conflict as a courtroom scene with Memory as defendant, Reason as prosecutor and ‘I’ as judge, is generally said to derive from Isaac Watts’s edifying work, The Doctrine of the Passions (1729): ‘Call your love often to account at the bar of reason and scripture, to enquire whether the object of it be proper …’ (section 20). However, the motif was a sermonical commonplace.
6. a plain, unvarnished tale: In Othello, the hero answers Desdemona’s father’s objections to the match by promising a ‘round unvarnish’d tale’ of their courtship (I. iii. 90).
7. to let … within them: Charlotte Bront? had often delivered inner tongue-lashings to herself and Ellen Nussey, such as ‘no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted – the marriage ceremony performed’ (Letter of 20 November 1840, Letters, Vol. I, p. 234).
8. ignis-fatuus-like: Like Will o’ th’ Wisp, a flitting light on marshy land, receding only to recur elsewhere, drawing a traveller to his death. The reference is probably to Byron’s admonitory lyric, ‘To a Youthful Friend’, advising against promiscuity that moves like ‘marshy vapours’, ‘To flit along from dame to dame, / An ignis-fatuus gleam of love’ (stanza 17).
9. chalk … ivory: Charlotte Bront? presents artistic realism as the cure for fantasy. The withering self-portrait in chalks represents a coarser and also cheaper medium than the miniature on ivory paper.
CHAPTER XVII
1. to truss game and garnish dessert-dishes: Elizabeth Rigby’s scathing review of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review quoted a ‘lady friend’ to the effect that ‘no woman trusses game and garnishes desert-dishes with the same hands, or talks of so doing in the same breath’ (CA, Vol. III, p. 52). Thus, the novel must have been written by a man or by a woman so depraved as to have ‘long forfeited the society of her own sex’ (p. 53).
2. list slipper: A slipper of soft material.
3. pleasant … trouble: ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’ (Psalm 46:1). Although the child Jane had denounced psalms as ‘not interesting’ in Ch. IV, the mature Jane turns to them in her distress.
4. Mesrour: In The Arabian Nights, Mesrour is the executioner of Harun al-Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad. The allusion, reflecting the swaggering orientalism which Charlotte Bront? associated with Byron, implies that Rochester returns in a form of disguise, to sound out rival brides, for Haroun and Mesrour walked the streets of Baghdad disguised as merchants, checking on the citizenry.
5. Her purple riding-habit: The equestrian image of Blanche in imperial purple emblematically implies worldliness, caste and pride.
6. ‘Some natural tears she shed’: PL, Bk XII, l. 645: ‘Some natural tears they shed, but wip’d them soon.’ By substituting ‘she’ for ‘they’, Charlotte Bront? implies the fallen Eve in Adèle.
7. ‘Elles changent … mangé’: They are changing their clothes … At my mother’s, when there were guests, I used to follow them everywhere, from the drawing-room to their bedrooms; often I used to watch the maids arrange the ladies’ hair and dress them, and that was so interesting: you can learn from that … Oh yes, miss: it’s been five or six hours since we’ve eaten.
8. crucibles … spontaneous combustion: crucibles: The cook’s esoteric arts are humorously presented as part of an alchemist’s experiment to turn base metals into gold; spontaneous combustion: burning of a substance (or mass) from self-generated heat.
9. ‘et alors quel dommage’: And then, what a shame!
10. ‘Est-ce que … toilette’: May I take one of these glorious flowers, miss? Just to complete my outfit.
11. minois chiffoné: Having the charm of irregular features.
12. Dowager … pillar: A dowager is a widow who has inherited a title or estate from her husband. It is hard to see how Lady Ingram can be termed ‘Dowager Lady Ingram’, given that she and her deceased husband have an unmarried son. The description recalls not only the hard-faced pride of Mrs Reed but also the inhumanity of Mr Brocklehurst, who appeared to Jane a black pillar.
13. low brow: Phrenologically, a low brow, indicative of simian lack of intelligence, was also associated with racial inferiority. Hence, Charlotte Bront?’s image of ‘high’ breeding in the aristocracy suggests inbreeding and degeneracy.
14. is brought in … arch: The change of tense from past to present for nearly three paragraphs has the effect of stage directions (the curtain serving to half-conceal Jane and to focus the characters in the lit theatre of action), with a paradoxically distancing effect. This ‘staging’ technique points up the artifice and superficiality