I recently read an article, "Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's Weather Wisdom." in PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association of America) by Justine Pizzo.
Pizzo points out Bronte's fascination or knowledge of the weather and lunar influences which Bronte references many times throughout the novel, Jane Eyre. (The following is a synopsis of that article.)
In 1840 meteorology was formally officiated as a discipline and academically the practice would include the act of observing, measuring, and analyzing the weather, all of which was central to the Victorian's fascination with weather. Prior to and during this time, "Victorian meteorology centered on the forms of folkloric knowledge about the weather....(until) the British Meteorological Society (est. 1850) began to espouse more empirical approaches." (Pizzo, p 86).
An innate ability to "predict" weather phenomena or intuitively respond to it, as depicted in Jane Eyre, was considered a form of "weather wisdom." For example, when someone "knows" it is going to rain because "they can feel it in their bones" is symbolic of "weather wisdom." But Charlotte Bronte takes it a step further in her novel Jane Eyre by citing the moon as a form of female physiological response to the climatic changes. Moreover, she references the wind and thunderstorms in sort of a clairvoyant way. In the following passage where Jane Eyre shares a moment of female camaraderie with her friend, Helen "where Jane participates in a physical exchange that the celestial body of the moon oversees":
Resting my head on Helen's shoulder, I put my
arms around her waist: She drew me to her, and
we reposed in silence. We had not sat as long thus,
when another person came in. Some heavy clouds,
swept from the sky by a rising wind, had left the
moon bare; and her light, streaming in through the
window near, shone full both on us and on the
approaching figure, which we at once recognized
as Miss Temple.
According to Pizzo, Jane associates the "rising wind that parts the clouds with the feminine body of the moon and 'her light...streaming in through the window'. The moon appears to orchestrate both the movements of the changeable air and the embodied experience shared by the girls."
Charlotte Bronte as "lunarist," is something that "meteorologists dedicated to proving that the moon controlled the weather, (was) upheld throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century." (pp 90-91)
In another passage in which Jane Eyre "describes as a 'mysterious summons'":
I contended with my inward dimness of a vision,
before which clouds yet rolled....My heart beat faster
and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an
inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through....The feeling
was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp,
as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their
utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor....my powers
were in play and in force.
Pizzo believes in this scene "Jane's physical and psychological continuity with the atmosphere extends her meteorologically inspired authorial sensibility to an embodied omniscience....Jane Eyre's transitory omniscience- 'that mysterious summons' - comes from her unclouded 'inward vision.' Inner and atmospheric knowledge are productively intertwined."
Charlotte Bronte/Jane Eyre "atmospheric sensitivity is expressed through a profound interest in pictorial representation." (pp 94-95) Indicated in the following passage is Jane Eyre's transformation from girl to woman, where the moon is personified as a "celestial female body" in her paintings which she shares with Mr. Rochester, below is a passage pertaining to one of the paintings:
Beyond and above spread an expanse of the sky,
dark-blue as twilight: rising into the sky, was
a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints
as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim
forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments
below were seen as through the suffusion of vapor:
the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy,
like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail.
On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight;
the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds
from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star.
The woman's shape personified and the atmosphere surrounding it, "effectively blends the female body with its thrilling, turbulent atmosphere." This particular painting might reference Venus (the goddess of love). "The 'pale reflection like moonlight' on the neck of this figure also evinces its alliance with lunar agency. The lack of division between Jane's diverse imaginings of gendered figuration and their atmospheric context disclose her autobiography's similar pairing of womanly incarnation and celestial authority."
As Jane reflects on her art, she insists "the result of her interpreting the creative force as something beyond her power to control." Bronte prefaces this as "atmospheric inspiration that enable artistic production....in visual terms, the complex relation between atmosphere and the female body" reflects the meteorological influence on the body, something scientists had formerly considered a form of "lunacy," pardon the pun. But sensitivity to climatic and lunar changes, and the changing of the ocean tides, has since been validated by quantitative science and is now acknowledged.
Jayne Lewis's research on "ephemerarality of air does not so much invite an analogy with the human body as mediate between folkloric beliefs in the spiritual contents of atmosphere and emerging models of Enlightenment reason...." Thomas Laycock, one of the founders of modern neurology wrote in his Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women (1840) that the atmosphere did have an effect on nervous people. (pp 84 and 89)
Work Cited: Pizzo, Justine. Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's Weather Wisdom. Publication of the Modern Language Association of America. (2016): 84-100. Print.
Image: Found online