ABSTRACT
With 'no possibility of taking a walk that day', the child Jane Eyre flees to an alcove of Gateshead Hall, seeking out a 'double retirement' from the 'pale blank of mist and cloud' outside (Bronte, 1975, p.4) and the dominion of her enemies the Reeds within. In retreating, Jane is the characteristically timid orphangoverness, but also the intermittently invisible Brontean heroine who quietly excuses herself from her public role in the household and the obligations of her formative self-narration. Her window-seat is a refuge in which she can indulge an illicit appetite for fancy, and in which her narrative imagination can fashion a world neither as bleak as theY orkshire autumn nor as prosaic and degrading as the bullying of John Reed. Scarlet draperies and panes of glass ('protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day', p.4) enclose a fictional world of distant lands and hazardous voyages: Arctic wastes, solitary rocks, shipwreck, and doldrums. But Jane herself never ventures outside England. The melodramatic romances of her imagination, demanding an interior geography of their own, are generated entirely within the vivid recesses of an otherwise temperate landscape. The extremities of foreign lands are to the 'flat, rich middle of England' (Bronte, 1984, p.58) what the red-room is to Gateshead Hall. Unable or unwilling to venture far out ('I never liked long walks', Bronte, 1975, p.3), Jane is locked in, and the tale takes the place of the journey. Much of Charlotte Bronte's fiction, however, does concern itself with voyages, real and imagined. Indeed, perhaps nowhere in English fiction is the journey more poignantly allied with seclusion; and nowhere in Bronte's fiction is the journey more powerfully associated with the promise and the peril of independence for a woman than in Villette (1853).
