Mar 26
Oneida Heights, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.
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Oneida Heights, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.
The Earl of Sandwich outside his stately home in Hinching Brook, Huntingdon.
Photo by Slim Aarons
I want to comment on art in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Jane Eyre, because I think it’s an illustrative comparison.
In both books, the heroines have an interest in and a talent for art. I’m a little behind on Wildfell Weekly, but in chapter 18, “The Miniature”, we see Huntingdon looking at Helen’s art on several occasions. On all of them, he shows no interest in the art itself or Helen’s thoughts as an artist (as with a scene where he calls her away to look at a Van Dyke painting and she’s actually interested in it, but he cuts off her thoughts as he doesn’t care about it and only wanted to get her alone), but only what the art demonstrates about her feelings for him, which please his ego.
On the first occasion, he is looking through Helen’s drawings, but we get none of his comments on them until he is delighted to find a sketch of his face on the back of one of them, and some erased but still visible attempts at other sketches of him. He is delighted by this, flaunts his power over Helen by ignoring her for the rest of the evening and flirting with another woman, and then kisses her (a very unacceptable advance on a woman you weren’t married or engaged to at the time, and one which Helen does not consent to).
The next day, he sees Helen working on a detailed painting of a young girl in a glade of the forest looking up at a pair of nesting turtledoves, a symbol of love.
“Very pretty, i’faith!” said he, after attentively regarding it for a few seconds; “and a very fitting study for a young lady. Spring just opening into summer—morning just approaching noon—girlhood just ripening into womanhood, and hope just verging on fruition. She’s a sweet creature! but why didn’t you make her hair black?” [Helen’s hair is dark.]
“I thought light hair would suit her better. You see I have made her blue-eyed and plump, and fair and rosy.”
“Upon my word—a very Hebe! I should fall in love with her if I hadn’t the artist before me. Sweet innocent! she’s thinking there will come a time when she will be wooed and won like that pretty hen-dove by as fond and fervent a lover; and she’s thinking how pleasant it will be, and how tender and faithful he will find her.”
“And perhaps,” suggested I, “how tender and faithful she shall find him.”
“Perhaps—for there is no limit to the wild extravagance of Hope’s imaginings at such an age.”
Helen gets him to walk the last comment back, but his takeaway from the painting - another assurance that she’s in love with him, and he can use that and rely on it without giving anything in return - is, again, one that satisfies his vanity and sense of power. And immediately after, he takes Helen’s works in progress and looks at them, ignoring her refusal, and laughs at finding a miniature of his portrait she has drawn.
This contrasts with a scene in Jane Eyre where Rochester is looking at Jane’s art: he is not interested in what they say about how she feels about him (this is still early in their acquaintanceship), but in what they say about her and her thoughts.
Rochester looks through her portfolio closely and picks out three, all with rather Gothic subjects and tone (in contrast to the more sentimental tone of Helen’s turtledove painting):
one of a shipwreck in storm, with the arm of a drowned woman, and a cormorant holding a jewelled bracelet that the waves had torn from her wrist
the peak of a grassy hill in wind, with a deep blue twilight sky showing the shoulders and head of the figure of a woman with a star on her brow (Silmarillion fans, imagine fanart of Varda and you’ll get the idea)
An iceberg in polar winter, with the northern lights, and a vast, pale-white head in the sky, half- veiled and representing Death.
Even as a narrator of the book, Jane is diffident, saying the pictures are “nothing wonderful”, but she describes them in great detail, and in answer to Rochester’s question of whether she was happy when she painted them, admits that “to paint them was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known”, and that when she painted them she worked on them from morning to night.
That Rochester focused on these three paintings, which are very different from the calm, composed, and dutiful image Jane projects to the outside world, already says a lot about his understanding of her; he is seeing something in her that almost no one else has noticed. He observes, before she has told him anything, that they took “much time, and some thought.” Jane, despite having loved working on them, says in response to his questions that she is dissatisfied with them: “in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realize.”
Rochester is clearly impressed by both the art and the thoughts, though he is blunt and not flattering:
“You have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more, probably. You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to give it full being: yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish. These eyes in the Evening Star you must have seen in a dream. How could you make them look so clear, and yet not at all brilliant? for the planet above quells their rays. And what meaning is that in their solemn depth? And who taught you to paint wind? There is a high gale in that sky, and on that hill-top.”
Huntingdon is interested in Helen’s art only insofar as it reveals her attraction to him and flatters his vanity. Rochester is interested in Jane’s art for what it says about her and her thoughts; she is reserved with most people, and he probably gets a better sense of her personality and character - and shows more interest in it - from that one conversation than anyone else has in Jane’s adult life. His questions are blunt, but she answers them with honesty and emotion, like it’s a relief and pleasure to meet someone who wants to know. She wants the side of her revealed in those paintings to be understood, and he’s the only person she’s met who understands it; that’s central to why they fall in love.
CON10008DO by Stanley Short Via Flickr: A westbound Conrail TV train races through Huntingdon, PA on March 27, 1999, led by C40-8 No. 6046. Conrail's days were numbered and trips trackside were happening with greater frequency to get what we could before being replaced with NS black.
Pinkie (1794) by Thomas Lawrence. Huntington Library.
Pennsylvania Railroad engine #623, a K-4S (4-6-2) "Pacific" built in Juniata during July of 1917 and retired in May of 1948 after 31 years of service. In this contest, it's hauling an eastbound Troop Train. Huntingdon, PA October 7, 1946
Great Crested Grebe by Oliver Andrews Via Flickr: A great crested grebe out for a lunchtime swim at RSPB Fen Drayton Lakes.