Ms. Jane Austen, Chawton, Hampshire.
Mary Lou’s comments on her visit to Chawton (Jane Austen’s home later in life) bring to mind the desk at which Austen wrote. As Mary Lou points out it was a small table, merely, not a desk at all. It is positioned today exactly where Jane Austen said she had it placed (her letters are clear) so she could be near the fire, catch the light, and be able to see the famous ’squeaky door’ to her room. That way, when someone came in she would always be aware of it and she could cover her work or letter for privacy.
I mention that because there was no privacy even in that rather pleasant home. Sometimes when writers in the Nine Month Memoir project or at the Blue Hills writing Institute tell me they have no time and space to write I think of Jane Austen’s table. Jane even shared a bedroom and a bed for much of her life with her sister, who was her one true confidante, it seems. The need to maintain a public persona and yet to be permitted a private sensibility were in constant conflict with social intrusiveness.
That’s Anne Elliott’s plight. It’s also Jane Eyre’s plight. For everyone in that novel wants to reduce Jane to something that is convenient for their sense of who they think she is; and she resists. She does so with politeness, firmness, good humor, intelligence, and steely courage; for everyone (including little Adele, and Mrs Fairfax) wants her to be the person they need her to be for their own comfort. This is classic transference, in the psychoanalytic sense. And Jane Eyre resists it. Even her sweet cousins, the Rivers girls, want her to marry their brother so he will not go abroad - even though they know how impossible he is, and can imagine what a hard husband he would be. Friends indeed.
When Jane Eyre gives St. John Rivers a grilling for denying his love for Miss Oliver we could say she’s doing the same thing. Yet look at how different her viewpoint is! She tells St. John what she knows: that he loves Miss Oliver. He admits it, yet he will not give in to it since he is so attached to his idea of being a missionary - his need of this public persona is so strong it fights with his personal yearnings. Notice, Jane doesn’t want him to be something different for her own good; she wants him to be alert so that he can be a more compassionate and kindly human being for his own good. This is the exact reverse, in fact, of the overall trend in the book’s other characters.
Sometimes I think of Jane Eyre as literature’s first modern therapist.
on January 19th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Dear Administrator:
Early this morning I left Chawtron for Selboorne (in my 1996 journal, of course).
Once again I came to Gilbert White’s famous remark:
“It is I find in zoology as it is in botany; all nature is full that the district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.”
And doesn’t Gilbert White tie these slender threads? By whioch I mean that which we examine closely always yields details not otherwise appatren - Our own lives included.
Jane Eyre’s letter to herself ( which may or may not be another way to describe the novel-written-as-autobiography). This novel feels like a memoir as she writes her way into the fullness of her being.
Jane Auten whom you say demonstrates interior life through relationship.
What is White’s book after all but a series of letters in- print now for over 200 years? Letters to his zoologist-mentor.
Might White have been the precursor to blog? A soul benmoaning the lack of neighbors reached out to another through a strong mutual interest?
In any case, thanks to your meanderings through places both real and imagined, my own life has grown richer as I am reminded of the heritage offered to writers who read.
MLou