Rearranging furniture in Jane Eyre and Villette.

Klotz, Michael

"Where did you get your copies?" "Out of my head:' "That head that I see now on your shoulders?" "Yes, sir." "Has it other furniture of the same kind within?"

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

THE EXAMPLES ARE NUMEROUS. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot silently inventories Captain Harville's "rooms so small"; in Our Mutual Friend, the narrator anatomizes Mr and Mrs Boffin's divided parlour (which is the "queerest of rooms"); in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke endures her "dreary oppression" amongst the "shrunken furniture" of her boudoir; and in The Spoils of Poynton, the "tell-tale things" make their way into Fleda Vetch's heart. Why do nineteenth-century novels place such emphasis on the furnishing of rooms? The standard starting point for a consideration of objects in the realist novel is Ian Watt, who has suggested that "solidity of setting" is achieved by the description of "moveable objects in the physical world" (17, 26). In a similar vein, Martin Price writes of the unmotivated physical detail as one of the hallmarks of realism, asserting that "the triumph of the particular is the triumph of formal realism" (262). And in his essay "The Reality Effect," Roland Barthes argues that superfluity of detail is an inextricable feature of literary realism.

But throughout novels of the nineteenth century the attentive description of objects does more than establish the concreteness of the fictional world. The narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop remarks that "We are so much in the habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us by external objects ... that I am not sure I should have been so thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I had seen huddled together in the curiosity dealer's warehouse. These, crowding on my mind ... as it were, brought [Nell's] condition palpably before me" (13). Yet in spite of this telling image--the "heaps of ... things" literally "crowding" the narrator's mind--critical considerations of the Victorian novel have nearly dismissed the importance of "things:"

What I want to suggest about Jane Eyre and Villette is related to the way that descriptive detail becomes bound up with narration in the examples I have provided above, but the reading I have in mind is somewhat more specific: it is grounded in work on the cultural significance of the cluttered domestic rooms of the Victorian period and in theoretical writing on the interior. In The Victorian Parlour, Thad Logan analyzes the Victorian drawing room both as a cultural artifact "delimiting the horizons of character, and constituting the particular visual, spatial, and sensory embodiments of human culture at a particular historical moment," and as a "subject of mimetic representation" in the literature of the period (1, 202). To view the Victorian drawing-room from her perspective is to see a space (both actual and "virtual"/literary) abounding with "things" to be read both as a part of nineteenth-century consumer culture and as they reflect a specific aesthetic and ideological outlook. "The characteristic bourgeois interior," she says, "becomes increasingly full of objects, cluttered--to modern eyes, at least--with a profusion of things, things that are not primarily functional, that do not have obvious use-value, but rather participate in a decorative, semiotic economy. This eruption of objects in the home was, of course, part of the larger-scale evolution of the Victorian panoply of things" (26).

For Logan, the Victorians' object-strewn rooms reflect an unspoken domestic rhetoric expressed in a "semiotic economy" that can be parsed and comprehended as a language. She proposes a "grammar of the parlour" to classify the ways that particular objects can and are combined in a specific domestic space: "segments of domestic space perceived as distinct and unified areas (parlour, bedroom, library, etc.) are comparable to units of discourse" and "the appearance of particular items is governed by an internalized model of what classes of things belong where within the home" (79). Logan's approach follows that of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, who write that "goods assembled together in ownership make physical, visible statements" that "are read by those who know the code and scan them for information" (5).

In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart takes the relationship between persons and things beyond the context of the Victorian parlour. Stewart's understanding of objects is to a certain degree influenced by Marx: where he writes of the mysterious, incomprehensible, fetishized commodity, Stewart notes that objects are "saturated with meanings that will never be fully revealed to us" (133). But while she theorizes that the traces inscribed in objects are never fully legible, Stewart has an acute sense of the ways that they are visibly connected to the construction of identity: "[T]he self is invited to expand within the confines of bourgeois domestic space. For the environment to be an extension of the self, it is necessary not to act upon and transform it, but to declare its essential emptiness by filling it" (157). By amassing and arranging objects, characters in nineteenth-century novels construct and display something of their interiority: "Not simply a consumer of objects that fill the decor, the self generates a fantasy in which it becomes a producer of those objects, a producer by arrangement and manipulation" (158). However, the decoration of rooms inevitably comes to reflect an outmoded or cast-off version of the self, so that the process of introducing furnishings into a room, and discarded unwanted decorations, is really never at an end. Narrative "seeks to reconcile" but never erases the disparity between the inhabitant of a particular space and the objects that surround him (136-7).

Both Jane Eyre and Villette dramatize the tension between the arrangement of interior spaces and the vicissitudes of the characters that inhabit them, and the differing experiences of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe can be more precisely understood by attending to their material environments. The contents of rooms in Jane Eyre move in flux with Jane's consciousness, and her fears, hopes, intentions, and regrets often seem to be embodied in the objects that surround her. "Few novels are as spatially articulate as Jane Eyre" asserts Karen Chase. "Its houses, of which there are many, abound with gardens, galleries, bedrooms, dining rooms, schoolrooms, libraries, attics, halls, and closets. These spaces are in continual upheaval.... Houses are full then suddenly deserted; they are devotedly cleaned or savagely burnt to the ground" (59).

As an orphan at Gateshead, a student at Lowood, and then a governess for Mr Rochester and later St John Rivers, Jane spends most of the novel as an outsider in the spheres that she inhabits. Though the novel takes place almost entirely indoors (admittedly not to the degree that it does in Austen), the changing domestic spaces of Jane Eyre leave Jane an outsider looking in, unable to make herself at home. To see what I mean by this, we should begin at the beginning of the novel, with its famous first sentence: "There was no possibility of taking a wall< that day" (13). It is because of the wet weather and cold that Jane and the Reed family do not venture outdoors, yet, as Jane shortly tells us, staying indoors is something that she is naturally accustomed to: "I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons" (13). As Eliza, John, and Georgiana sit "clustered around their mama in the drawing-room," Jane looks on from "a distance" at Mrs Reed and her children, enviously watching their comfort and ostensible happiness. From her uncomfortable perch Jane escapes to "a small breakfast-room [that] adjoin[s] the drawing-room," to nestle herself between the "folds of scarlet drapery" and the "clear panes of glass," where she can read in peace. In a certain sense the opening of Jane Eyre, which depicts the heroine's displacement from a family scene, is fitting for a novel that ends with the birth of another family: Jane married to a battered and tame Rochester and, despite earlier trials, having every indication of happiness in the future. But as I trace the way objects are linked to the interior lives of characters in Jane Eyre, I want also to suggest how Jane's penchant for understanding people through their possessions makes her a fit mate for Rochester and his "designing mind."

Throughout the novel, Jane's view of rooms displays something of her emotional state. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter 11, when Jane leaves Lowood for Thornfield, her arrival is described in terms that indicate that her expectations about her new life as a governess have not yet met the reality of her circumstances:

 A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play;
 and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy
 you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large
 figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet,
 such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints;
 including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince
 of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is
 visible to you by the light of an oil-lamp hanging from the
 ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my
 cloak and bonnet. (108)

Jane begins by comparing a new chapter in a novel and a scene in a play, and with this in mind she asks the reader to "fancy" her sitting in the George Inn as if she were on stage. But how are we to picture her? There are a number of places in Jane Eyre where the heroine's minute attention to the decoration of a room, and the objects contained within it, allow her to begin to understand its inhabitant, in a process that is a little like the inventorying of another person's thoughts. Here, however, Jane's invitation to see the room where she sits is difficult--there is hardly any detail at all. We are invited to imagine a room with "such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantel-piece, such prints." The contents of the room are presented as a list of nouns without adjectives: we are told the type of things that surround Jane without any indication of their particular kind or quality. Yet, this muddled description is no accident, because it is inflected by Jane's nervous expectation. Rather than telling us how the room appears, Jane invites us to imagine what seems appropriate for such a room, as she wonders about her job at Thornfield. Since she has never worked as a governess before, Jane--like the reader--can only grasp at the adjectival details of her situation, and her vague and haphazard description betrays her psychological state. But in case the reader has failed to notice this, Jane states plainly: "Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in mind" (108).

When Jane finally arrives at Thornfield, she finds that Rochester has been away from home for some time, and she decides to question Mrs Fairfax about the character of her master. Despite Jane's subtle queries regarding Rochester, Mrs Fairfax says very little about him, and she seems to have come to very few conclusions in the years that she has been working there. Jane wonders if Rochester is "generally liked," and when Mrs Fairfax answers in the affirmative, if he is "liked for himself" or for the legacy of his family? Mrs Fairfax is of little help. All of her assertions are qualified--"his character is unimpeachable, I suppose"--and she seems, really, to have never considered the subject before. She thinks him "clever," but she has "never had much conversation with him." She deems him "rather peculiar," but this means only that "one cannot always be sure whether he is in jest or in earnest, whether he is pleased or the contrary." When Jane remarks on the cleanliness of the rooms, and inquires if Rochester is a "fastidious man," Mrs Fairfax says only that he has a "gentleman's tastes and habits." Understandably, Jane is frustrated: "There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or things: the good lady evidently belonged to this class; my queries puzzled, but did not draw her out" (120-1).

However, as Mrs Fairfax takes Jane on a tour of the house, Jane pays careful attention to the objects that surround her. And when Mrs Fairfax directs her attention to the drawing-room, she takes particularly close note:

 She pointed to a wide arch corresponding to the window, and hung
 like it with a Tyrian-dyed curtain, now looped up. Mounting to it
 by two broad steps and looking through, I thought I caught a
 glimpse of a fairy place: so bright to my novice-eyes appeared the
 view beyond. Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and
 within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which
 seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy
 mouldings of white grapes and vine-leaves, beneath which glowed in
 rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on
 the pale Parian mantel-piece were of sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby
 red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general
 blending of snow and fire. (119-20)

In a certain way, Jane's reaction is typical for her: ecstatic wonder is quickly checked and subdued. A "fairy place" is rapidly revised into "merely a very pretty drawing room," and this emendation is fitting at this point in the novel. During her stay at Thornfield, Jane constantly reminds herself that she is only a governess, an employee of Mr Rochester, and as a looker-on she cannot really hope to take part in the life she observes.

Yet Jane does aim to understand the people around her, and the drawing-room reveals something about Rochester. Impetuous and at the same time quite reserved, Rochester tells Jane of his former French mistress and yet he is often condescending and cold--he proposes marriage to her while he conceals Bertha on the third floor. This conflict, between Rochester's fervent spirit and his repressive impulse, is played out in his parlour. "The snowy mouldings" and "white carpets" are offset by glowing "crimson couches and ottomans" and "sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby red." This "rich contrast" in the drawing-room is something that Jane will later find in Rochester himself--a "general blending of snow and fire" fits both as an assessment of Rochester's character and as a description of the adornment of his parlour.

Bronte's attention to the arrangement of Rochester's drawing room is one instance of a broader Victorian interest in interior decoration that fills texts of the period. Victorian design manuals took part in the discourse surrounding interior decoration, and these tracts underscore the intimate connection between the arrangement of furnishings and the inhabitants of a particular space. In The Drawing Room (1877), Lucy Orrinsmith deems the drawing-room the "very headquarters of the commonplace," and while she laments the uniformity of the exteriors of most houses in London, she reinforces the possibilities allowed in the display and arrangement of objects: "there is scope for originality within doors, and surely our rooms should be made to suit our individual tastes and characters" (1,144).

In Victorian design manuals, as in Victorian novels, the reader is invited to look through fictional rooms and imagine why they have been arranged as they have. For both the reader and the consumer, visualizing interior spaces is inseparable from speculating about the men and women who live there. In Orrinsmith's The Drawing Room, the reader is led through a particularly uninviting fictional parlour at the same time that he is implored to avoid the mistakes of its fictional decorator:

 The cold, hard, unthinking white marble mantelpiece, surmounted by
 the inevitable mirror, varying in size only with the means of the
 householder, totally irrespective of any relation to the shape or
 proportions of the apartment; the fireplace a marvelous exhibition
 of the power of iron and blackhead to give discomfort to the eye.
 At the windows hard curtains hang in harshest folds, trimmed with
 rattling fringes. On the carpet vegetables are driven to frenzy in
 their desire to be ornamental. (1-2)

Orrinsmith concludes that with its unwelcoming arrangement this is a drawing room to which "no one withdraws," and the reader is warned against committing similar errors (1-2). Yet interestingly, her condemnation of the parlour also implicitly conjures an idea of its fictional owner: with a mantelpiece "cold, hard, [and] unthinking," windows adorned with curtains of the "harshest folds," and a carpet that has been ornamented in a "frenzy," the reader of The Drawing Room is led to imagine a tyrannical master for the drawing room Orrinsmith describes.

In A Plea for Art in the House (1876), W J. Loftie similarly anatomizes the house of a fictitious Mr Brown, and as he reports on the furnishings in Brown's home we get a good sense of the man himself:

 I go into my neighbour Brown's house, this is what I see:--The
 carpet is modern "Brussels"; the curtains are figured "rep"; the
 hall and passages are covered with oil-cloths; the furniture is of
 the last new pattern, designed in the "Gothic style," by Messrs Oak
 and Velvet, upholsterers and undertakers. Brown tells me
 complacently that he has spent a thousand pounds on furnishing the
 sitting-rooms, and asks me to look at the frames of his prints.
 They are gorgeous enough, certainly. "Now," says Brown, "I venture
 to say you can hardly tell them from carved and gilt wood. They are
 done by a new process." You look at the prints for which the
 imitation frames were procured. They are late pale impressions of
 poor second-rate works, of which even proofs would be worthless,
 but Brown has had to pay some cheating dealer a good sum for them.
 It is the same with everything. Its only possible value, at the
 best, was its novelty. A year's wear makes it worthless. The
 dining-room chairs are of a carved oak, "carved by machinery" of
 course, and the backs are marked with Brown's monogram in gilding
 on the scarlet leather. They have cost him between two and three
 guineas apiece, and he is naturally proud of them. But what are
 they worth? What is anything in the house worth? (22-3)

Loftie's detailed account of Brown's sitting-rooms, dining room, and parlour goes on at some length, and he even imagines dialogue for his character: Brown speaks "complacently" and proudly about his "imitation frames," and as he notes Brown's monogrammed leather chairs the author's irritation is palpable. For the inhabitant of these rooms, in the character of Mr Brown, Loftie has a specific type of man in mind, and in design manuals of the nineteenth century, as in realist novels of the nineteenth century, readers are directed to imagine fictional rooms carefully arranged to fit the characters who occupy them.

It appears more than a historical coincidence, as John Lukacs writes, that "the interior furniture of houses appeared together with the interior furniture of minds" (623). A look at the etymology of words associated with the interior seems to bear out this observation. As Dianna Fuss notes in The Sense of an Interior, "interiority" acquires its present meaning of "inner character or nature" in 1803 and "interior decoration" first appears in English only four years later, in 1807 (16). Increasingly detailed and extensive thinking about the decoration of the home evolved in tandem with the growingly realistic depiction of interior life.

In Jane Eyre, Rochester clearly places some importance on prevailing mid-Victorian taste, yet he is not wasteful: his drawing room is wall-papered, it is filled with carpets and expensive fabrics, and generally arranged in the "ordinary modern style" (113). Jane notices that "as fashions changed" the old furniture has been moved to the third floor of Thornfield, where "bedsteads of a hundred years old; chests in oak or walnut ... rows of venerable chairs, high backed and narrow; stools still more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries" all provide "the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory" (121). Rochester has piled his old furniture in front of the room where Bertha sleeps, and these old pieces seem to be inseparable from an era of his life, and a way of thinking, that he would like to forget, but cannot. The antiquated pieces are a "shrine of memory;' connecting them with Rochester's shift in consciousness: the old chairs, chests, stools, and bedsteads physically embodying an older sense of himself, while the "brilliant" furniture of the drawing-room is allied with Rochester's present state, which is spurred by his passionate nature and restrained by his sense of duty and propriety.

The furniture of St John's Moor House, by contrast, has been left entirely undisturbed--old pieces have not been discarded or placed in the attic, and no new objects have been introduced. The same "old-fashioned chairs" and "antique portraits" adorn the walls that have always been there, and the room is "plainly furnished" throughout. The objects have been efficiently and sparingly arranged, and when Jane "examine [s] first, the parlour, and then its occupant" she notes that there is not one "superfluous ornament" or "piece of modern furniture" in the room (385). Indeed, these old items have not been treated carelessly--they give visitors the impression of being "well worn and well saved," everything having been sedulously cleaned, including the "walnut-wood table" that shines "like a looking glass." St John, rigid and parochial in his view of the world, is twice linked to the antique portraits which hang in his parlour: Jane describes him "sitting as still as one of the dusky pictures on the wall," and she remarks on his "pictorial-looking eyes" (386). Each object in the drawing-room has been set in its proper place, treated with care, and preserved over time, and as Jane sits in the parlour of Moor house, considering all of this, she discerns something of St John as well. There is "scarcely" anything "gentle," "yielding," or "impressible" about his nature, Jane thinks to herself, and it is hard not to attribute her impression as much to her perusal of the room as to her observation of the man himself (386).

Later in the novel, after discovering the inheritance she will receive from her uncle, Jane decides to refurnish Moor House and she begins by introducing modern furniture into many of the rooms. Jane surrounds the old chairs, ornaments, and portraits, with "new coverings, and mirrors, and dressing-cases for the toilet table," and the old carpets and curtains are replaced with new ones. Everything is arranged to invest Moor House with renewed life: to make a more pleasing impression on its inhabitants, and to suggest new possibilities for the future. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard asserts that "the house, even more than the landscape, is a 'psychic state, and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy" (72). And for the reader of Jane Eyre, there is a sense that in redecorating Moor House Jane is trying to imbue St John's environment with the kind of "intimacy" that Bachelard describes. Jane reports that Diana and Mary "were delighted with the renovation and decoration of their rooms," but St John, tellingly, is less satisfied (439).

When Jane is finally able to convince St John to take a tour of his new house, he can only feel that Jane has "bestowed more thought on the matter than it was worth" (437). It is clear to Jane that St John does not want things to be disturbed, and his displeasure predictably returns to matters of efficiency: "How many minutes, for instance, had I devoted to studying the arrangement of this very room?" (437-8). And of course, no answer will be sufficient. Jane is understandably disappointed by St John's unenthusiastic response, but his reaction also leads her to realize something about him. Earlier in the novel, Jane had praised Rochester for his "designing mind," and now, as she observes St John's indifference to the newly ornate rooms of Moor House, she reflects: "This parlour is not his sphere." St John lives a life estranged from material things, and he does not invite any alteration to their arrangement.

At the end of Jane Eyre, by contrast, Rochester is only too ready for Jane's attention to his rooms. The interior of Ferndean Manor, unlike Thornfield, is rendered with very little detail, and what is described points to Rochester's solitary and miserable condition. Jane finds her former master, now blinded and abandoned, resting his head on an "old-fashioned mantelpiece" and sitting next to a "fire burnt low in the grate" (481). As Jane, during her first meeting with St John, aligns him with the things in his parlour by remarking on his "pictorial-looking" eyes, so at the end of the novel Rochester is connected with the misery of his drawing-room: "his countenance reminded one of a lamp quenched" (386, 488). But whereas St John can only be frustrated at the time Jane has spent cleaning and redecorating Moor House, Rochester is pleased with Jane's attention to his interior space; and while St John, at the end of the novel, remains "as still as one of the dusky pictures on the wall," Jane's presence changes both Rochester and his rooms at Ferndean: "I had wakened the glow: his features beamed" (488).

In The Art of Decoration (1881), Mary Eliza Haweis confidently writes that "a room is like a picture," and the inhabitants should not be expected "to adapt themselves to their walls," but rather "their walls should be adapted to them" (10, 23). In Villette, however, Lucy Snowe does not have the freedom to arrange the rooms that she occupies to fit her taste; whereas Jane has increasing control over the furniture that surrounds her, culminating in her redecoration of Moor House, Lucy's passivity in Villette is discernible in a repeated image: the unwanted imposition of objects that threaten the spaces that she occupies.

At the beginning of the novel the reader has only a limited sense of Lucy's interiority, and much of what we know about her is limited to her circumstances. Lucy lives with her godmother, Mrs Bretton, and Graham Bretton, her son. The house in Bretton, with its "peaceful" rooms, "well-arranged" furniture, and "clear wide" windows seems to suggest placidity, but Lucy gives no direct account of this herself. However, the upheaval which accompanies Paulina Home's arrival is in some ways an exception: her presence is signaled by a disruption of the house, unsettling the material comfort of their domestic environment and creating an alteration that Lucy immediately resents.

 The next day, on my return from a long walk, I found, as I entered
 my bed-room, an unexpected change. In addition to my own French bed
 in its shady recess, appeared in a corner a small crib, draped with
 white; and in addition to my mahogany chest of drawers, I saw a
 tiny rosewood chest. I stood still, gazed, and considered.

 "Of what are these things the signs and tokens?" I asked. (62)

At this point in Villette, it is unclear why the arrival of a visitor is treated with such caution. Since the form of Lucy's narrative is autobiographical, the events of her early life are viewed through the lens of her later experience, and her subsequent jealousy of Paulina influences the presentation of her arrival. Paulina brings with her a disruption of domestic space in the Bretton home--her furniture crowds Lucy's bedroom and occludes her view of Graham. And perhaps most interesting is the way that Lucy registers this "unexpected change": she assumes that the new pieces of furniture in her bedroom must be "signs and tokens" of something else. Rather than inferring the arrival of a guest from the change in her room, Lucy wonders what the alterations may signify, and though she is reticent about her feelings and thoughts throughout Villette, this is one of several instances in the novel where, as Tony Tanner suggests, her consciousness is discernible in her observation of the objects that surround her (14).

By the beginning of Chapter is, Lucy has left England altogether and is on vacation from Madame Beck's Pensionnat de Desmoiselles. It is difficult to precisely characterize Lucy's state of mind during this period, because she suffers from more than malaise or even profound depression--she is both unable to get away from the loneliness of her circumstances and also somehow severed from the actuality of her condition. In the culminating event of the chapter, after assuring the reader that she is "not delirious," Lucy "weak and shaking" ventures out on the Rue de Fossette, and her solitude-induced wandering, punctuated by her visit to confessional, ends abruptly with her collapse (232).

When Lucy awakes, she does not recognize the room that she is in, and she wonders if, perhaps, she has not woken up at all. The uncertain narrative of Villette makes it difficult for the reader to be any more certain of Lucy's state than she is at this point, since actuality is so often obscured in the novel, and her emotions have the power to entirely refashion her world. Lucy concludes that she cannot be in Madame Beck's pensionnat, and she begins to look around the room for a clue to where she has been brought:

 And here my eye fell on an easy chair covered with blue damask.
 Other seats, cushioned to match, dawned on me by degrees; and at
 last I took in the complete fact of a pleasant parlour, with a
 wood-fire on a clear-shining hearth, a carpet where arabesques of
 bright blue relieved a ground of shaded fawn; pale walls over which
 a slight but endless garland of azure forget-me-nots ran mazed and
 bewildered amongst myriad gold leaves and tendrils. A gilded mirror
 filled up the space between two windows, curtained aptly with blue
 damask. In this mirror I saw myself laid, not in bed, but on a
 sofa. I looked spectral; my eyes larger and more hollow, my hair
 darker than was natural, by contrast with my thin and ashen face.
 It was obvious, not only from the furniture, but from the position
 of windows, doors, and fireplace, that this was an unknown room in
 an unknown house.

 Hardly less plain was it that my brain was not yet settled; for, as
 I gazed at the blue arm-chair, it appeared to grow familiar; so did
 a certain scroll-couch, and not less so the round centre-table,
 with a blue covering, bordered with autumn-tinted foliage; and,
 above all, two little footstools with worked covers, and a small
 ebony-framed chair, of which the seat and back were also worked
 with groups of brilliant flowers on a dark ground.

 Struck with these things, I explored further. Strange to say, old
 acquaintance were all about me, and "auld lang syne" smiled out of
 every nook. (238)

In the unknown parlour the objects are anthropomorphized, so that arm-chairs, footstools, tables, and mirrors appear as "old acquaintances" greeting Lucy as she returns. In her reading of this passage, Monica Cohen emphasizes the way that Lucy is acted upon by the things that surround her: "while Lucy's eye passively falls, seats dawn on her, wallpaper runs, the blue arm-chair grows. All these objects, she protests, she 'was obliged to know ... compelled to recognize and hail"' (50). The contents of the drawing room are animated by Lucy's imagination to such an extent that they threaten to usurp her authority. Tony Tanner may well have this scene in mind when he writes of Villette that "there is a hyperdominance of things so that autonomy of human action is always in danger of being handed over to the power of objects" (14). However, it is not only that the objects which surround Lucy threaten to dominate her, but that Lucy is unsure of whether she is, in fact, awake. What Benjamin has called "phantasmagoria" of the interior is discernible in Lucy's dream-like gaze (9). When she looks in the parlour mirror, Lucy reports that she appears "spectral," and so, as the room where Lucy sits comes to life, Lucy wonders if she is not herself dead--if, perhaps, she is now the setting for a tale of objects.

Yet as Lucy scrutinizes the parlour, intent on discovering where she is located, and how she has been placed there, the objects she surveys return to their inanimate places and no longer appear to have an existence of their own:

 Of all these things I could have told the peculiarities, numbered
 the flaws or cracks, like any clairvoyante. Above all, there was a
 pair of handscreens, with elaborate pencil-drawings finished like
 line-engravings; these, my very eyes ached at beholding again,
 recalling hours when they had followed, stroke by stroke and touch
 by touch, a tedious, feeble, finical, school-girl pencil held in
 these fingers, now so skeleton like....

 Too weak to scrutinize thoroughly the mystery, I tried to settle it
 by saying that it was a mistake, a dream, a fever-fit; and yet I
 knew there could be no mistake, and that I was not sleeping, and I
 believed I was sane. I wished the room had not been so well
 lighted, that I might not so clearly have seen the little pictures,
 the ornaments, the screens, the worked chair. All these objects, as
 well as the blue damask furniture, were, in fact, precisely the
 same, in every minutest detail, with those I so well remembered,
 and which I had been so thoroughly intimate, in the drawing-room of
 my godmother's house at Bretton. Methought the apartment only was
 changed, being of different proportions and dimensions. (238-40)

The objects that Lucy sees become almost a continuation of her form, a fitting instance of Susan Stewart's insight that "the material world is a physical extension of the needs and purposes of the body" (102). Lucy finds herself strangely familiar with "every minutest detail" of the chairs, ornaments, china, and kerchiefs that adorn the room: so "thoroughly intimate," she says, that she could number the "flaws and cracks" of each object by "heart." If, as Monica Cohen has argued, when Lucy first awakes in the strange parlour the objects have a life of their own, which she can only passively observe, it seems then that as the scene progresses a change occurs: our heroine begins to find her identity inscribed in every detail of the now-dormant objects. When Lucy looks at a pair of handscreens, for instance, the "elaborate pencil drawings" cause her to remember the time she spent making them, and the tactility of her recollection--"stroke by stroke and touch and touch"--make the handscreens, really, inseparable from the hand that made them. As the objects from Mrs Bretton's parlour have imposed themselves on Lucy's consciousness from the time of her childhood, so too they have been altered by her presence: her handling, cupping, cracking, mending, and engraving forming a history of her interaction with the things in her godmother's parlour.

This is to say that Lucy is indeed awake and the objects that surround her are in fact the ones of her childhood. The furnishings from her childhood home in Bretton provide a link between her childhood "self" and Lucy as she finds herself at Madame Beck's pensionnat. In this way, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton's conclusion in The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self is relevant to Lucy's experience: they write that "objects serve the purpose of maintaining the continuity of the self as it expands through time" (100). Mrs Bretton, as Lucy shortly learns, has also moved to Brussels, and she has brought with her all of the furniture and decorations of her parlour and put them in their familiar places in her new home of La Terrasse. She and Graham had found Lucy passed out beside the church on the night of her journey and, having carried her into the drawing-room of Mrs Bretton's new house, have tended to her as she has recovered. Lucy's confusion is understandable considering the strange set of coincidences that have occurred, but for the reader her perplexed exclamation only reinforces the continuity between the furnishing of rooms and the narration of her experience: "Why hovered before my distempered vision the mere furniture, while the rooms and the locality were gone!" (241).

Throughout Villette, Lucy's vision is defined by the furniture that surrounds her, and her passive observation of the rearrangement of rooms in the novel is in many ways a fitting image of her psychological state. While the novel begins with the imposition of Paulina's small crib and rosewood chest on the otherwise tranquil interior in Bretton, and is punctuated by Lucy's bewildering experience amongst the objects of her childhood in the new home of La Terrasse, it ends with M. Paul's decoration of a new home for Lucy. As she and her benefactor tour her new place of residence they exchange almost no words at all, but Lucy's attentive eye nonetheless marks many of the comfortable features of her future house: a tiny parlour whose "delicate walls" are "tinged like a blush," a little kitchen with "bright brasses, two chairs, and a table," and a "well-scoured" and "carpetless" classroom with a "teacher's chair and table" (584-5). Lucy is told that all that she sees in the house in Faubourg Clotilde is in fact hers, and as she "caresse[s] the soft velvet" on M. Paul's cuff she effusively expresses her gratitude. In her new house Lucy will finally be given the luxury of complete control, and in this way the cozy, well-ordered rooms of her new school also promise a degree of psychological refuge. Yet, fittingly, this is a possibility that the reader can only imagine after the close of the text. Lucy does not take charge of her new house: rather, M. Paul presents her with a ready-made interior arrangement, and the reader is left to image her life there (and, famously, to decide whether M. Paul returns or not) after the end of the novel.

In their 1877 manual on interior decoration, Rhoda and Agnes Garrett offer consolation to the increasingly broad segment of their readers who employ interior designers for the furnishing of their rooms, by reassuring them that in spite of their reliance on outside assistance the decoration of their rooms will be--and should be--an intimate expression of their interior lives: "After the decorator has finished his work, even to the most careful minutiae, he has but made a frame as it were, the filling up of which must be left to the mind of the man or woman who inhabits the house. No house is satisfactory unless it bears also the impress of home, and this impress must come from within" (10-11). For Lucy Snowe as for Jane Eyre, each room appears as a bare "frame," the specific dimensions filled up by "the mind of the man or woman who inhabits the house," the chairs, curtains, mirrors, pictures, sofas, and ornaments embodying a dimension of interiority that may only be understood by those readers who choose, along with them, to gaze attentively at the furniture of their novels.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jim Adams, Laura Brown, Harry Shaw, and Charity Ketz for suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.

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Michael Klotz

Cornell University

MICHAEL KLOTZ is a PhD student in the English department at Cornell, where he is writing a dissertation (tentatively called Looking through the Room) on the relationship between the discourse of interior decoration and the domestic ideal in novels by Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Oliphant.