She Moves in Mysterious Ways: Jane Eyre’s Journeys

Very BRESNEHAN followed with

Sam Baker has arrived, and so we can begin. I’d

like to begin actually by saying that this is the Jet Thorold podium.

This is handcrafted. And this comes from the from Jack. And it’s

kind of a reminder that he was one of the founding members of the British Studies

Group. This goes back all the way to 1975. And so he has seen

a lot of changes.

So I won’t say anything more, actually, except I hope that Jack will explain how

the best pronunciation of Jane Eyre is. Go ahead, Jack.

Well, as as I was saying, I actually have heard Jane Eyre

presuming to get a, you know, a play on words. So you don’t hear that anymore. And I think the Jane

Eyre will suffice.

I by the way, I may have built this left

turn, but it’s nothing to what Roger has built in this

world class institution. And I’m always honored to take

part in it. I can’t. I can’t believe it’s been going since 1975.

There we are. And we have the books to prove it.

Well, I want to talk about one of the Brontes today. And

there was a time when they tended to be seeing Emily and Charlie

as a kind of pair of Yorkshire goonies. Nobody quite

knew what to make of them. And I still think that Emily Bronte does not

get her just recognition as a truly great novelist.

Certainly somebody who can sit at the table with George Eliot and

it in my mind, she is the Victorian Virginia Woolf, because of

the subtlety of her feelings, the depth of her perception, the complexity

of her emotional judgments. So Emily still,

I think, needs to be relieved of some condescension. Charlotte,

on the other hand, was enormously popular right from the beginning. Jane Eyre was an immediate

bestseller and all Charlotte was was always successful as a

novelist, but also some of

the same condescension. You know, carried on

even with her. And I thought I’d give you a

little example of that. Things have improved greatly. You put this is the kind

of thing when I started teaching the novel, this is the kind of thing that you might come across

with respect to Charlotte. This is a parody by of all people,

Bret Hart called Miss Mix. And I’m just

gonna read you a paragraph. Blunder Bore Hall The Seed of

James roared Jester. Esquire was encompassed by dark pines

and funereal hemlocks on all sides. The wind sang weirdly

in the turrets and moaned through the long, drawn avenues of the park as I

approached the house. I saw several mysterious figures flip before the windows,

and a yell of demonic laughter answered my summons at the bell,

which was answered by a scared looking old woman who showed me into the library.

I entered overcome with conflicting emotions. I was dressed

in a narrow gown of dark serge, trimmed with black bugles,

a thick green shawl was pinned across my breast. My hands were encased in black.

Half mittens work with steel beads. On my feet were

large patterns, originally the property of my deceased grandmother

as I passed before a mirror, I could not help glancing at it, nor could I disguise myself

that I was not handsome. Drawing.

Excuse me, she she. The elderly woman bites her into the library

and she enters and draws a chair into the recess. I

sat down with folded hands, calmly awaiting the arrival of my master. Once

or twice, a fearful yell rang through the house, or the rattling of chairs and

curses uttered in a deep, manly voice broke upon the oppressive stillness.

I began to feel my soul rising with the emergency of the moment.

You look alarmed, miss. You don’t hear anything, my dear, do you? Ask

the housekeeper nervously. Nothing. Whatever. I mark calmly as a terrific scream,

followed by the dragging of chains and tables in the rooms above ground. For a

moment, my reply. It is the silence, on the contrary, which has made me foolishly nervous.

The housekeeper looked at me approvingly and instantly made tea. I drank nine cups.

So that’s the kind of thing that that used to sort of

foreign frequently in discussions of the Brontes. But but that has much improved. Thank

heavens. In any case, I’m going to be talking about Jane

Eyre. And the first thing to look at in Jane Eyre is its plot.

And the first thing to notice about the plot is the scheme of Jane’s journeys.

She begins at Gateshead. Wonderful place to begin. She then goes

on to Lowood and things get very low at Lowood.

Then they get worse at her next stop. Thornfield Which is very thorny.

Then comes Marsh End, where Jane has to struggle through the marshes.

Finally, she partially retraces her journey until she comes to a semi Edenic garden.

Co-funding. Just from the names we can tell. This is an allegorical

journey and that the novel is fashioned in the first instance after John

bunyan’s late 17th century classic Pilgrim’s Progress,

bunyan’s immensely popular book tells the story of a protagonist

named Christian who was weighed down by the great burdens of his sin.

Christian must travel from the grievers city of destruction and discover the celestial

city, the city on a hill where he and his wife Christiana

will find salvation along the way, they must pass through awful places

like Vanity Fair, the slew of Despond and the wicked gate.

Excuse me. bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress plots Christian search for his spiritual

identity across a symbolically demarcated landscape where temporal and spatial boundaries

create a guide to for the protagonist and no less for the reader.

Moreover, our recognition of bunyan’s allegory as a model for Jane Eyre

is read fast, reinforced by numerous allusive passages and Bronte’s text,

even the final chapter is awash with explicit references to bunyan’s book.

But however much the narrative is formed by bunyan’s allegorical journey,

it simultaneously mirrors in its motions and altogether antithetical

journey founded on quite a different pilgrimage. The second journey

is brewed from the heady potion that Byron had created in Child

Harrell’s pilgrimage. The sensational and boisterously erotic poem

that appeared in the four cantos during 1812 to 1818, and

that made Biron by far the most popular poet of his time.

One of his devoted admirers was Charlotte Bronte, who in her young years memorized

hundreds of lines of fire. The most provocative aspect of his fiery

poetic was the dark, brooding, guilty figure of the Byron ahero.

There is no question that Rochester Jane Eyre descends from this dangerously attractive wanderer

as the following lonesome chariot, Charles Harold will suggest the poem’s narrator

is considering the figure he has created in Harold Long

absent. Harold reappears at last. He of the breast which fain

know more, would feel wrong with the wounds which kill not but never

heal. Get time. Who changes all had altered

him in soul and aspect as an age.

Years steal fire from the mind as vigor from the limb and life’s

enchanted cup. But sprach sparkles near the brim.

His springs of life were poisoned. And again,

Montas text is littered with allusions to Byron’s poetry and

the bionic hero. Jane’s position thus becomes

what Yates would later call in one of his majestic late poems, the subject of a

dialog of self and soul. Jane is journeying in a double direction

where her effort to discover her spiritual identity, which somehow must somehow comprehend

the self divisions and the multiple moral dimensions of her being.

Even if we as readers do not recognize the bunion esq and by running frames of

identity the Bronte’s using, we soon get caught up in Jane’s probing and often

unsettling accounts of her fantasies, anxieties and childhood speculations

on who she is and where she is. There is, for example, the

trauma of her experience in the red room at Gateshead, where her habitual feelings

of fear, betrayal and anger deepen into, quote, a dark deposit

in a disturbed mind. Bronte’s highly imagistic presentation

of her heroine in many such passages portrayed Jane strenuous efforts

to penetrate what amounts to her Proteau by Roenick identity.

Yet at other times, the four Lauren child ripens into the position of a steady,

mature narrator who is stabilized by her penetrating judgment and

convincing perception. Here’s a passage from Jane at Lowood, where she

is one morning eating her scantly breakfast. My vacant

detention soon found lively attraction in the spectacle of a little hungry,

hungry rabbit, which came and chirped on the twigs of a leafless

cherry tree nailed against the wall of the case.

I crumbled a morsel of my roll and tugged at the sash to put out crumbs

on the windowsill. A passage like this, of course, implies an equivalence

between the deprived Jane and the hungry Robin. Both are trapped in a

threatening environment. But the parallel between them is managed by the Jane who

is seeing. And seeking a moral center.

The novel repeatedly prompts in us a pervasive shifting of focus between

Jane’s fearful experiences like those in the red room. And

Jane’s account of her morally intact and mature being. The kind

of shifting we must do in order to read the novel duplicates, the

kind of shifting Jane mustn’t do in order to read herself.

In effect, the framing of the bunion esq and by Raonic journeys that locate Jane’s pilgrimages

actually signal not the contradictions of self and soul that divide her, but a

language of symbolic action. As Kenneth Burke would call it, that creates at the level

of plot what Jane experiences at the level of character. To illustrate

this point, I want to turn to another episode at Lowood. Jane is

befriended at Lowood by a student even more disadvantaged than she. The appropriately

named Helen Burns. Helen is steeped in the Bunyan account of identity,

though unfairly and miserably treated at Lowood, Helen practices a fervent evangelical

faith. Jane is mightily impressed by Helen’s ardor and

conviction. She draws closer and closer to Helen as Helen declines

into a deadly illness. Jane’s own spiritual fervor is manifested

as Helen warns Jane against, quote, her too impulsive to vehement

love of human beings. She tells Jane as though reading a chapter

Bundanoon to her. That there are greater spiritual resources,

quote, than your feeble self can attain. Quote,

Besides Earth and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom

of spirit, that world is round us, for it is everywhere. And those spirits watch

for us as they are commissioned to guard us. Helen’s greatest

impact on Jane comes one evening when she shares an hour of close connection with Helen

and Miss Temple, Lowood, one caring teacher.

Jane is so enthralled by feeling accepted rather than a stranger that she listens in rapture

to Helen’s explanation of her religious convictions as Helen sermonettes

reaches its climax. The text gives us this wonderful description,

quote. Then her soul sat on her lips

and language flowed from one source. I cannot tell.

Has a girl of 14, a heart large enough, vigorous enough to

express such a swelling spring of pure full fervor

eloquence. The image of Helen Souled sitting on her lips

magnificently captures the near coalescence of meaning and being

that the whole novel takes as its project. And Jane, enthralled

rather than baffled by her realization that the language of Helen’s discourse is

grounded in some inspired but unknown source.

Janus, again, confronted by a miracle of utterance that the novel itself is

trying to register for us. We can take yet another instance of the novels, Buried Language,

to see how deeply Bronte is learing Jane’s complex identity. The

specific case I’m going to quote returns us for a moment to Gateshead,

but its relevance permeates the narrative. Jane, as usual,

is suspected of disobedience and has been hauled before the Rev. Mr. Brocklehurst

to be chastised. Brocklehurst wisdom about young children

extends no further than his belligerent Calvinism allows.

Well, Jane Eyre, he says to her. And are you a good child?

Impossible to reply to this in affirmative. My little world held a contrary

opinion, so I was silent. Mrs. Reid answered for me by an expressive

shake of the head, adding soon, perhaps the less said on that subject, the better.

Mr. Brocklehurst. Sorry, indeed, to hear it.

She and I must have some talk. And bending from the perpendicular,

he installed his person in the arm chair opposite. Come here, he

said. I stepped across the rug. He placed me square

and straight before him. What a face he had.

Now that it was almost on a level with mine. What a great nose

and what a mouth and what large permanent teeth.

Do you know where the wicked go after death? He asks her. They go to hell. Was my

ready reply. And should you like to fall into that pit?

And be burning there forever? No, sir. What must you

do to avoid it? I must keep in good health and not die.

So here you have a kind of stereotypical

bunny in this scene and Jane’s by Romick

Rebellion as a counter statement to it. And what I’m trying to

suggest is that this is what happens throughout the novel. There are these two discourses

that confront each other and speak to each other. And Jane is gradually

becoming the product in the sense of

those discourses, as in the case of Jane and the Hungry Robin.

The novel here assimilates a story to yet another reservoir of expressive language

in a fairy tale. It draws heavily on this reservoir. How

can it be that, Jane, at every stage of her pilgrimages, encounters two false sisters,

together with a distant male figure, a snobbish surrogate mother and an INDISCERNABLE

fairy godmother? Obviously, the novel is providing

us with a version of Cinderella, much less Red Riding Hood. One

that seems tainted by Picasso since the principal figures appear in distorted and displaced

but still readable form. At Thornfield, this version of the fable

appears in the narrative. When the lofty Dowager Lady Ingram visits for an extended

stay with her two daughters, Blanche and Mary, the former is marked by,

quote, her arched and haughty lip and the latter by her expressionless

face. From her obscure spot in the room think

fireplace. Jane generously allows that,

quote, most observers would call them attractive. Meanwhile,

quote, I saw Mr. Rochester smile, his stern features

soften and his eyes grew, both brilliant and gentle. Rochester

is becoming a proper Prince Charming. But the undercurrent fairy

tale is revealing Jane’s smoldering rage and jealousy.

Never a good sign for Cinderella. However, Jane has been privileged by a psychic

fairy godmother who has a special gift for intuitive knowledge.

Quote, He is not to them what he is to me. He is not of

their kind. I believe he is mine.

I am sure he is. I feel akin to him. I

understand the language of his countenance and movements through rank and wealth, though.

Excuse me, though, rank and wealth several rows widely. I have something

in my brain and in my heart and nerves that assimilates

me mentally to him, not the jinkx cannot quite identify

the something in her heart and blood that forms her connection with Rochester.

But since we know the story of Cinderella and Prince Charming, we readily recognize the dynamics

of desire that motivate Jane at Thornfield. Rochester has awakened

Jane’s own by Romick being. Yet Rochester’s soul

does not sit on his lips. Quite the contrary.

Even in the earliest extended conversations she has with him, she rejects

his conviction such as that the difference between a guide and a seducer

is easily recognized. Jane is bewildered by what he says. To speak

truth, sir, I don’t understand you at all. I cannot keep up the conversation

because it got out of my depth. What Jane feels she is losing is

her trusty sense of authenticity, her frequently renewed sense of what road

to take. Things get so bad in the toilet. Thornfield

that she finally realizes she has been snared, quote, in a web of mystification.

She wonders, quote, What unseen spirit has been sitting for weeks by my heart,

watching its workings. While leaving her without answers and without direction,

the red room of her distraught childhood is gradually reappearing as the mad

woman’s attic, a place where speech is being replaced by screams.

The degeneration of speech and the screams marks the development of impending crisis

at Thornfield, which has become a remarkably unsavory place as the

narrative unfolds. Its account of Thornfield. We were given

scenes where the entertainment is, tellingly, games of

charades. The Schrader’s raids are followed by the arrival.

Excuse me, by the arrival of a gypsy fortune teller who surprisingly requests Jane

as a client. And whose strange thorn wrapped me in

a kind of deceit. This episode no sooner concludes than a foreign travel and

named Mason shows up, arriving apparently by Jet from the West Indies.

His presence turns Rochester whiter than ashes, despite his shock. Rochester treats

Mason as though he was an old college chum. Once Rochester gets Jane alone, he

attempts to explain himself to her by offering a disguised autobiography that takes the

form of his own by running pilgrimage, but ends by confessing, but ends

by confessing to a lot of hanky panky, both in Jamaica, where he met Mason

and in Paris, where he diplomatically revealed he knew quite

well what Paris was for. After all of this, you half

expect to see her alive striding into this room saying there’s nothing but lying

and mendacity in this place. Nothing but byan and mendacity.

The central issue crisis of the novel occurs, of course, after Jane has finally agreed to marry the deceived

in Rochester. When a lawyer from London, Mr. Briggs, who represents both Richard

Mason, the elusive friend of Rochester, as well as Mason’s sister Bertha,

breaks up the wedding in progress because Bertha is Rochester’s erstwhile wife.

The following morning, Jane wakes with all the anxiety of crisis still upon her and asks

herself what she used to do. The answer, quote, The answer my

mind gave leave Thornfield at once was so

prompt. And so dread that I stopped my ears.

The moment epitomizes the Thornfield portion of Jane’s pilgrimage. She has received

so many warnings about the obscure roads she has taken that she has been stopping

her years and not learned. Bertha’s shrill screams

and pyrotechnics should have been enough to send Jane packing. But Rochester

has a fetish for hiding mistresses. He tries a new approach

with Jane, quote, You should go to a place I have in the south of France. France is always

getting. Coming up here. Dangerous moments. You should go to a place I have in south of France.

A white washed villa on the Mediterranean shores.

There you shall live a happy and guarded life. Attempting often, no doubt,

but Jane finally eludes the by ironic law with the help of another Red Broom dream.

This time the dream discloses, quote, a white human form that speaks to her

spirit. Jane describes the spirit’s tone as immeasurably distant,

but its whisper is immediately present. She has retrieved the power

of pre linguistic communication that enables her moral consciousness

and her sense of reality. The form says, my daughter

flee temptation. And she answered simply, I will.

There are many ways to read this exchange has the critical literature on the novel shows. But however,

reread it. The episode reinforces the main point I had been making here, namely

that Jane as a character reflects the plot of the novel itself through a complex

interweaving of voices, discourses and symbolic actions that describe

its drama of self-discovery. Jane makes several different attempts to

elucidate the access she seems to have to a sort of the language of the inner self

akin to Helen Burns’s inspired utterance. And missing entirely from

the shrouded world of Thornfield as she resists Rochester, for example,

she listens for a quote, a gentle Ariel to compose her responses.

But all the voices of nature around her, she says, remain inarticulate.

She is accustomed, as she puts it, to opening, quote, her inward ear to a tale that was

never ending a tale. My imagination created a narrative continuously

while her mind’s eye dwell, quote, on whatever bright

vision rolls before it. For the reader, this experience is palpable

since the interweaving I have been outlining is altogether present as multiple allusions,

echoes, parallels and subtext cross one another on the page.

Quite unexpectedly, Jane, Plum’s the heart of her metter language in a quiet,

contemplative moment at Thornfield, where, unprompted, she gives us a complicated

account of how her inward ear in her mind’s eye function

in the workings of her imagination. Oddly, this passage is

nearly entirely overlooked in the critical to her. But for me, it seems to me absolutely

crucial to the novel, quote, presentiment

of strange things. And so our sympathies and so are signs.

And the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet

found the key. I never laughed at sentiments in my life

because I have had strange ones of my own sympathies. I believe

exist, for instance, between a far distant, long absent holding

a strange relative asserting notwithstanding their alienation,

the unity of the source to which each traces his art.

Whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs

for all we know, maybe. But the sympathies of nature with man.

The passage is extraordinarily pertinent to the theme we have been exploring presentiment

of for tellings of the future. A plot projection, so to speak,

such as the red room dreams that recur at pivotal moments in Jane’s narrative

or prefatory tales that give us guideposts to the narrative we are following.

Sympathies, as Jane is using the term, constitute telepathic communications

that arise from the mystic bonds of a common life that is stronger than

the barriers of time and space. And signs form

an alternative language awards worthy in discourse recollected

by the self in special moments. That is, WORDSWORTH said to

his Brontë and readers, for example, open consciousness to poetic

faith. Or they could be spoiler alerts like explosive

lightning strikes that will split a horse chestnut down the middle to warn a naive young woman that

she should get out of Dodge in a hurry. James,

exposition of presentiment, sympathies and signs refers to phenomenon

that permeate Bronte’s novel and that illuminate both the dilemmas and the decisions

James faces as she says she feels ensnared in a web

of mystification. And in her journeys, she calls on what she sometimes

addresses as, quote, some good spirit, unquote,

that can provide her with the self-knowledge she needs to deal with the questions that

would set her. For Jane, that self-knowledge can only be grasped within

the framework of a transcendent language that inherently dissolves mystification

at the zeenat of the illusions and mendacity that twists her whole world.

Jane explicitly tells Rochester what a transcendent language is.

Quote, I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom

invention analogies, nor even of mortal flesh. It is

my spirit that addresses your spirit. She wants

no more of seeing through a glass darkly. It is difficult to define

the latent language that characterizes Jane’s idea of speaking spirit to spirit,

though, as I have been saying, the text is imbued with an approximation of what she speaks.

I think we can borrow Freud’s term, the uncanny or when, with

which he introduced in a long essay of 1919 and identified as a puzzling perception

of the familiar in something of the unfamiliar. Excuse me. In something familiar.

As Freud puts it, the uncanny quote is in reality nothing new or alien

but something which is familiar, an old established in the mind and which has become

alienated from it to a process of repression. A decisive

example of the uncanny for Freud is a manifestation of the ID in the presentation

of the ego. What I want to do is credit Charlotte Bronte

with introducing into the narrative structure of Jane Eyre. A layer of uncanny

language. Especially in the sense that Jane is guided and enlightened

by discourses that she can understand, even though they always remain

mysterious to her. There are two other stages of Jane’s

journey that involve marvelous use of Bronte’s uncanny, novelistic twists.

Jane, having gotten the message to flee Thornfield at last Braves the open ronit

in order to escape the fate of being converted by Rochester into

being converted by branches into another berthon Mason. Of course, our journey

goes badly so that she soon finds herself friendless, penniless, utterly alone

and no g._p._s in spite of these problems and without a clue

as to where she is going. She manages to arrive at a shining light on a hill

top, which is easily identifiable as bunyan’s Celestial City.

Not only that, but of all the locales in England, the cottage she

comes to is home to her only living family. Three cousins

whom she does not know she has. Only her two

female cousins are at home and a kindly motherly figure who watches over

all of them. She might as well have called herself Cinderella instead of Jane Elliot,

especially since an Adonis, her male cousin by the name of sin, Joan Rivers, soon

shows up as a highly eligible Prince Charming. However, though, Jane

is quite happy to have found female cousins and a surrogate mother, Cintron proves a dud.

As opposed to Rochester, who was the prince of darkness, tempting Jane into the precincts

of desire, Singerman out bunyan’s Bunyan. He excites

and Jane not passion, but piety. Jane has Recher voices in

her head. The fulcrum of Sinjin regard for Jane is this increasingly

important plea to her that she come out to India with him and be his

missionary’s wife. Granted, he does not want to tuck

her away in an attic, but yet he is just as committed to making Jane

a prisoner of his power. But again, Jane is rescued by

the scripts that reflect her real identity. Amazingly,

through Saint John, Saint John Jane comes to learn of her own connections

with Mason family and that despite the many deceits that her wicked

stepmother perpetrated on her, she is heiress to the Mason fortune.

And as a result, she becomes not only and perhaps super abundantly

the pilgrim who has reached the shining city, the Cinderella who has gained a two sister

loving family and an actual fairy godmother who can and does

distribute her surprise inheritance to her newfound cousin.

All of Jane’s fantastic fulfillments of her evolving identity at Morehouse actually

derived from another triumph of her expressive self as she grows into the roles

that her discoveries at the cottage on the hill established for her. She remains, as usual,

partly anonymous and masked. But one day, Sinjin, who has been

in touch with Brigs and who has heard much of the story of a woman known as Jane Eyre,

receives some documents that have been retrieved from Gateshead. Among these papers

are discarded sketch papers that the real Jane has made.

He shows the supposed Jane Elliot some shabby slips of paper,

quote, with stains of ultramarine and familiar.

In the ravish margin of the drawing paper, the actual Jane sees

quote, in my own handwriting, the words Jane Eyre.

From the smudges of her art, Jane appears.

Jane. Jane. It just this inchoate and uncanny discourses blend into

Jane’s autobiography, the preliminary art of the sketches instantly

disclose who she is and where she has come from. It is not Sinjin

who is discovering Jane. It is Jane discovering Jane.

Even more dramatically, Jane, who is at the brink of accepting a programmatic marriage to Sinjin

for the sake of the moral duties he has nearly persuaded her to accept.

She hears a voice, quote, a known love, well-remembered voice, calling

her over and an immense distance. It must be said telepathically

from the heart of nature itself, filling her as we discover in the final

two chapters with presentiment, sympathies and signs.

The uncanny language that flourishes so powerfully and so indelibly in

the interstices of the written text finally unites. Jane with herself

and the narrator with the reader. Brontë has positioned Jane between

the symbolic utterances that frame her story and the an unbearable story

that constitutes her identity. Thanks very much.