absolute homelessness. She establishes
her selfhood immediately, with the housekeeper, retaining a sense
of mystery and integrity, making goosberry pies, and becoming
part of the domestic scene. (She was surprised when I told her
I had searched for a recipe for gooseberry pie in my many cookery
, books and had even emailed friends asking for help, and had
been unable to find one. Goosberry amber, cheese, chutney, cluster
cup, cream, flan, fool, huff cap, jam, jelly , meringue, mould,
pudding -- but between moulds and puddings, no pie. Jane suggested
I try the Net, and sure enough there was a recipe on the Pie Page
(http://www.teleport.com/~psyched/pie/goose.html) At the home
of the Rivers, the homeless, loveless orphan of the early years
has taken her final great step towards the house, hearth, home
she has always craved. I asked her whether anybody had ever made
a board game of her life; she said she didn't know, but we agreed
that it was a perfect blueprint for such a thing. I recently received
a glossy invitation to an exhibition of Jane's latest paintings.
The pictures are vivid interiors, rooms filled with rich furnishings
and all with windows looking out onto gardens, parks, and hillsides.
The gallery, is, by nice coincidence, close to the Freud Museum
in London. She has painted several pictures of Thornfield as she
remembers it in the good times; and also some of the ruin. One
of the great pleasures of making the CD-Rom will be the opportunity
for publishing a number of Janes's paintings to illustrate the
text. She still has, by some miracle, the first pictures she showed
to Edward so long ago. The drawings she imagined while trying
to get to sleep at Lowood -- freely pencilled houses and trees,
butterflies hovering over over-blown roses, birds picking at ripe
cherries -- these can all now be found in her folio. There is
also a series of beautiful and haunting sketches of Helen Burns,
mostly from memory, although a few are works Jane did before Helen
died.
I am keen to include a photograph of the plate on which Bessie
brought Jane food after the ordeal in the red-room. Brightly-painted
china with a bird of paradise nestling in a wreath of convolvulus
and rosebuds. This plate, also, has survived unscathed. It's one
of the many objects in Jane's story that testifies to her love
of colourful, exotic trappings. She admits that she still feels
a secret attraction for crimson velvets and glittering crystal,
for exotic gifts from the Continent, and for the even wilder ornaments
of the East and the Indies, but says she is now dedicated to moderation
and simplicity. She had Adele educated in England, she said, in
order to correct her French defects.
Gulliver's Travels and The Arabian Nights and Pilgrim's Progress are still among her favourite books, showing her lifelong belief
in the magic of storytelling and the dangers and pleasures of
the traveller in strange and unknown lands. And demonstrating
also the way she has always positioned herself powerfully at the
centre of the story. She sits curled in the window-seat behind
the red curtains, observing the icy, moonlit world outside, and
spinning from her own imagination the story of the pilgrimage
of her life. We'll definitely start the CD-Rom with the cliche
of the closed red curtains, so inviting, like a theatre, so full
of promise yet subtly infused with threat. What rooks, ravens,
black phallic villains and scarlet goblins will come forth? When
the curtain comes down at the end, what countries of the mind
we shall have visited.
Jane sees the making of the CD-Rom as yet another pilgrimage,
another following of the windings of an unknown road. I have recently
sent her a copy of The Wizard of Oz which she had not read, but which she thought sounded very interesting.
Meanwhile, I am working on the development of Jane's story in
a form that she says she never imagined would be possible.
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I have not indicated in the text most of the places where it will be possible for the user of the CD-Rom to explore. Consequently I will list here some of the key words that will be highlighted for use, giving access to all manner of different forms of text, illustration, sound and walkthrough: red, black, white, window, gate, door, mahogany, moon, sun, fire, snow, house, homeless, pilgrim, Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Thackeray, bride, raven, bird, rose, dream, stocking, gooseberry, clock, bell, eye, fairy
janeyre@window is in theee parts for easier downloading:
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