hen Jane Eyre relates her delighted reactions to her living quarters at Thorwood, Brontë connects setting and mood in order to characterize her protagonists's moment of recognition, or epiphany. Imagery of light suggests Jane's personal enlightenment. Much as the sun illuminates this "bright little place," a figurative light clarifies Jane's predicament. Jane's recognition or change in attitude mirrors the change in setting from the "bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood" to the "gay blue chintz window curtains" at Thornfield. In one sense Brontë's coupling of emotion and setting-description recalls Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy." "All violent feelings have the same effect," Ruskin argues. "They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'pathetic fallacy'" (Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, p.1278). For Ruskin, emotion distorts descriptions of external appearances into being "false" and "untrue" while simultaneously clarifying the writer's 'state of mind, his interior world." In the passage above, Jane's 'spirits" undoubtedly inform her survey of the chamber's "bright" and "gay" interior. And yet in another sense Brontë's conflation of setting and mood stands in subtle contrast to Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy." Notice how setting in each case precedes or affects emotion, and not vice-versa. "Externals have a great effect on the young," in the same measure that Jane's "faculties" are "roused by the change of scene." Emotions are dependent upon setting; this is a causal relationship. On the other hand, Ruskin is concerned with how emotions color or inform description — a causal relationship antithetical to Brontë's. For Ruskin, emotions affect setting, and not the other way around.
Jane's moment of prescience suggests a transition from youth to a "fairer era of lifea new fieldan indefinite future period." Setting inculcates the theme of the Bildungsroman — a "novel which concerns itself with the development of a youthful protagonist as he or she matures" usually predicated upon 'some form of loss or discontent" which "must jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting" (Hirsch). Having borne the wrath of Mrs. Reed and survived the epidemic at Lowood, Jane readies herself for maturity and all its "flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils." Jane envisions her future — a moment of inner contemplation and reflection.
In contrast, several descriptive passages in Charles Dicken's The Pickwick Papers seem less an inner recognition than a glimpse out of the Pickwickian world (an isolated community of middle-class men) towards the social reality of industrial expansion.
It was quite dark when Mr. Pickwick roused himself sufficiently to look out of the window. The straggling cottages by the roadside, the dingy hue of every object visible, the murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick dust, the deep red glow of furnace fires in the distance, the volumes of dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around; the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons which toiled along the road, leaden with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods — all betokened their rapid approach to the great working town of Birmingham.
As they rattled through the narrow thoroughfares leading to the heart of the turmoil, the sights and sounds of earnest occupation struck more forcibly on the senses. The streets were thronged with working-people. The hum of labour resounded from every house; lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic stories, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up in the great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of the engines, was the harsh music which arose from every quarter. [Pickwick Papers 776, Chapter XVII]
This passage, much like several of Sam Weller's streetwise social commentaries, is one of few attempts in the novel at social realism — a stylistic technique in which the material specifics of everyday life are reported as accurately as possible. Dickens's brief description of the rigors of industry stands in stark juxtaposition to the light-hearted travails of Benjamin Allen, Bob Sawyer, and Pickwick. Again, what's interesting is that this moment of social reality is a glimpse out of the Pickwickian world — one marked by hyperbole, fantastic embedded tales, digression and repetition. The theme evoked is a tension between the interior and exterior — between Dicken's literary space and the severe public sphere suggested by the passage above.
Unlike Brontë, Dickens focuses on darkness rather than light. Darkness indicates the bleak reality of "high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around." Notice how this descriptive passage differs from the lengthy development of setting which marks Pickwick's trip to Dingley Dell just before Christmas (see 410, Chapter 28). In that passage, Dickens utilizes what Rhoda Flaxman has codified as "word painting," the proto-cinematic 'spatial progression through a landscape" which is "focused through the viewpoint of a particular spectator" — a technique which perhaps ameliorates the artist's dilemma of rendering space in a primarily linear form (Jason Smith, "Word-Painting," Victorian Web). In his description of industry, however, Dickens abandons "word-painting" for an additive or cumulative style in which one image bombards into the next. Dickens rejects spatial perspective, emphasizing rather the immediacy and proximity of these overwhelming 'sights and sounds of earnest occupation." The additive style awakens the reader to the unyielding density of machinery, the textures of "trembling walls" and the resonations of "dead heavy clanking of the engines."
If Brontë's passage signifies Jane's coming-of-age and Dicken's passage suggests a dichotomy between external and internal, public and private, then nineteenth-century class-struggles (even within the many middle-classes) place both passages into understandable contexts. According to David Cody, "different social classes can be (and were by the classes themselves) distinguished by inequalities in such areas as power, authority, wealth, working and living conditions, life-styles, life-span, education, religion, and culture." Jane comes to Thornfield to assume a governess position. Governesses 'so clearly indicated the precariousness of the unmarried middle-class woman's status in Victorian England" (Norton II 903). Somewhere between family and servant, the governess's ambiguous social place perhaps exemplifies how expansive and indeed how hierarchical the class structure was. "Each class," Cody goes on, "included a wide range of occupations of varying status and income; there was a large gap, for example, between skilled and unskilled labor." Flanked by aristocracy and the under-class, the expansive working class perhaps suggests the heteroglossia of political discourses emerging at that time in response to the concerns of competing classes. At any rate, the brevity of Pickwick's glimpse at the working-class arena suggests perhaps how one middle-class formation was not necessarily privy to the hardships of another.
Interestingly enough, no matter how tenuous a connection furniture may seem to have to literature, the context of Victorian furniture and interior design seems to suggest itself! Notice how the transition in setting from Lowood to Thornfield involves upward class-movement class. In the manner of the Bildungsroman, Jane's social ascent parallels the change from "bare planks" to the more ornate "papered walled and a carpeted floor." These, along with the "gay blue chintz window curtains," are accouterments and comforts of wealth which are combined elsewhere in the novel with the trappings of British Imperialism. According to George P. Landow, Victorian furniture — such as that which was shown at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition — was "extremely ornate, even cluttered" when compared to the 'stripped-down, supposedly functional aesthetic" of the twentieth century ("Victorian Furniture Design"). That is, Victorian furniture was marked by excess, decadence, abundance, and accumulation — much like the style with which Dickens writes in the passage above! What's telling is that Victorian furniture emphasizes a rift between aesthetics and function, much as Dicken's passage here juxtaposes the function of urban industry with the otherwise peaceful bucolic narrative landscape over which Pickwick travels. [For another discussion of this subject.]
Last modified 1996