ABSTRACT
There is a passage in Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel where Jane Eyre shows some of her own amateur paintings to Mr Rochester, her new employer. It is worth quoting in full.
He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately.
While he is so occupied I will tell you, reader, what they are: and first, I must premise that they are nothing wonderful. The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. And as I saw them with the spiritual eye before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.
These pictures were in water-colours. 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 yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.
The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with some grass and leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tint 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 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.
The third showed the 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 features a sable veil; a brow quite bloodless, white as a 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 a 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 had none’.
‘Were you happy when you painted these pictures?’ asked Mr Rochester, presently. (Bronte 1966: 156-7)
This passage illustrates, I believe, that some present-day assumptions about the nature of unconscious imagery are echoing ways of thinking which were to be found in earlier times – in this case in nineteenth-century Romanticism. There are several relevant clues to this. The pictures are acknowledged as arising spontaneously from inside the psyche – ‘I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them’. This doubtless reflects Charlotte Bronte’s own capacity for eidetic vision, a gift which she shared with her sister. Second, it may be noted that Mr Rochester doesn’t seem to find this inner and personal source of pictorial inspiration unusual, a situation which is harder to imagine in an earlier period. This point is emphasized by the fact that he asks about her state of mind when she made the pictures. There is an implication that she was probably not happy at the time; this comment therefore assumes an interpretation of the paintings – something quite remarkable for 1847, and which clearly shows that the Romantic Movement was definitely able to accommodate the idea of interpreting pictures, in a psychological sense, long before the advent of psychoanalysis. Finally, and perhaps less surprisingly in view of the above, the pictures, as described, are symbolic in a way that would be immediately familiar to most art therapists, and even can be imagined as examples of artwork produced in the course of analysis or therapy at the present time. I would say that the described images have something of an archetypal quality about them, in a Jungian sense.