Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] Page A
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a scream that comes from her without her knowing it, but then goes "quite through" all those around her—sets the stage for the entire novel, gets replayed throughout Jane's life, is ultimately the scream that goes through the house. For Jane is presented already in childhood as split, fissured, porous, entered by spirits, a shrieker of screams.
How would you truly show the enduring effects of emotional injury, the actual reality of trauma? I'd want to say that the penetrating scream in the red room is a signal of Jane's own continual emotional turmoil that will not be silenced or stay put, a kind of libidinal flow that courses through the house and the story. In this regard, Bronte is stunningly Freudian (even though she antedates him by over half a century), in that the red room episode is given to us as a textbook illustration of the mechanics of child abuse, of a wound that stays open, so that the language of phantoms and shrieks becomes eloquent as an index of damage that leads to potent feelings and to alteration of self. Bronte has wanted to tell the story of an injured child, and it is no accident that the motif of abandoned or unsavable children runs in filigree throughout the novel, appearing in Bessie's songs and in Jane's own fitful dreams. After all, what does emotional abuse of a child truly look like? At the surface, with a camera or notebook, you could describe it in terms of something happening, a physical or sexual injury; but how would you graph what is happening under the surface, what continues to smolder throughout one's life?
Bronte's invasion of the spirits in the episode in the red room does exactly that, shows us a little girl in the process of becoming a haunted house. Yet her scream not only escaped, but it seems ultimately to script the key events of the novel. For Bronte writes her narrative in such a way that the surface realism—from episode A to episode B and so forth—is disrupted, imploded by the libidinal virulence generated in the red room. This virulence is so great that it becomes the novel's reality principle by twinning its characters. Hence, Charlotte Bronte has taken the fissured, spirit-ridden Jane, and has systematically doubled her in this novel by her raging, carnal, libidinally charged counterpart self: Bertha Mason Rochester, the madwoman in the attic.
To see that proper, diminutive, wrenlike Jane and libidinal, corpulent, murderous Bertha might be the same person is to break all the rules of both realist fiction and common sense, but the poetic logic here is irresistible. Punish a young girl enough—and this book loads on the punishment—and she'll either die or explode. To see Bertha's violence as Jane's revenge is to see how the scream that goes through the house sovereignly reshapes reality, gives it a devastating emotional cogency.
Bronte would hardly have understood the word uncanny in the way Freud did—as an intuition that the place we enter for the first time is oddly familiar, that we've been there before—yet her novel beautifully depicts just such a world. It is a deceptive physical world, deceptive because it is drenched in spirit and emotion, ordered by libido rather than Newtonian logic, a space that is entirely scripted by our past history. Is this not what it means when the scream inside goes through us, then through the house? It spills out, shapes what we see, governs and becomes our reality.
Freud invokes the uncanny because he knows that we create the world (rather than merely taking it in), and we do so by projecting onto its physical surface our own emotional and libidinal needs and circumstances. Art, on this heading, is the supreme subjective record of life, the personal vision of things that might be at complete odds with the objective picture. Proust once claimed that film was an inferior art form for
just this reason: it was shackled to the existing physical world of appearances and could not represent our inner picture of life. Through
How would you truly show the enduring effects of emotional injury, the actual reality of trauma? I'd want to say that the penetrating scream in the red room is a signal of Jane's own continual emotional turmoil that will not be silenced or stay put, a kind of libidinal flow that courses through the house and the story. In this regard, Bronte is stunningly Freudian (even though she antedates him by over half a century), in that the red room episode is given to us as a textbook illustration of the mechanics of child abuse, of a wound that stays open, so that the language of phantoms and shrieks becomes eloquent as an index of damage that leads to potent feelings and to alteration of self. Bronte has wanted to tell the story of an injured child, and it is no accident that the motif of abandoned or unsavable children runs in filigree throughout the novel, appearing in Bessie's songs and in Jane's own fitful dreams. After all, what does emotional abuse of a child truly look like? At the surface, with a camera or notebook, you could describe it in terms of something happening, a physical or sexual injury; but how would you graph what is happening under the surface, what continues to smolder throughout one's life?
Bronte's invasion of the spirits in the episode in the red room does exactly that, shows us a little girl in the process of becoming a haunted house. Yet her scream not only escaped, but it seems ultimately to script the key events of the novel. For Bronte writes her narrative in such a way that the surface realism—from episode A to episode B and so forth—is disrupted, imploded by the libidinal virulence generated in the red room. This virulence is so great that it becomes the novel's reality principle by twinning its characters. Hence, Charlotte Bronte has taken the fissured, spirit-ridden Jane, and has systematically doubled her in this novel by her raging, carnal, libidinally charged counterpart self: Bertha Mason Rochester, the madwoman in the attic.
To see that proper, diminutive, wrenlike Jane and libidinal, corpulent, murderous Bertha might be the same person is to break all the rules of both realist fiction and common sense, but the poetic logic here is irresistible. Punish a young girl enough—and this book loads on the punishment—and she'll either die or explode. To see Bertha's violence as Jane's revenge is to see how the scream that goes through the house sovereignly reshapes reality, gives it a devastating emotional cogency.
Bronte would hardly have understood the word uncanny in the way Freud did—as an intuition that the place we enter for the first time is oddly familiar, that we've been there before—yet her novel beautifully depicts just such a world. It is a deceptive physical world, deceptive because it is drenched in spirit and emotion, ordered by libido rather than Newtonian logic, a space that is entirely scripted by our past history. Is this not what it means when the scream inside goes through us, then through the house? It spills out, shapes what we see, governs and becomes our reality.
Freud invokes the uncanny because he knows that we create the world (rather than merely taking it in), and we do so by projecting onto its physical surface our own emotional and libidinal needs and circumstances. Art, on this heading, is the supreme subjective record of life, the personal vision of things that might be at complete odds with the objective picture. Proust once claimed that film was an inferior art form for
just this reason: it was shackled to the existing physical world of appearances and could not represent our inner picture of life. Through
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