Lisa Denney
There are three watercolors painted by Jane Eyre that are described in detail in the novel, which have prompted much debate by various scholars. Bronte describes these works in greater detail than any other works produced by Jane Eyre, and that fact alone suggests the significance of their subject matter, and its interpretation, to the novel. There is certainly not a single, overarching interpretation for these works and that is why scholars implicate multiple sources and apply numerous readings. The main sources appear to be Milton's Paradise Lost and Bewick's History of British Birds, which are two texts that are prominent in the novel. Neither, however, fully elucidates these complex, enigmatic paintings. Some agreement among scholars is noted in the interpretation of the paintings as prophecies that foreshadow future events (and their accompanying emotions) in Jane's story. The paintings incorporate a surrealistic, multi-layered vision that is at once Jane's past and her future: Jane creates the paintings at Lowood and they reflect her state of mind while she is there, and they connect also to future events in the novel.
These watercolors tend to say as much about Rochester as they do about Jane as he looks on them at Thornfield Hall. There appears to be some significance to these particular works for him, since he has chosen these three from among other drawings and paintings in Jane's portfolio, while dismissing the rest (130; ch. 13). It is also significant that Rochester's viewing of the watercolors occurs during the first lengthy conversation with Jane at Thornfield the day after their first meeting on Hay Lane (120; ch. 12). The dialogue between them takes the form of an interrogation of Jane by Rochester, particularly concerning her education, of which her artwork is a part. While Rochester looks at them, Jane describes the first in detail:
The first represented clouds low and livid, 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 impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn. (131; ch. 13)
The Miltonic aspect of this painting is the cormorant, which is present as a symbol of deception and greed in Paradise Lost:
Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of
Life,
The middle tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life
Thereby regained, but sat devising death
To them who lived. (1536-7)
The image is of Satan, and here he is entering Paradise in disguise just prior to tempting Eve thereby setting in motion the Fall of Man. Therefore, the cormorant is "an image of temptation," a "sinister figure" who holds the property of the drowned woman like a greedy devil (Bacon 65). This interpretation is reinforced by the Oxford English Dictionary, which states that the "cormorant" is a term for an "insatiably greedy or rapacious person," which is the definition in the early 19th century when the novel was published (936). Temptation and deception are markers of Jane's early relationship with Rochester, where Rochester tempts Jane to the altar while he is already married, and desired to adorn her with jewelry and clothing prior to the wedding (271; ch. 24). Rochester also admits he agreed to marry Bertha for her money, not for love (321; ch. 27). The "drowned corse" could be Bertha in this interpretation because she is woman whose fortune is obtained by Rochester –who is symbolized by the cormorant holding the jeweled bracelet. Paul Pickrel, on the other hand, sees the cormorant as a positive figure. He states that "the cormorant holds aloft the brilliant bracelet emblematic of her womanhood," an image of "Jane as she saw herself in her last days at Lowood School where the watercolor was executed" (174). The bracelet, then, is "an emblem of hope where all is desolate" rather than a symbol of greed (Pickrel 174). While he acknowledges the Paradise Lost allusion, his Satan is benevolent, reaching out to rescue rather than to torment (174). Evidence from the novel reveals this to be a problematic interpretation. "Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange," she tells Rochester when he wishes to bedeck her in fine clothes and jewelry (271; ch. 24). Jewelry is a thing she would spurn, as she spurns all embellishment. Therefore, Jane would not perceive the bracelet as symbolic of womanhood or hope, but of vanity. Jane's reference to the cormorant as "dark and large," the cormorant's reputation, the Miltonic undertones, as well as the possibility of the bracelet's being "torn" away from its owner do not give the painting a sense of hopefulness. The woman in the water is already drowned, with no hope of recovery. Therefore, the image of the cormorant is too overwhelmingly a negative force to repel the light that singles it out in the painting.
There is yet another example in the text that this painting is negative and prophetic. This comes as Jane and Rochester's wedding is called off, when Jane returns to her room after meeting the current Mrs. Rochester:
My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. . .in full, heavy swing the torrent poured over me. . .I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me. (311; ch. 24)
Jane associates drowning with the overwhelming emotion of despair. The cormorant and its bracelet, then, would symbolize the sinfulness of Rochester's failure to disclose the fact that he is already married. This act eats away, as the cormorant eats the bracelet, her chance for happiness and security in wealth symbolized by that bracelet. Notably, Jane refuses to call Rochester sinful, only untrustworthy, though she immediately decides to flee, which is an aspect of the second painting discussed below (310; ch. 26).
Critics also see the desolate nature of the painting as a reflection of how Jane must have felt in her younger days when she was isolated like the drowned woman (Langford 47; McLaughlin 23). Here the cormorant represents the hypocritical Mr. Brocklehurst, who allows the girls at Lowood School to go wanting and even perish from disease, as he and his family display their wealth ostentatiously. The isolation and desperation of her youth are reminiscent of Bewick's History of British Birds, which is a text that appeals to her while she lives at Gateshead. It is a source of several images in her paintings: the shipwreck, the desolate landscape, and the bird in the first painting (8; ch. 1; Kelly 231).
Bewick and Milton are also sources for the third painting:
The third showed a pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head,--a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil; a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was 'The likeness of a Kingly Crown;' what it diademed was 'the shape which shape had none.' (131-2; ch. 13)
The Arctic region this painting depicts is reminiscent of the scenes Jane was drawn to in Bewick in the first chapter. These scenes from of the first chapter are of cold and ice that she describes as "death-white realms" (8; ch. 1). There is a "connection between cold and white and death" that Jane recalls from Bewick, which is a connection to death that is reinforced by Jane's quotes from Milton (Kelly 231-2). Her invocation of a "Kingly Crown" and "the shape which shape had none" is very effective for determining the subject of this work:
The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either; black as it stood as night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on. (1510)
This passage is taken from the point in Paradise Lost where Satan is "searching for a way out of Hell" (Bacon 65). The image is that of Death, "the shape which shape had none" who is one of two gatekeepers guarding of the gates of Hell, preventing Satan from leaving (Bacon 65). Based on Jane's own words, then, the subject of this painting is death, and it has a prominent connection to the first painting's allusion to Milton, where death is a consequence of the Fall.
There is another interpretation for this painting prevalent in literary criticism that alludes to death by suggesting it is a premonition of the character St. John Rivers, for it "coldly and accurately portray[s] the spiritual (if not the physical) death toward which Jane is tempted by St. John's proposal of a marriage without love and a missionary service without dedication" (Langford 48). It also "anticipates Jane Eyre's description of St. John's 'high forehead, colourless as ivory'" as well as the scene where his "'brow [is] supported on both hands'" (Pickrel 175). Pickrel goes on to state that St. John is often associated with iciness, hence he is associated with the iceberg, which is an idea also asserted by McLaughlin (Pickrel 176; McLaughlin 23). Pickrel claims that "the turban suggests his missionary efforts in India" (Pickrel 176). At the end of the novel, St. John is awaiting death and "'his sure reward, his incorruptible crown,'" which is another prophetic connection to this work, for his crown is won with the price of his coldhearted vision and eventually his sacrifice in death.
Death is a significant part of Jane's story, from the death of Helen Burns at Lowood to Bertha Rochester's suicide. Death creates turning points, especially the death of her uncle John Eyre, who leaves her a substantial inheritance. Why is Rochester attracted to this particular work, then, if its subject is death? One explanation is the belief that Rochester, prior to his brush with death in the fire at Thornfield Hall, is concerned too much with outward appearances (Pickrel 172). The painting operates as a conscience for Rochester, so he is drawn to it. Though the turban could suggest St. John's future as a missionary, more relevant in the story is the scene in which Rochester is actually wearing one (192; ch. 18). The charade scene, along with the gypsy fortune telling scene after it, addresses Rochester's adeptness at deception and the cold heartedness with which he deals with his first wife and with Blanche Ingram. He sees his own coldhearted acts, like locking up his mad wife in the third story, in the covering of the veil depicted in the painting. Notably, the colossal head has only one eye visible behind the veil, a reminder of how Rochester will have only one eye at the end of the story. Jane, who is a woman uninterested in jewelry and finery, is also unconcerned with appearances. Her painting is representative of her ability to observe and bring forth in art "a truth behind appearance" (Pickrel 173). This truth is observable by the eye, which Jane calls the soul's interpreter that is "often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter" (335; ch. 27). The unconscious aspect of her eye gives credence to the premonitory role the paintings play in the novel. This statement from a later chapter is relevant to how she describes seeing the paintings "with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them" (131; ch. 13). It is her imaginative force, propelled by the isolation of her youth and young womanhood, which compels her to produce these paintings.
This leads to an interpretation of the second painting, with its prominent eyes, which has a conspicuous effect on Rochester:
The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanted as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark-blue as at twilight: rising into the sky, was a woman's shape to the bust, pourtrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star. (131; ch. 13)
Pickrel asserts that this figure is a vision of Bertha Rochester, "her eyes shining 'dark and wild' and her hair streaming 'shadowy;'" in Bertha's final scene in the novel her 'long black hair' is 'streaming against the flames' just before she jumps to her death from the roof of Thornfield (175; Gilbert and Gubar, 357). This is a valid interpretation, if only a partial one, for Rochester observes Jane's eyes to be just as powerful:
Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want. (335; ch. 27)
The scene in which this passage takes place is pivotal; Jane is about to leave Rochester and Thornfield for good, for both place and person will be changed dramatically the next time she sees them. Rochester has seen Jane as a spirit or elf from the moment he met her; now, at this climactic point in the novel, she is the spirit in the painting that flies away. It is significant also that Jane dreams of a moon goddess, the night before she leaves Thornfield, who cautions her to "'flee temptation'" (337; ch. 27). The temptation present in the first painting associates it with this other painting that Rochester has chosen. Jane's "spiritual eye" predominates and eclipses the interpretation of the figure as Bertha, though a dual meaning is certainly present and could reflect the notion of Bertha as "mad double" for Jane (Gilbert and Gubar 78).
These interpretations help explain Rochester's abrupt reaction to this particular work where he commands Jane to "'put the drawings away!'" after he cannot bear to think about them any longer (132; ch. 13). Rochester appears to have two reactions simultaneously. First, he dismisses the paintings as the "peculiar" work of "a school girl" who has "secured the shadow of [her] thought; but no more," and as if they were not worthy of any more of his time and attention than the music Jane played for him before he views the paintings (132; ch. 13). On the other hand, his insistence that they be removed from his sight occurs right after he recognizes a hill in the second painting as "Latmos," fostering a conclusion that the idea of Latmos was particularly repellant to him (132; ch. 13). The meaning of "Latmos" is a matter of debate. It is said to be a thinly disguised misspelling of "Patmos," which is an island on which St. John the Divine reportedly received the material for the Book of Revelation (Pickrel 178; Rev 1:9). This interpretation could be valid, for there are multiple allusions to Revelation and apocalyptic vision in the novel, which points to Charlotte Bronte's more than just passing knowledge of the Bible's final book, as well as a possible source for the name of the character St. John Rivers. A more likely explanation for Rochester's reaction, however, can be found in the myth of Endymion, where a key feature in the landscape is Mount Latmus (Dickerson 57; Graves 210). Endymion is a man who idealizes love as a heavenly virtue and seeks to attain it; along the way he becomes sexually attracted to a woman (who later reveals she is the goddess Selene) and they couple, which Endymion believes to be a complete betrayal of his ideal (Graves 210). The name "Selene" is conspicuously like that of Celine Varens, Rochester's former lover. Rochester's rejection of the paintings at the point of recognizing Latmos, then, reveals the beginnings of his turmoil as he confronts his sexual attraction to Jane--a turmoil that eventually eclipses his moral judgment as he later rushes to marry Jane while already married (304; ch. 26). This interpretation of Rochester's reaction reflects on the choice of paintings he has made.
The anthropomorphic "Evening Star" of the second painting is a symbol for Venus, the goddess representing the sexual side of love (McLaughlin 23; Bacon 65). A sexual interpretation of the "Evening Star" can also be found in Paradise Lost, Book XI, where seduction and sin accompany sexuality and love (Bacon 65). Moreover Venus, as a bright object in the night sky, is the companion to the other bright object, the Moon. This is significant to the interpretation since Selene is goddess of the moon, and Jane has a moon goddess vision-dream, and in the painting the figure of Venus is described by Jane as moonlit.
The paintings are founded on ideas from Bewick, Milton, Greek mythology and the Bible, and this foundation allows one to move toward an interpretation of the paintings. Images of temptation, desolation, isolation, and sexuality dominate these three works much as they do the text as a whole. Rochester professes to be Jane's "judge" in the matter of her education just prior to viewing the paintings, and yet it appears to be himself who is judged as he gazes into them (128; ch. 13). The paintings' interpretation leans heavily toward their premonitory power based on their suggestiveness to other events in the novel. Alan Bacon states, "the paintings do not need to be understood as direct predictions of her later life, although Jane states at the beginning of Chapter 21, 'I never laughed at presentiments in my life'" (65). Could there be any argument left against their extrasensory power, when the main character would not doubt it, and the author incorporates voices heard over miles of distance as a literary climax? They manifest the inner conflict present in Rochester as he falls in love with his young governess, whose former life is figured in the isolation and desolation in the paintings, even as they foreshadow future events in their lives.
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