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The red room: the beginning of Oedipal dynamics
Jane’s initial situation at Gateshead is one of deprivation, and her rebellion against her unjust treatment by John Reed leads to her punishment – she is dragged to the red-room. She looks around her at that gigantic jail-like room which surrounds her, known to be the most prominent place of the house, but which is seldom lived in for Uncle Reed died there. Jane’s perception of the enclosed space of the red-room – a microcosmic mirror of the house as she experien ces it – breeds superstitious fears and feelings of guilt that turn into a fit on the brink of insanity. The hatred and the aggressiveness Jane feels for the Reed family are at the origin of painful sensations which she experiences to the extreme as she is locked into the red-room, such as suffocation and asphyxiation. Such conditions are highly destructive for the self as they increase sadness, fear and insecurity. According to Melanie Klein, the fear of being shattered by inner destructive forces is the deepest and the most harmful one.16 A possible remedy lies in the comfort a mother can give to her child. However, as Jane is deprived of motherly love, those feelings of tension and disquietude cannot be soothed. She has no other choice but to go along with the worry of insecurity, the perpetual dissatisfaction, and the consciousness of not being loved. The dark red of the room endows it with an initiatic and funerary significance. Its prevailing, hypnotic red colour – “red damask”, “red carpet”, “crimson cloth” (10-11)– is opposed to blinding, spectral and immaculat e white. This colour scheme appears repeatedly in Charlotte Brontë’s work, a sc heme of violent contrast between the cold purity of white and the hot crimsons and scarlets of passion and retribution. In this scene, the colour white seems to represent a limit: it is the colour of passage, of death and rebirth. This opposition between red and white is also symbolically significant of Jane’s personality, mental nature, as she constantly struggles between feelings and reason, passion and restraint. Besides, her progress is in some ways paralleled or indicated by the oscillation between the extremes with which fire and ice are associated in the novel.
In Bleu. Histoire d’une Couleur , Michel Pastoureau puts forward the important meaning of a colour but also its complex and controversial approach:
uses red to give the impression of a slaughter. Indeed, with her red scarf, Jocaste hangs herself. Besides, during the honeymoon (Act III, part I), the room is considered to be “une cag e, une prison”, symbolic of Oedipus’ new functions and of his destiny. In this scene, the red and white aggressive colours create an omnipresent feeling of oppression: “La petite boucherie” is reminiscent of the slaughterhouse, a sort of metaphor of destiny; the red colour is associated with the death menacing the two characters, this death being associated with incest. Moreover, the red scarf is an object which gives rise to Jocaste’s fear and anguish; indeed she fears it: “je la crains”. Jane is equally frightened by the red room. At one point, she decides to cross the room: “I had to cross before the looking-glass” (11). This action is a kind of test: she is trying to avoid the reflection of herself in the mirror. She is unsure of herself, of what she will see. She wants to avoid looking because she does not yet know herself, what she is going to find in the mirror. She finally looks at herself in the mirror, only to find out that she is completely alien from herself: “strange little figure there glazing at me” (11). She experiences a schizophrenic dissocia tion: “Am I a monster?” – in this alienated state, the self is seen as a terrifying other.
Oedipus experiences the same kind of dissociation. His deformity and later his self-inflicted blinding contributes to his state of alienation, as he has to face the “monster” he has turned into. His own parents, by physically injuring him when he was yet only a child, mete out a hurtful scar which Oedipus will have to endure until his death. This wound is a reminder and a symbol of his ill-fated life; one in which he has always been singled out. It is also a parallel to the way his moves have been quelled and restricted from the day he was born and for the rest of his life. Interestingly enough, it turns out that the author also experienced some part of the very first crisis of her story: the red-room. It was discovered thanks to a letter from Mary:
“Three years after” – (the period when they were at school together) – “I heard that she had gone as teacher to Miss Wooler’s. I went to see her, and asked how she could give so much for so little money, when she could live without it. She owned that, after clothing herself and Anne, there was nothing left, though she had hoped to be able to save something. She confessed it was not brilliant, but what could she do? I had nothing to answer. She seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of duty, and, when she could get, used to sit alone, and “make out”. She told me afterwards, that one evening she had sat in the dressing-room until it was quite dark, and then observing it all at once, had taken sudden fright”.
Progressing towards integration
According to Lacan, the virtue of the mirror stage is to lead the child to a certain degree of autonomy, though he will never be a complete autonomous being. In the course of this experience, the child progressively masters his body image through its reflection. As he identifies himself through his reflecting image, he contributes to the structuring of the “I” and to the progressive destr uction of the aspect of a fragmented body which he had. The mirror stage is thus of paramount importance, as it contributes to the child’s considering of his body as a unified totality.
It is thanks to this body image that the child will come to know himself, to identify himself and form his identity. However, young Jane’s experience of the mirror stage is far from being a stage of progressive mastery of her body image and destruction of the aspect of a fragmented body which she has. She cannot consider her body as a unified totality. Winnicott approaches Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage differently. Where Lacan attaches a same “mirror experience” for every child, that is undergoing a crisis of identity being faced with an alienating self that will “mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development” 24, Winnicott presumes that another consideration has to be taken into account. According to him, the factor of the “facilitating environment”, or the “holding environment” which is represented by the caretakers in charge of the infant’s well being, detains a major role, if not the predominant role in an infant’s development and his feeling of “discord”. To be fulfilled, the psychological maturation requires a favourable environment and is subordinate to its quality. According to Wilfred Bion and Winnicott’s works, the caretakers hold a considerable function in what Bion first called “co ntainment”. As psychoanalyst Margot Waddell clarifies, Containment is Bion’s term for the state of mind in which it is possible for the mother unconsciously to be in touch with the baby’s evacuation or communications of pain, and of his expressions of pleasure, to receive, then to be able to engage with and savour them if calm and loving, or to modulate them if distressed and threatening, and to hand them back to him in a recognisable and now tolerable form. Bion thought of this capacity as being essential to the baby’ s ability to get to know, to centre and to understand the different parts of himself and his relationships with others.25
Jane lacks the presence of a container. The Reeds are unable to absorb her anxiety and hand it back in a more compliant form, on the contrary, they exacerbate the narrator’s anguishes. Jane is left in a confused and alienating state; the different experiences she will have to go through will not be assimilated and incorporated as long as she will be deprived of this “holding environmen t”, thus preventing her to grow and reach a state of maturation and identity. Glòria Ma teu i Vives, counsellor and child and adolescent psychotherapist, clearly summarizes Bion’s work: Bion’s theory of containment (1970) provides a conceptual tool for looking at the mechanisms of protection and containment of anxiety. Bion formulated a condensed statement about the transformations of beta particles into alpha activity. The gist of his theory is that if an emotional experience is not worked through, it cannot be metabolised and digested and the result will be that it will remain unassimilated. Beta elements, undigested particles, can become Alpha elements only if they are contained and thought about rather than expelled. The process of digestion and transformation contains the primitive emotional experience and makes it palatable and manageable.
Absence of a father figure
The father figure being absent, the child retreats into an exclusive relation with the mother; a fusion that is detrimental for his well being. Regarded as one of the two founding figures of a child’s character, the father (not necessarily the child’s progenitor) stands as an emotional landmark, which is essential to the child’s mental development and particularly his construction of an identity in the processus of sociability. The father represents the necessary dividing force which disunites the child from his mother. Besides, the father’s role is very important as regards to the child’s emotional and sentimental life, as it will greatly influence his or her later love affairs as well as all of his or her human relations. Jane does not enjoy the presence of the second parental figure; the one which helps bring about the growing of her independence and autonomy. The principal consequences of such an absence for a child correspond to an emotional stress and in some cases a psychosis. According to Michael W. Yogman36, the father embodies two principal psycholigical roles: protect and stimulate. He facilitates the child’s ability to deal with affliction and is always present as a protective force against any adverse or aggressive environment. His absence provokes pertubations in a child’s development.
If we follow such a statement, Jane must have inevitably felt the lack or loss of this father figure and consequently yearned to find him and establish link with him in order to achieve mental equilibrium.
Miss Temple being gone, the fusion between Jane and the object of motherly love is broken: “with her was gone every settled fe eling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a home to me” (71). Lev y-Shiff’s work “The effects of father absence on young children in mother-headed families, Child development” helps us understand how a fatherless child can be so anxious and disturbed when it comes to separations (1982). Jane is so affected by Miss Temple’s leaving that she experiences a new crisis of identity. Levy-Shiff studies the multiple consequences related with the absence of the father on the child’s emotional equilibrium. He notes that fatherless girls are more independent than those who have one. This theory is relevant when applied to Jane’s character, as she endlessly goes from one place to another, on a quest most of the time deprived of any emotional links or human company. Her desire for independence can be perceived in her persistent will to fly away and find intercourse: “I longed to go w here there was life and movement”
(75) to experience “all incident, life, fire, feeli ng, that I desired and had not in my actual existence” (93). She alone takes the decision of a dvertising in the Herald to find a situation: You must inclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the Editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J.E. at the post office there: you can go and inquire in about a week after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly (73).
Table of contents :
Introduction
I. Relationship between the individual and the group: Jane Eyre as scapegoat
1. Jane’s family
2. The stare of others
3. The red room: the beginning of Oedipal dynamics
II. The development of the Oedipal complex
1. Progressing towards integration
2. Seeking a substitute mother.
3. Absence of a father figure.
4. Jane’s quest
5. Identity crisis
6. Finding the father figure, the patriarchal power.
III. Fulfilment of the Oedipal dream?
1. Loving the father figure
2. Some intriguing likenesses
3. An alternative to the Oedipal end
4. The final fusion with Rochester
Conclusion
Bibliography
