Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (post 3): Jane is unattractive, but she sees with her mind’s eye, and hears with her inward ear, continuously narrated tales

“I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer: I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked” (1, p. 84).

The above is, more or less, how Charlotte Brontë looked, and how she felt about how she looked, in real life. I quote it because it shows the autobiographical authenticity of the text, including what follows.

“Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of the incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence” (1, p. 93).

Note that she does not say I imagined, but rather that my imagination created. That is, her subjective experience is that she, her regular self, does not create. Her job is to allow her mind’s eye to see, and her inward ear to hear, what an independent agency (an alternate personality) creates and provides to her. She calls that alternate personality “my imagination” only to indicate that what she experiences, subjectively, as an independent agency, is, objectively, a product of her own mind.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. Edited by Richard J. Dunn. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.