‘…What Sort of Face It Was to Be, I Did Not Care or Know…’: Jane Eyre and the Self-Creating Portrait

Abstract

Abstract Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a highly visual novel as Jane creates art, describes her artwork, and engages the reader in these acts of descriptive creation. While most critical scholarship has focused on Jane as an artist, the role of artwork beyond the artist, particularly the portrait of Mr. Rochester, has been largely unexamined. The unnamed portrait of Rochester is unique because it does not depend only on the artist; rather, as I argue here, the portrait is a self-creating object within the text. This act of self-creation de-centres the human figures of both Jane and the reader, upending the traditional nineteenth-century subject-object relationship, and focusing instead on the generative relationship necessary between narrator, reader, and portrait to create and perceive fictional matter.