‘I Never Liked Long Walks’ 107
sublimity, with a combined sense of terror and power. At the moment of the
greatest sense of inequality between Jane and her cousins, the idea of nature
off ers an idea greater than herself – sublime, dark, powerful – to which she can
attach her imagination, and which, in turn, grants her a legitimized individual-
ity, and something that is uniquely hers: the imagined images are ‘[her] own’ and
no one else’s, while nature’s ‘pale blank’ becomes imbued with personal meaning.
Th e opening of the novel enacts a relationship between Jane, nature and escape
that will become a motif. Jane will continually seek refuge in a reimagined, sub-
lime nature, until the crisis of her near-death on the moor, which returns her to
the all-too-real ‘raw twilight’ that as a child she had been so glad to avoid.^12
As she grows, Jane continues to prefer her own imaginative, sublime visions
of nature. She describes one episode in retrospect, when she shows Rochester the
paintings that she completed during her last two vacations at Lowood. She tells
Rochester how she ‘sat at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night:
the length of the midsummer days favoured my inclination to apply’. Surely this
is peculiar: Jane is spending her midsummer days – the very days when Lowood
is, according to her earlier descriptions, at its best – drawing indoors, reimagining
nature into a sublime hypernature. Strikingly, she expresses herself with paintings
that mirror the images from Bewick’s Book of Birds, with shipwrecks and lonely
arctic scenes, cormorants and crowns. Th e natural scenes that began as Jane’s
reading material have become a ciphered production of her self and proof of her
individuality: Rochester says that they ‘are, for a schoolgirl, peculiar’.^13
In her fi rst weeks at Th ornfi eld, too, Jane turns to her imagination acting on
nature as a method of psychological escape. She describes how she ‘longed for
a power of vision which might overpass’ the limit of the horizon, and says that
her ‘sole relief was to ... allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions
rose before it ... to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement’.^14 Similarly,
on the evening that she fi rst meets Rochester in the lane, she says that she ‘did
not like re-entering Th ornfi eld. To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation’.
Th is sense of limitation pushes Jane toward nature again; she paces outside of
Th ornfi eld, and describes the moon:
Her orb seeming to look up as she left the hilltops, from behind which she had come,
far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight-dark in its fathom-
less depth and measureless distance: and for those trembling stars that followed her
course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them.^15As when she enshrined herself in the window seat as a child, Jane turns to her
imagination acting on the natural world around her as a source for sublimity, for
‘fathomless depth and measureless distance’, and for a response that borders on
the physical: her heart heaves and her ‘veins glow’.