Night Passages by Bronfen Elisabeth; Brenner David;

Author:Bronfen, Elisabeth; Brenner, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

JANE EYRE’S BATTLE WITH GHOSTS

The psychomachia of the orphan Jane Eyre begins in the red room where her aunt has her locked away one night without a candle to punish her for her alleged disobedience. Jane, who feels herself to be a stranger in Gateshead Hall in constant discord with her aunt Mrs. Reed and her cousins, rebels against what she perceives to be an unjust treatment of her person. She responds to this dark side of Victorian conventions by indulging in fantasies of self-reduplication so typical of gothic sensibility, reintroducing magical thinking into rational morality. To her, the room is haunted by the spirits of superstition because after her uncle died it was in this room that his corpse lay in state. Driven to desperation at having been abandoned here, she looks into the mirror and sees a colder, darker world, with herself a strange little figure, reminding her of the “tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp” that her nurse Bessie described in the evening stories, “coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travelers” (46). The nocturnal side of her psyche breaks through along with the dusk. In the dark room, Jane believes she sees a light suddenly gleaming on the wall, gliding up to the ceiling and quivering over her head, and takes it to herald the approach of the ghost of her deceased uncle. Her terrified screams summon her aunt, who persists in punishing Jane because in her eyes this unwelcome foster child is a precocious actress, a “compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity” (50). Jane is forced to remain in the dark room, where, utterly terrified, she loses consciousness; she only wakes the following night, as from a terrible nightmare, in the safety of her own bed.

The vehement accusations that this passionate, albeit nervous girl launches against her aunt will result in her being allowed to leave this inhospitable home, yet she will carry the spirit of discord with her. Upon arriving at Lowood, a school for orphans, she will turn her new home into a stage for a battle with precisely that other self that had compelled her to rebel against the stern Mrs. Reed. In her belated autobiographical confession, she openly admits that in her battle of words with her aunt “something spoke out of me over which I had no control” (60). With her departure from Gateshead, the boundary between reason and passion dissolves to such a degree that magical thinking imbues the way Jane views both herself and her world, imagining that fairies, demonic seducers, and vampires had come together to do battle for her soul. Yet in contrast to the classic gothic tales discussed in the previous chapter, Brontë’s novel does not revolve around her heroine’s destructive, psychic nocturnality. Even if Mrs. Reed conceives of her niece’s rebellious spirit as evidence of an actress’s dangerous duplicity, the mature Jane who recounts her story in hindsight insists her former outbreaks should be taken as a sign of her unrestrained sincerity.

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