En Plain Eyre
A personal essay on the effect of stratified landscapes on the author, heroine, and reader of Jane Eyre
by Jenny Clendenen
Forty years ago, when my world still burned with Wordsworth’s celestial light and my own small life seemed interwoven with all of nature, my favorite authors included those greats of Romanticism and Transcendentalism who could gracefully articulate that tapestry -- Louisa May Alcott, Sir Walter Scott, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. When I read their works, I sensed the patterns that characters and landscapes pressed upon each other, though I knew nothing of metaphor or allegory: Mary Lennox, up to her elbows in soil and seeds and bulbs, grows and transforms along with the secret garden; Rob Roy, leaping across crags and waterfalls and glens, immortalizes both himself and the Highlands; Jo March Baer, raising neglected boys to discover nature in the fields, restores their trust and the farm. My parents reinforced these fused impressions of nature as character -- my mother by substituting classic children’s literature for television, and my father by imbuing each of his five children with his passion for the natural world. That world was always with us. Our family lived first beneath the redwoods in the Saratoga mountains and later on a hillside apple farm in Watsonville, and we spent our summer vacations in canvas tents by northern California creeks. When I grew up I splurged on pilgrimages to some of the wild places I’d seen so clearly in books – Yorkshire, Melrose, Inverness. As a result, my most poignant memories are a mingling of literary and personal landscapes – of Scottish lochs and camping trips, of English moors and hikes.
When I studied literature in college, my professors, along with my childhood immersion in books and forests, helped me see the more subtle connections that writers like Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin, and Ernest Hemingway, for example, drew between settings and characters, and the way they used nature to enrich subtexts and heighten drama. I was especially attuned to the ways an author’s childhood environment emerged in his or her paper setting, and how those two superimposed terrains affected the internal landscape of the protagonist – and, as a reader, me. This layering became apparent in many of the classic works I read, but for me, none better exemplified these stratifications than Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre.
As I read and reread Jane Eyre through the double lens of the author and protagonist, I found that their fused experiences of nature echoed mine in many ways – that their respective flights to the moor paralleled my own walks in the woods, and rendered some of the same resolutions. Clifton Fadiman once said, “When you reread a classic book, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” I found this to be particularly true of Jane Eyre, with whose author I so intimately empathized that to call her “Bronte” here would seem untoward. In Charlotte’s novel, more than any other, I saw that the fragile film that separates us from our deepest selves and each other dissolves when the natural landscapes we share as writer, character, and reader are overlaid.
Charlotte’s locale and history so closely parallel those of her title character, Jane, that the story could only have been told in first person; the author has, consciously or otherwise, left her own life-tracks all over the pages, and Jane has walked in those footsteps. Both were residents of the Yorkshire countryside, and Charlotte, like Jane, lost her mother at a very young age. Both were uprooted from their homes and raised by an aunt, both attended a boarding school that neither fed nor heated its pupils properly, and both lost loved ones to tuberculosis contracted there. Ten-year-old Charlotte, suffering from the loss of her mother, home, and two older sisters, as well as the damaging effects of her negligent school, took to writing stories with her remaining siblings about an imaginary land called, all too obviously, Angria.
When I envision little Charlotte writing her stories, I see her in two settings. One is the Bronte parsonage, her second home, in Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. Because I was a cloister-craving child, I imagine Charlotte and her brother and sisters crouching under the dining room table, hidden by its tablecloth, as they whisper and draft together in secret, away from the eyes of their preacher father, who might wonder what his children were up to and apply a magnifying glass to the tiny writing in their tiny notebooks. He might not like to discover that they had gone off into an imaginary world called Angria. It would sound suspiciously like Anger, too much like hostility toward the God who had caused, or at best allowed, their pain. To express anger in any form would be to express disagreement with God’s decisions, to take umbrage at his divine will. So it seems to me, who as an adult has taken umbrage and written cathartically myself, that the children would have written in a secret place. A fort, where they could barricade themselves not only from their father’s frowns, but from a world –if not a God—that seemed maliciously intent on their misery.
When I was ten, I, too, was a sequestered writer, though not to hide from God; my childhood was relatively charmed. Deep in a swale of our hillside orchard grew a grand old apple tree, a Yellow Bellflower planted by the Italian immigrants who had settled the farm a century before. Its enormous branches arched and draped to the ground like the bustled skirt of an elegant giantess, and every day after school I’d take a blanket and a book, a notepad and a pen, and enter through a leafy slit. The earth inside was soft beneath a brittle layer of winter leaves. In springtime the dangling twigs billowed with creamy blossoms and bright new foliage, suffusing the air with chartreuse light and the fragrance of incipient fruit. There were other solitary spots to be found around the farm – the barn, the woodshed, the basement – but in that glowing dome I was part of a storybook setting, a hidden bower where clansmen might lay down an injured king; where knights and maidens might rendezvous; where minstrels might rehearse on moonlit nights. My fantasies were always story-based, and fueled the ones I penned beneath that tree.
It seems to me that Charlotte, like myself an ardent fan of Sir Walter Scott, might have sought such refuges, outdoors or in. In fact, when she writes Jane Eyre twenty years after inventing Angria, she opens the novel with little Jane thus ensconced: “I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.” Jane (and, I believe, Charlotte) would almost always have preferred to be outdoors, but in this opening scene she is avoiding her bellicose cousins, and glad that the weather prevents her from taking a walk with them, as “the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.“
The depressing view from the window seat reflects the inner desolation felt by young Jane and Charlotte, whose traumas had not ended with childhood. In the few years prior to writing Jane Eyre at thirty, she had suffered unrequited love, the disrepute of her only brother, and the failure of her school. Thus the description of the view also describes their mutual vision of the future: “Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.” I saw that same blast in my own thirties, as my children pulled away and a “lifelong” friend betrayed my trust -- but also, like Charlotte-through-Jane, I saw beyond it the “blank of mist and cloud” in which a brighter future might abide. In life as in the book, the horizon beyond the storm bodes hope, and outdoors offers both solace and inspiration.
Outdoors on the moor is the other place I can picture young Charlotte writing in her little books, alone, lying in purple heather under a broad blue sky, as far from the parsonage as she would be allowed; perhaps farther. The moor was, in reality, her playground – both a liberating space and a dividing line. Out there she “wove a web in childhood / A web of sunny air,” she wrote later. I’ve roamed the wild Yorkshire moors myself – in fact, I took my parents and sisters to explore our ancestral castle grounds the year before we knew that my father was fatally ill. We stood in the ruins of the dining hall at Ravensworth and mused that having closed the geographical and genealogical gaps, only Time remained to block our view of medieval gowns and dancing aunts, of our multi-great grandfather quaffing his goblet of wine. Eight centuries were nearly envisioned away that April day; it’s relatively easy for me to see merely Victorian Charlotte perched among the jagged rocks and rills of those same moors, one eye on the shaggy cows and sheep. And though the traumas of my own life have been relatively few, I know what it’s like to bolt outdoors when illness, death, and sorrow come to call. I lost my father not long after that trip, and I spent many prayerful hours in sunlit glens seeking respite from the same sounds Charlotte would have endured -- the fitful coughing, the pitiful moans, and then the dreadful, welcome silence. Nature both provides that respite and reminds us that decay is a component of renewal, a Transcendentalist idea beautifully expressed by Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”:
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
I ‘m certain Charlotte’s dashes into beauty gave her moments of necessary peace, but neither indoor seclusion nor outdoor freedom would have assuaged her accumulated anguish and outrage for long. Her grief was too great to be released in small places, tiny books, or empty air. As she grew older she needed a vast forum, an amplifying venue, and an engaged audience to hear her out. She also needed the power to command her circumstances, to put an end to the sequence of tragedies that seemed to stalk her. And so Jane Eyre was born. The years of suppressed emotion that Charlotte had funneled into Angria as a child were embodied in passionate Jane, and the events of both creator and created were overlapped – Charlotte guiding Jane, with the clarity of hindsight, from anger to happiness.
This guidance is not just through shared events and emotions but over shared landscapes as well. Just as young Charlotte Bronte needed that “web of sunny air,” so does young Jane “Air,”[1] and she seeks it often in woods, on moors, and in forests. The other elements of fire, water and earth also appear extensively in the novel, beginning on the first page in descriptions of hearths, oceans, and the “death-white realms” of bleak northern landscapes. Jane, looking at a book illustrating the latter, says its text gives “significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.” To me, these images indicate an authorial belief resonating with my own, that there is meaning in particular combinations of nature’s components. Just as Jane notices the jagged against the smooth, so in my own outdoor wanderings and musings I’m often drawn to the overlapping of the fractal and the spherical -- twigs touching eddies, rivulets bubbling over rounded rocks, a branch silhouetted against the moon, lightning forking within a cumulus cloud – representations of the broken and the solid, the harsh and the smooth, the yin and the yang, of life.
Time and tragedy had likely intensified a similar awareness for Charlotte, whose adulthood experiences provided further events, emotions, and outdoor escapes for Jane. By her late twenties Charlotte had been employed unhappily as a governess, been rejected by the older, married man she loved, and been the founder of a failed school. As she pours her own past into Jane, she channels their parallel twists and turns through their layered landscapes of recovery and inspiration until at last they arrive, like two forks of one river, at a delta of self-acceptance and renewal.
Years ago, in the wake of my dear father’s death, a long walk in winter-struck woods nudged my own internal landscape toward spring. The sensory immersion in that raw tableau of decay helped me understand that dissolution, as an ongoing aspect of regeneration, is no more wrong than winter. The world is at once both the womb and the grave. Every hole creates a hill, and every hill a hole; everyone and everything is connected simply by virtue of existence. Months later, reading Emerson’s essay, “The Over-Soul,” I saw that he had eloquently expressed what I -- and I think Jane and Charlotte, too -- had seen in the truth of outdoors:
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing, and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
In Jane Eyre, the “shining parts” of nature abound as constant reminders of this greater presence. Some of these “parts,” or aspects of nature, are the many birds that show up as emblems of love and happiness, as harbingers of demise and death. Charlotte’s constant aviary references indicate a conscious belief that the divine transforms or informs through nature, whether Jane is conscious of it or not; once she gains her freedom from Gateshead, the novel’s pages practically flutter with the beating of wings. There are crows at Rochester’s Thornfield and strange birds on the tapestries there; she’s compared to a “stranger bird,” an “eager bird,” a “half-frozen bird,” a linnet, and a skylark; she feels “impotent as a bird with both wings broken” and “like a messenger pigeon flying home.” Birds have always connoted spirituality, and especially so, for me, as during my father’s final days, he watched the wild birds and scrawled notes in his worn guidebook. Charlotte, Jane, and I share not just an appreciation for the blithe beauty of birds, but an overriding awareness of their real and symbolic fragility. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” says Jane; “I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Even an independent will needs guidance, and the moon, another “shining part,” provides this for Jane. It reveals her future fiancé, Rochester, to her for the first time, as it was “waxing bright; I could see him plainly,” but later, after she accepts his bigamous proposal the moonlight disappears, the wind kicks up, lightning splits the chestnut tree in half, and the moon glares between the split, a cross-Testament biblical image that evokes commandment tablets broken by Moses and a temple veil torn by God. Later, visions of the moon lead Jane to escape across the moor – as little Charlotte would have escaped her own trauma – and take comfort and seclusion there:
I touched the heath, it was dry, and yet warm with the beat of the summer day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was […]
Later she takes refuge at Moor house with the Rivers siblings. Just as I have many times myself, Jane has journeyed over wild lands to end up waterside, and there finds restoration. This calming experience begins a sequence of choices that allow her to realize her destiny. Near the end of the sequence she dreams of the mighty Rochester in fragile ruins, only a shell-like façade of the man remaining; it’s clear the architecture of both man and manse are one when she finds Thornfield burnt to the ground and hears of its master’s reduction to personal ruin.
As she approaches his forest hermitage of Ferndean, the density and gloom of the woods make her think she has taken a wrong direction. She looks for another way, but there is none: “all was interwoven stem, columnar trunk, dense summer foliage--no opening anywhere.” The landscape points the inevitable way to her destiny. She finds Rochester blind and maimed; her nightmare has come true – and so have her dreams. She has her man, and now she’s in control, a point she chooses by make by emphasizing that “He saw nature--he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam--of the landscape before us; of the weather round us--and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.” The landscapes through which Charlotte has led Jane “Air,” by lunar light, over earth, to water, and through fire, Jane now shares with Rochester.
In fact, Jane Eyre is one long fusion of air and earth, of light, or flame, and water. Did Charlotte consciously intended to overlap so many elemental images so meaningfully, or if it was the natural result of her intent consciousness? Her childhood flights from reality at the parsonage to write fantasies on the moors indicate an intuitive awareness of the soul-nurturing, creativity-engendering qualities of nature, whether it was consciously manipulated for literary purposes or not. I believe, based on my own experiences, that Charlotte’s immersion in nature infused her with awareness of its sustenance and emerged in her writing spontaneously. Her expressions of nature as setting and psyche are foundational to Jane Eyre, the composite bedrock upon which Charlotte builds – igneous in its passionate origin, metamorphic in its internal processes, sedimentary in its accumulation of experiences. This bedrock, topped by moors and woods and forests, implies a sort of timeless, geological collaboration between Charlotte, Jane, and I; we share defining places, processes, and purposes. Charlotte realized, and caused Jane to realize, and helped me realize that whatever the issue of concern, our natures – aided by Nature in all her elements and forms – will point the way. We are not to worry; the omniscient, omnipresent Over-Soul is omnipotent. To quote a higher source than Charlotte with a softer metaphor than rocks: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.[2]
At journey’s end, peace and productivity engender a well-deserved joy. “It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind,” says Jane, “delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space.” Little Charlotte must have done the same -- I know I have. Alexander Pope expressed this relinquishment of anxiety to nature when he wrote, in his “Essay on Man:”
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reasons’s spite,
One truth is clear,
Whatever is, is right.
Whatever is, is right. We are each where we are meant to be, or we would not be who we are. In literature, the impact of a particular physical context on a character’s development is profound. Change the environment, and the character changes. Though all else be equal, a child of the arctic will develop a different personality than a child of the desert. The constant threat of avalanches, for instance, creates a different character than the constant threat of a scorpion sting; while equally deadly, they require different preparations. A character is shaped by his reactions to both the beauty and challenges of his personal landscape, the tensions of which reverberate through all his feelings, thoughts, and deeds.
Just as Charlotte’s character was shaped by her specific landscape, and Jane’s in turn by Charlotte’s, I know that I am who I am because of what I read and where I lived. If I had grown up in the city, or at the shoreline, and if I had been immersed in stories rooted in the Australian outback or the Saharan desert, I would be someone else. My soul would have been filtered through a different setting. As it was, my real and literary immersions were in dappled trails and backlit leaves, staggered layers of grey-blue hills, and clearwater creeks thrashing with fish. Charlotte Bronte read Romanticists and found refuge on the wide and wild moors. Her heroine, Jane, followed her author’s trail of elements to find happiness deep in a forest. And I, in their footsteps, follow them both to find more of myself.
[1] The family name of Eyre is that of a Derbyshire knight whom William the Conqueror is said to have christened for lifting the injured William’s visor and providing him with needed air.
[2] Matthew 6:28, KJV
Forty years ago, when my world still burned with Wordsworth’s celestial light and my own small life seemed interwoven with all of nature, my favorite authors included those greats of Romanticism and Transcendentalism who could gracefully articulate that tapestry -- Louisa May Alcott, Sir Walter Scott, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. When I read their works, I sensed the patterns that characters and landscapes pressed upon each other, though I knew nothing of metaphor or allegory: Mary Lennox, up to her elbows in soil and seeds and bulbs, grows and transforms along with the secret garden; Rob Roy, leaping across crags and waterfalls and glens, immortalizes both himself and the Highlands; Jo March Baer, raising neglected boys to discover nature in the fields, restores their trust and the farm. My parents reinforced these fused impressions of nature as character -- my mother by substituting classic children’s literature for television, and my father by imbuing each of his five children with his passion for the natural world. That world was always with us. Our family lived first beneath the redwoods in the Saratoga mountains and later on a hillside apple farm in Watsonville, and we spent our summer vacations in canvas tents by northern California creeks. When I grew up I splurged on pilgrimages to some of the wild places I’d seen so clearly in books – Yorkshire, Melrose, Inverness. As a result, my most poignant memories are a mingling of literary and personal landscapes – of Scottish lochs and camping trips, of English moors and hikes.
When I studied literature in college, my professors, along with my childhood immersion in books and forests, helped me see the more subtle connections that writers like Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin, and Ernest Hemingway, for example, drew between settings and characters, and the way they used nature to enrich subtexts and heighten drama. I was especially attuned to the ways an author’s childhood environment emerged in his or her paper setting, and how those two superimposed terrains affected the internal landscape of the protagonist – and, as a reader, me. This layering became apparent in many of the classic works I read, but for me, none better exemplified these stratifications than Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre.
As I read and reread Jane Eyre through the double lens of the author and protagonist, I found that their fused experiences of nature echoed mine in many ways – that their respective flights to the moor paralleled my own walks in the woods, and rendered some of the same resolutions. Clifton Fadiman once said, “When you reread a classic book, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” I found this to be particularly true of Jane Eyre, with whose author I so intimately empathized that to call her “Bronte” here would seem untoward. In Charlotte’s novel, more than any other, I saw that the fragile film that separates us from our deepest selves and each other dissolves when the natural landscapes we share as writer, character, and reader are overlaid.
Charlotte’s locale and history so closely parallel those of her title character, Jane, that the story could only have been told in first person; the author has, consciously or otherwise, left her own life-tracks all over the pages, and Jane has walked in those footsteps. Both were residents of the Yorkshire countryside, and Charlotte, like Jane, lost her mother at a very young age. Both were uprooted from their homes and raised by an aunt, both attended a boarding school that neither fed nor heated its pupils properly, and both lost loved ones to tuberculosis contracted there. Ten-year-old Charlotte, suffering from the loss of her mother, home, and two older sisters, as well as the damaging effects of her negligent school, took to writing stories with her remaining siblings about an imaginary land called, all too obviously, Angria.
When I envision little Charlotte writing her stories, I see her in two settings. One is the Bronte parsonage, her second home, in Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. Because I was a cloister-craving child, I imagine Charlotte and her brother and sisters crouching under the dining room table, hidden by its tablecloth, as they whisper and draft together in secret, away from the eyes of their preacher father, who might wonder what his children were up to and apply a magnifying glass to the tiny writing in their tiny notebooks. He might not like to discover that they had gone off into an imaginary world called Angria. It would sound suspiciously like Anger, too much like hostility toward the God who had caused, or at best allowed, their pain. To express anger in any form would be to express disagreement with God’s decisions, to take umbrage at his divine will. So it seems to me, who as an adult has taken umbrage and written cathartically myself, that the children would have written in a secret place. A fort, where they could barricade themselves not only from their father’s frowns, but from a world –if not a God—that seemed maliciously intent on their misery.
When I was ten, I, too, was a sequestered writer, though not to hide from God; my childhood was relatively charmed. Deep in a swale of our hillside orchard grew a grand old apple tree, a Yellow Bellflower planted by the Italian immigrants who had settled the farm a century before. Its enormous branches arched and draped to the ground like the bustled skirt of an elegant giantess, and every day after school I’d take a blanket and a book, a notepad and a pen, and enter through a leafy slit. The earth inside was soft beneath a brittle layer of winter leaves. In springtime the dangling twigs billowed with creamy blossoms and bright new foliage, suffusing the air with chartreuse light and the fragrance of incipient fruit. There were other solitary spots to be found around the farm – the barn, the woodshed, the basement – but in that glowing dome I was part of a storybook setting, a hidden bower where clansmen might lay down an injured king; where knights and maidens might rendezvous; where minstrels might rehearse on moonlit nights. My fantasies were always story-based, and fueled the ones I penned beneath that tree.
It seems to me that Charlotte, like myself an ardent fan of Sir Walter Scott, might have sought such refuges, outdoors or in. In fact, when she writes Jane Eyre twenty years after inventing Angria, she opens the novel with little Jane thus ensconced: “I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.” Jane (and, I believe, Charlotte) would almost always have preferred to be outdoors, but in this opening scene she is avoiding her bellicose cousins, and glad that the weather prevents her from taking a walk with them, as “the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.“
The depressing view from the window seat reflects the inner desolation felt by young Jane and Charlotte, whose traumas had not ended with childhood. In the few years prior to writing Jane Eyre at thirty, she had suffered unrequited love, the disrepute of her only brother, and the failure of her school. Thus the description of the view also describes their mutual vision of the future: “Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.” I saw that same blast in my own thirties, as my children pulled away and a “lifelong” friend betrayed my trust -- but also, like Charlotte-through-Jane, I saw beyond it the “blank of mist and cloud” in which a brighter future might abide. In life as in the book, the horizon beyond the storm bodes hope, and outdoors offers both solace and inspiration.
Outdoors on the moor is the other place I can picture young Charlotte writing in her little books, alone, lying in purple heather under a broad blue sky, as far from the parsonage as she would be allowed; perhaps farther. The moor was, in reality, her playground – both a liberating space and a dividing line. Out there she “wove a web in childhood / A web of sunny air,” she wrote later. I’ve roamed the wild Yorkshire moors myself – in fact, I took my parents and sisters to explore our ancestral castle grounds the year before we knew that my father was fatally ill. We stood in the ruins of the dining hall at Ravensworth and mused that having closed the geographical and genealogical gaps, only Time remained to block our view of medieval gowns and dancing aunts, of our multi-great grandfather quaffing his goblet of wine. Eight centuries were nearly envisioned away that April day; it’s relatively easy for me to see merely Victorian Charlotte perched among the jagged rocks and rills of those same moors, one eye on the shaggy cows and sheep. And though the traumas of my own life have been relatively few, I know what it’s like to bolt outdoors when illness, death, and sorrow come to call. I lost my father not long after that trip, and I spent many prayerful hours in sunlit glens seeking respite from the same sounds Charlotte would have endured -- the fitful coughing, the pitiful moans, and then the dreadful, welcome silence. Nature both provides that respite and reminds us that decay is a component of renewal, a Transcendentalist idea beautifully expressed by Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”:
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
I ‘m certain Charlotte’s dashes into beauty gave her moments of necessary peace, but neither indoor seclusion nor outdoor freedom would have assuaged her accumulated anguish and outrage for long. Her grief was too great to be released in small places, tiny books, or empty air. As she grew older she needed a vast forum, an amplifying venue, and an engaged audience to hear her out. She also needed the power to command her circumstances, to put an end to the sequence of tragedies that seemed to stalk her. And so Jane Eyre was born. The years of suppressed emotion that Charlotte had funneled into Angria as a child were embodied in passionate Jane, and the events of both creator and created were overlapped – Charlotte guiding Jane, with the clarity of hindsight, from anger to happiness.
This guidance is not just through shared events and emotions but over shared landscapes as well. Just as young Charlotte Bronte needed that “web of sunny air,” so does young Jane “Air,”[1] and she seeks it often in woods, on moors, and in forests. The other elements of fire, water and earth also appear extensively in the novel, beginning on the first page in descriptions of hearths, oceans, and the “death-white realms” of bleak northern landscapes. Jane, looking at a book illustrating the latter, says its text gives “significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.” To me, these images indicate an authorial belief resonating with my own, that there is meaning in particular combinations of nature’s components. Just as Jane notices the jagged against the smooth, so in my own outdoor wanderings and musings I’m often drawn to the overlapping of the fractal and the spherical -- twigs touching eddies, rivulets bubbling over rounded rocks, a branch silhouetted against the moon, lightning forking within a cumulus cloud – representations of the broken and the solid, the harsh and the smooth, the yin and the yang, of life.
Time and tragedy had likely intensified a similar awareness for Charlotte, whose adulthood experiences provided further events, emotions, and outdoor escapes for Jane. By her late twenties Charlotte had been employed unhappily as a governess, been rejected by the older, married man she loved, and been the founder of a failed school. As she pours her own past into Jane, she channels their parallel twists and turns through their layered landscapes of recovery and inspiration until at last they arrive, like two forks of one river, at a delta of self-acceptance and renewal.
Years ago, in the wake of my dear father’s death, a long walk in winter-struck woods nudged my own internal landscape toward spring. The sensory immersion in that raw tableau of decay helped me understand that dissolution, as an ongoing aspect of regeneration, is no more wrong than winter. The world is at once both the womb and the grave. Every hole creates a hill, and every hill a hole; everyone and everything is connected simply by virtue of existence. Months later, reading Emerson’s essay, “The Over-Soul,” I saw that he had eloquently expressed what I -- and I think Jane and Charlotte, too -- had seen in the truth of outdoors:
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing, and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
In Jane Eyre, the “shining parts” of nature abound as constant reminders of this greater presence. Some of these “parts,” or aspects of nature, are the many birds that show up as emblems of love and happiness, as harbingers of demise and death. Charlotte’s constant aviary references indicate a conscious belief that the divine transforms or informs through nature, whether Jane is conscious of it or not; once she gains her freedom from Gateshead, the novel’s pages practically flutter with the beating of wings. There are crows at Rochester’s Thornfield and strange birds on the tapestries there; she’s compared to a “stranger bird,” an “eager bird,” a “half-frozen bird,” a linnet, and a skylark; she feels “impotent as a bird with both wings broken” and “like a messenger pigeon flying home.” Birds have always connoted spirituality, and especially so, for me, as during my father’s final days, he watched the wild birds and scrawled notes in his worn guidebook. Charlotte, Jane, and I share not just an appreciation for the blithe beauty of birds, but an overriding awareness of their real and symbolic fragility. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” says Jane; “I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Even an independent will needs guidance, and the moon, another “shining part,” provides this for Jane. It reveals her future fiancé, Rochester, to her for the first time, as it was “waxing bright; I could see him plainly,” but later, after she accepts his bigamous proposal the moonlight disappears, the wind kicks up, lightning splits the chestnut tree in half, and the moon glares between the split, a cross-Testament biblical image that evokes commandment tablets broken by Moses and a temple veil torn by God. Later, visions of the moon lead Jane to escape across the moor – as little Charlotte would have escaped her own trauma – and take comfort and seclusion there:
I touched the heath, it was dry, and yet warm with the beat of the summer day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was […]
Later she takes refuge at Moor house with the Rivers siblings. Just as I have many times myself, Jane has journeyed over wild lands to end up waterside, and there finds restoration. This calming experience begins a sequence of choices that allow her to realize her destiny. Near the end of the sequence she dreams of the mighty Rochester in fragile ruins, only a shell-like façade of the man remaining; it’s clear the architecture of both man and manse are one when she finds Thornfield burnt to the ground and hears of its master’s reduction to personal ruin.
As she approaches his forest hermitage of Ferndean, the density and gloom of the woods make her think she has taken a wrong direction. She looks for another way, but there is none: “all was interwoven stem, columnar trunk, dense summer foliage--no opening anywhere.” The landscape points the inevitable way to her destiny. She finds Rochester blind and maimed; her nightmare has come true – and so have her dreams. She has her man, and now she’s in control, a point she chooses by make by emphasizing that “He saw nature--he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam--of the landscape before us; of the weather round us--and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.” The landscapes through which Charlotte has led Jane “Air,” by lunar light, over earth, to water, and through fire, Jane now shares with Rochester.
In fact, Jane Eyre is one long fusion of air and earth, of light, or flame, and water. Did Charlotte consciously intended to overlap so many elemental images so meaningfully, or if it was the natural result of her intent consciousness? Her childhood flights from reality at the parsonage to write fantasies on the moors indicate an intuitive awareness of the soul-nurturing, creativity-engendering qualities of nature, whether it was consciously manipulated for literary purposes or not. I believe, based on my own experiences, that Charlotte’s immersion in nature infused her with awareness of its sustenance and emerged in her writing spontaneously. Her expressions of nature as setting and psyche are foundational to Jane Eyre, the composite bedrock upon which Charlotte builds – igneous in its passionate origin, metamorphic in its internal processes, sedimentary in its accumulation of experiences. This bedrock, topped by moors and woods and forests, implies a sort of timeless, geological collaboration between Charlotte, Jane, and I; we share defining places, processes, and purposes. Charlotte realized, and caused Jane to realize, and helped me realize that whatever the issue of concern, our natures – aided by Nature in all her elements and forms – will point the way. We are not to worry; the omniscient, omnipresent Over-Soul is omnipotent. To quote a higher source than Charlotte with a softer metaphor than rocks: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.[2]
At journey’s end, peace and productivity engender a well-deserved joy. “It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind,” says Jane, “delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space.” Little Charlotte must have done the same -- I know I have. Alexander Pope expressed this relinquishment of anxiety to nature when he wrote, in his “Essay on Man:”
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reasons’s spite,
One truth is clear,
Whatever is, is right.
Whatever is, is right. We are each where we are meant to be, or we would not be who we are. In literature, the impact of a particular physical context on a character’s development is profound. Change the environment, and the character changes. Though all else be equal, a child of the arctic will develop a different personality than a child of the desert. The constant threat of avalanches, for instance, creates a different character than the constant threat of a scorpion sting; while equally deadly, they require different preparations. A character is shaped by his reactions to both the beauty and challenges of his personal landscape, the tensions of which reverberate through all his feelings, thoughts, and deeds.
Just as Charlotte’s character was shaped by her specific landscape, and Jane’s in turn by Charlotte’s, I know that I am who I am because of what I read and where I lived. If I had grown up in the city, or at the shoreline, and if I had been immersed in stories rooted in the Australian outback or the Saharan desert, I would be someone else. My soul would have been filtered through a different setting. As it was, my real and literary immersions were in dappled trails and backlit leaves, staggered layers of grey-blue hills, and clearwater creeks thrashing with fish. Charlotte Bronte read Romanticists and found refuge on the wide and wild moors. Her heroine, Jane, followed her author’s trail of elements to find happiness deep in a forest. And I, in their footsteps, follow them both to find more of myself.
[1] The family name of Eyre is that of a Derbyshire knight whom William the Conqueror is said to have christened for lifting the injured William’s visor and providing him with needed air.
[2] Matthew 6:28, KJV