Inspired by Judith Williams’ Perception and Expression in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë (1988)
Every once in a while you come across a book that is so insightful – that so lights up the mind and heart – that it is worth musing over, over and over again. This has been the case with this book by Judith Williams, which deals with Charlotte Brontë’s four published novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. I received the book as a Yule gift, having asked for it because I’d re-read Jane Eyre last October, finding in that novel so many spiritual and existential themes that I was intrigued to go deeper. And this book certainly full-filled that desire!
I was immediately refreshed by the author’s perspective, which seems grounded in an ‘archetypal’ and mythical approach to the human psyche. The analysis of the four novels, I would say, is spiritual as much as psychological, touching on mythic themes and following the journey of the main characters as a quest for wholeness. She suggests that, as such a quest, the way in which Charlotte’s characters are moving is from Innocence to Experience, ala William Blake’s paradigm.
I am also engaged with how Williams deals with gender and its fluidity; and how Charlotte allows for it in her stories—without condemnation—showing that the masculine and feminine aspects of personality can each be positive or negative, arguing that it is in balancing the two that we become whole—and therein approach wisdom.
Ultimately for Williams, to be a balanced persona – to be in touch with our ‘inner world’ as well as the ‘outer world;’ i.e., to be able to manifest feminine as well as masculine power – is to be spiritually androgynous! A spiritual androgyne, she says, is someone who has brought together the two poles of inner and outer life and can thereby draw and source their own power from within and without. The androgyne has both ways of seeing, naming and uttering. That is, experiencing and understanding and communicating. I think she is saying that one’s androgyne – a state of being-in-becoming attainable via the spiritual journey-pilgrimage-quest – is the guardian of a gateway into deeper and more mysterious knowledge. Williams says, “like Tiresias, he/she is an oracle who taps deep sources of knowledge.” And with regard to Brontë’s novels: “Almost all characters who have any spiritual power, for good or ill, in these novels are androgynous at some point, and all the protagonists must become androgynous to some degree.” (3)
I think immediately of Rochester’s presenting himself to the party at Thornfield as a female fortune-teller; dressed for the part—and fooling his guests with his charade, even Jane. But there is never an indication in the text that either the characters or the author thought Rochester ‘should not have been dressing up as a woman.’ I find this interesting in terms of current discussions of gender and sexuality.
Williams introduces at the beginning of the Introduction a hermeneutical triad of “Seeing—Naming—Uttering” that really struck me as having wide applicability. I find this triad to be a good cypher for describing our existential situation in-the-midst-of-life, as well as the mechanism by and through which we try and articulate our experience, our needs, our wants and for understanding our very being-in-the-world. It is a praxis in which we are all engaged at some level, virtually all the time. She says:
“To see something is to admit it into the awareness; to name is to recognize it; and to utter it is to bring it forth, as the etymology implies. … The struggle is to perceive not only with the eye and the rational understanding but also with the imagination and with sympathy, and involves, finally, in Villette, a need to express the experience in the form of a work of art—Lucy’s narrative.” (1-2)
I think this not only speaks to our everyday praxis, but also to one’s praxis as a Poet_ or any kind of Artist! To express – e.g., “utter” something in verse or prose, dance, music or painting – is always a response to “naming” it. If one cannot name it – if what I am referring to – whether an interior experience or an external one is too numinous, mysterious or unfamiliar or simply obscured in some way – then there follows a seeking for the ‘right’ or ‘best’ words, idioms, symbols, metaphors, and so forth. In order to name something, however, I have to “see” it in the broad sense in which Williams describes that engagement as perception. The thing “seen” might be a thought or emotion, a memory or a vision – internal realities – or something in the outer worlds in which I move, subsist and through which I wend my way to the Home in the Heart where I dwell whenever I get centered; at the Meath of the Self—when ‘life allows’ me to get there.
I recollect a dimension of realized depth here, in this hermeneutical praxis, in which I have long been immersed, even if often at the subconscious level. It seems so ‘obvious,’ but because of that I often lose sight of it; and then the words are shown to be again; as in this book—and I go “ah_ yes!”
As Williams intimates with regard to the main character in Villette, the quest – spiritual, mystical and imaginative we are all on – tends, at some level, toward expression in works of Art. This is the ultimate end of the triad of seeing—naming—uttering. I do not mean, by saying this, that ordinary, day to day, practically necessary acts of seeing—naming—uttering are not important, meaningful and useful. They are! I only feel led to urge that there are things which transcend that everyday realm, and that those are the experiences we “utter” – that is, express – though Art, if we are able, in any one of its many forms.
I have been
reading Perception and Expression mainly for going deeper into Jane
Eyre, as I have not read Shirely or Villette since the late 1980’s
(though I am now planning to delve into those texts again this Spring because
of this insightful book!) and when I came to this passage about stages
and shrines, I rested – at a full-stop – in meditation for a few minutes!
“One of the most frequent images in [Jane Eyre] is the curtained enclosure, and in expanded form the room or the house, an image whose quintessential form is the shrine or the stage, and the pattern formed by this motif correlates with Jane’s spiritual quest: since shrines and stages are both places of ritual enactment wherein truth is both hidden and revealed, this image is especially appropriate to a learning process that is only half conscious.” (20)
I’ve always intuited a relationship between stage and shrine, but this text has shown it to me in a way that can now be more specifically “named,” then “uttered”—if I can find the words.
Shrines are alternately mysterious and mundane places. They stand forth from the landscape in which they are situated as physical presences, just as all ‘places’ do, largely accoutered with what are seemingly ordinary artifacts. Candles, stone and/or wood artifices (a table, perhaps), natural objects, but then things which are somewhat more than ordinary: Sacred art, tools of rituals performed there, lighting – candlelight and electric lights – all of which can take one out of the ordinary. And of course, what goes on at shrines signifies and ‘reveals’ truths about whatever the shrine signifies; what or for whom it was constructed. You might walk past or through a shrine and ‘see’ only the ordinary. On another occasion, it is a setting in which the mysterious and transcendent may become apparent, presencing to our consciousness in ways unforeseen and unpredictable. And the danger of this experience is in thinking you’ve “seen it all” and “named it all” and that your “utterances” are therefore the summation of the mysterious, numinous experience you have been a party to. Not so_ such experiences have hidden as well as revealed truth to them.
The same can be said for a stage. You might be visiting a theatre when no play or performance is being put on. The stage is bare, it alludes to nothing out-of-the-ordinary. Again, many of the artifacts associated with the stage may seem more or less familiar. As with a shrine, however, other artifacts will ‘point’ to something ‘more.’ A piece of a set may allude to a fictional world within a play. Props left on the stage will be seen as also alluding to the presence of a story. Once the stage is brought to life – with actors, sets and lighting – it will reveal truths bodied-forth by the stories that are being re-presented. But there is always the hidden and unseen as well in any enactment of a story. This is what leads those who “see” the presentation to ask questions, to wonder about various aspects of the action, the spoken words, perhaps the use of music and lighting. The un-presented truths may also be at a depth ‘beneath’ the literal level of the story enacted, and therefore ‘hidden’ until concerted reflection acts on them—though perhaps not even then! Behind and beyond any story are truths much harder to “name” much less “utter.” The Mystery in everything that-is, is enveloped in what is present_ though there is always more to see, name and utter.
This comparison
of shrine and stage is especially appropriate to Jane Eyre, and – as
Williams suggests – in Charlotte Brontë’s
other novels as well. It has always
struck me that Thornfield is a theatre; which becomes literally manifest in the
night of charades Rochester puts on for his guests; the Ingrams and their
social group, as well as – and perhaps specifically for – Jane, whose
intentions he is attempting to ‘divine’ as the fortune teller. Generally, and not just in the charade
chapters, Williams says:
“Thornfield as a whole is a theatre of riddles and Rochester its stage manager; from start to finish, charades both literal and figurative are enacted there.” (29)
It is also a “shrine of truth,” which both reveals and hides
truths.
Overall this has been an incredible read, for me, and if you are interested in Jane Eyre and Charolotte Brontë’s other novels as well, I would recommend it. It was a strange find; and I’m glad I have had the pleasure of engagement with it.
