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Dreams In Jane Eyre

DREAMS IN JANE EYRE

          Jane Eyre contains a number of significant dreams and day-dreams. Despite her distaste for fantasies and inefficiency, the eponymous narrator, Jane, is a frequent day-dreamer. Edward Rochester, Jane's employer at Thornfield, recounts observing her pace around in a day-dream. When the voice of a servant, Mrs. Fairfax, awakens Jane, Rochester imagines her thinking "My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal," and finding a task to complete to ensure she does not slip back into daydreaming (3.22).

    This suppression of day-dreams reflects the trend of Jane learning to suppress her passions over the course of the novel. After a turbulent childhood, Jane fulfills a Victorian ideal of womanhood, and grows more graceful and composed as she completes her education. Despite her placid exterior, Jane still maintains a wild and active dream life According to Maurianne Adams, Jane even pays "inordinate attention to the details of her dream life" (85). Jane's dreams thus reveal the raw emotions she attempts to mask in order to be an ideal Victorian lady.

    When Jane becomes a governess at Thornfield, Rochester takes interest in three watercolor imaginative landscapesshe painted while at Lowood school. They reveal her great awareness for dreams. Jane describes the drawings as visions of her "spiritual eye" and notes, "The subjects had indeed risen vividly on my mind" (1.242). Rochester declares, "I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist's dreamland while you blent and arranged these" (1.244).

    The first painting shows a ship's mast a bare hand, and a bracelet rising out of a turbulent green sea. The second painting is of a wind-rustled hill below a night sky in which a cosmic female form is visible. The third is a monumental bleak human head rising out of the ocean, supported by hands and resting on an iceberg. Adams argues that the pictures represent the scope of Jane's unconscious...