‘I Never Liked Long Walks’ 105
undercut, however, and what had seemed like Jane’s opportunity to assert her
individualism is neatly inverted, when her movement toward nature results in
the near-annihilation of her physical self.
Th is account runs counter to other critical analyses of the power dynamics of
Jane’s narration. Doris Y. Kadish argues that Jane’s fi rst-person narration shows
her taking control of her story through her descriptions of landscapes, with
which Jane can both revolt against entrenched powers and defi ne herself as she
likes. Kadish writes that through the power of her narrative, Jane ‘with nature
can replace masters with a benefi cent, comforting mother’, and that
not only is she free as a bird, she is free to conceive of the symbolic values of objects
in nature such as birds as she chooses, regardless of whether they have been used and
interpreted by others before her in diff erent ways.^7While I agree that Jane’s nature descriptions are a bid for psychological inde-
pendence, I suggest that Jane’s subsequent physical suff erings in nature do much
to overturn this narrative of freedom-through-description. Although Jane goes
to sleep in the arms of a benefi cent natural mother, she awakes to ‘pale and bare’
want, and the sure knowledge that she is no bird.^8 Jane’s near-death in a real, hos-
tile landscape challenges her naturalist self-construction, suggesting that there
can be no durable identity granted by a sublime landscape when one is dying of
exposure to the elements.
Further complicating this landscape narrative is that the novel’s sublime land-
scape is not simply overturned, but turned into something else: a rural economic
landscape.^9 Even the sublime landscape, as it turns out, is not exempt from the
powerful social institutions of wealth and gender. Jacqueline M. Labbe has writ-
ten on the gendering of the sublime landscape, noting that the concept of gazing
out over a landscape implies a privileged, masculine viewpoint, with some sense
of ownership or control over the prospect.^10 Women, with their lack of power
or proprietorship, are more likely to be part of a landscape than observers of it
- more likely to be observed than observers. In Jane Eyre, it is Jane’s very destitu-
tion that turns the landscape from a sublime one into an economic one, and her
poverty is particularly gendered: her inability to fi nd work is due to suspicions
attached to her as a young , isolated woman. Th e sublime landscape on which she
hoped to build an identity turns out to be a social, economic landscape, and the
real threat to her well-being is not the icy shores or dark forests of her imagination,
but something much more banal: her inability to fi nd work in or near the rural
town of Morton. Such a reading of the landscape might also usefully complicate
criticism of Jane Eyre as Bildungsroman, another major area of critical inquiry. If
the typical young man of the Bildungsroman nearly died of exposure three days
aft er fi rst walking out the door alone, the genre would presumably have a very
diff erent cast to it.^11 Jane’s time in Whitcross and Morton moves her swift ly from