Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel

Jessica Durgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367138943
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429639593
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman Oscar Dubourg from Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler Diggory Venn in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Yellow Face" (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911). While color has been historically viewed as suspicious and seductive in Western culture, the Victorian period constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies and the upheavals of the first avant-garde art movements result in an increase in coloring's prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. These artist-authors draw on color's traditional association with constructions of otherness to consider questions of identity and difference through the imaginative possibilities of color.

1 Purple

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

As an amateur artist as well as a novelist, Charlotte Brontë makes an excellent beginning to any investigation of color. Her childhood training in the polite arts of drawing and painting shaped and enabled her literary deployment of the controversial meanings of color in the early Victorian period. Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre (1847), was drafted in the last decade of true color exclusivity and censure before the invention of aniline dyes and paints in the 1850s sparked a color revolution, providing cheaper access to the world of color for the middle and lower classes and rehabilitating color’s role in the visual arts through the first avant-garde movements. Written on the cusp of these changes, Brontë’s novel instead documents the previous several hundred years of Western suspicions of color, which are used to control the reader’s interpretation of characters’ morality through the systematic marking and ranking of people and places through their proximity to color.

While the color most readers and scholars associate with Jane Eyre is the crimson of the infamous “red-room” (9), purple is the shade reserved by Brontë to mark Jane’s greatest rivals and the worst of sinners, coloring Blanche and Rosamond’s wardrobe and the skin of Bertha Mason. While red and purple have been historically seen as “link[ed]” both in hue and symbolism (Gage 73),¹ with each associated with power and money due to their rarity and expense, even the luxury of the expensive crimson decorating the domestic spaces of Gateshead cannot compete with the priceless Tyrian purple of the Thornfield dining room, which was from antiquity considered “the King of all Colours” (Panciroli 1: 1). This exclusive dye, the favorite of Roman emperors and Cleopatra, was manufactured by the Phoenicians from shellfish in a secret method which was lost with the storming of Constantinople in 1453 (Finlay 354).² Jane Eyre taps into this history of purple as the most luxurious dye in Western history and therefore a most dangerous color, a history that informs the shade’s use as a signifier of moral decay. Throughout the novel, color, and particularly purple, repeatedly appears only to be negatively associated with the female, the wealthy, and the Oriental. It represents immoral luxury, in the form of material goods and cosmetic beauty, and is used by author and narrator to limit the power of the novel’s upper-class women, including Blanche Ingram, Rosamond Oliver, the Reed women, and Bertha Mason. In Jane Eyre, color constitutes a semiotic system that ranks characters through artwork, clothing, and skin color.

Villain Bertha Mason resides at the bottom of the novel’s color hierarchy. In addition to comparing Bertha to a ghost, a goblin, and a wild beast, narrator Jane also describes her—twice—as being strangely purple (Jane Eyre 242, 250). Upon first catching a glimpse of Bertha in her room in the dead of night, Jane tells Rochester the next morning, “I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face.” Rochester wryly responds, “Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.” Yet Jane is adamant: “This, sir, was purple” (242). Critics have given much attention to the clear othering of Bertha, Rochester’s supposedly mad first wife, in Jane Eyre, with many outlining the racial and imperial connotations of her characterization. Yet while the novel makes many gestures towards Bertha’s racial otherness, the narrative itself falls short of declaring her to be black, halting instead at purple. This emphasis on Bertha’s unnatural skin color has received relatively little attention, perhaps because the references to Bertha’s purple face are generally assumed to be exaggerated or merely figurative. However, as Brontë demonstrates, figurative color is very useful as a narrative system, allowing the author to use color’s discursive power to reorder the world in Jane’s interest.

By analyzing the linguistic and symbolic work of color in Jane Eyre, we can see that Bertha’s purple complexion is only part of a much larger narrative color system that encompasses the gendered, racial, and imperial connotations that critics have previously outlined, while also providing an ambiguous multiplicity that allows the author to tap into the complex but indeterminate web of cultural and symbolic meanings assigned to colors in every society. Brontë’s color markers operate on several different registers throughout the novel in an attempt to convince readers that the unconventional Jane possesses the ideal combination of moral values and therefore deserves a position of social power. Deliberately and repetitively, Jane’s monochrome superiority is established through art, fashion, and skin color while being consistently contrasted against the colorful, decadent, and degenerate characters of the upper classes. Ultimately, this color system creates a hierarchy of characters that operates primarily to redistribute power in the novel according to the new gender, class, and racial hierarchies favored by Brontë and her alter ego Jane Eyre.

Color and Art

One of the primary ways in which Jane is able to participate in the joys of color is through her artwork. Unlike the wealthier characters that she encounters, Jane has little access to the world of decorative color in the form of bright clothing or ornamental furnishings. However, Jane is able to take pleasure in artistic color, because, like her author before her, she has been educated in the expected feminine accomplishments and excels in drawing and painting. Jane’s art becomes a lens through which she sees and understands the world, and she often applies the lessons of her artistic training to the world around her.³ Therefore, it is not surprising that despite Jane’s attraction to color, her narrative often emulates the art world’s low estimation of color, which can be traced back to the classical preference of line (disegno) over color (colore) in artistic creation. The Renaissance’s devaluing of color was further exaggerated by the events of Protestant Reformation, which launched a “war against images” in the sixteenth century (Pastoureau 100). The Reformation’s iconoclasm was accompanied by what historian Michel Pastoureau refers to as a “chromoclasm” that viewed color as representative of “luxury, artifice, and illusion” (100, 107). Pastoureau finds negative portrayals of color “repeated over and over” throughout European history; the message is that color “is vain because it is mere matter; dangerous, because it deviates from the true and good; blameworthy, because it seduces and deceives” (107). Combined, these artistic and religious censures of color reflect what David Batchelor identifies as a wide-scale prejudice against color in Western culture. He writes, “This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia” (22). Brontë’s use of color in Jane Eyre largely reflects this Western suspicion of color, yet her depictions of Jane’s artwork also illustrate a desire for the imaginative possibilities of color, or “chromophilia” (Batchelor 71). As the narrator of her own story, Jane indulges in color through her art but avoids the association of her self with color. Instead, her narrative assigns the moral censure of color to those female characters with whom she must compete for male companionship and financial security while reserving the moral and artistic high ground, that of the monochrome, for herself.

This mixed treatment of color in Jane Eyre most likely reflects the limited artistic training that the author and her sisters received in their youth. Although Brontë, like her brother Branwell, entertained ambitions of becoming a professional artist, she received the conventional and insufficient artistic education designed to fit girls for polite society. While Branwell had a private tutor and was apprenticed to a Leeds portraitist, Charlotte and her sisters were largely limited to the instruction they received at Cowan Bridge and Roe Head schools as children and from teaching themselves from drawing manuals. At that time, drawing manuals—especially those aimed at women—often emphasized copying professional works in order to master drawing, rather than encouraging artistic creativity or personal expression. They promoted “progressive lessons” in the use of materials, recommending that students begin working with pencil before moving on to ink, sepia, and last, to color (Alexander and Sellars 45). Brontë’s artwork from Roe Head illustrates that she adhered to this strict pattern in her youth, not even advancing as far as sepia during her schooldays (45). As a result, though Brontë owned and used watercolors, she would have had very little access to any formal training in the medium.⁴

The Brontë women would also have had little recourse to studying coloring in professional artwork because of the family’s limited means and isolated location in Yorkshire. As Alexander and Sellars establish, “until they went to London [as adults], the Brontës’ experience of great art had been second-hand . . . [they] knew of the leading artists of the day—Lawrence, Turner, Landseer, Fuseli, Martin, Etty and others—but had never actually seen their works” (24–25). With the exception of attending The Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts exhibition in Leeds in 1834, which was their “first taste of professional painting” (25), the Brontë women would have had to rely on viewing engravings of famous paintings, which were commonly produced in black and white. When these engravings were decorated with color, it was added by hand to important elements of the composition after the printing process and did not represent the original artwork’s color scheme or shading. Theoretical discussions of painting techniques were more widely available, but they also downplayed the importance of color in art. For instance, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s popular Discourses—a late eighteenth-century text that was “still the bible of academic English art practice” in the mid-nineteenth century (Dolin 8)—recommended that artists avoid “a variety of tints” and instead favor the “quietness and simplicity” produced by subtle and “uniform” coloring (Reynolds 121). The devaluation of coloring was so common in the first half of the nineteenth century that the color-maker George Field’s treatise Chromatography, or, A Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of Their Powers in Painting &c., was met with public ridicule in 1835. Linda M. Shires quotes “A damning Athenaeum review” by George Darley: “We consider the whole of Mr. F’s harangue upon this subject, as a most unwise pandering to the public taste for that gay lady—Colour. Instead of the first, colouring is the very last among the great requisites. Expression, design, invention, are all before it” (2).

Charlotte Brontë’s own artwork largely reflects this academic viewpoint as it favors drawing over coloring and copying over invention. Her only two known exhibited works were pencil copies of published engravings of local landmarks, entitled “Bolton Abbey” and “Kirkstall Abbey,” which were displayed at the Leeds exhibition. Her extant colored works also illustrate a dependence on copying. For instance, the Brontës owned a hand-colored edition of Robert Montgomery’s The Sacred Annual, from which Charlotte produced a watercolor copy of A. B. Clayton’s “The Atheist Viewing the Dead Body of his Wife.” Her “copy is particularly faithful to the original” lithograph (Alexander and Sellars 243), indicating that she either did not feel able to or did not desire to color freely according to her own inclination. It is not surprising, therefore, that Brontë’s descriptions of her heroine’s art would betray an interest in the imaginative color denied to the author, while also reflecting the low valuation of color common in artistic education.

This conflicted understanding of color is visible in the description provided of Jane’s portfolio paintings, three of which receive extensive treatment in the novel. These watercolors, which Jane produces at Lowood and later displays at Rochester’s request, feature rich dark color schemes and are heavily influenced by the “apocalyptic sublime” and “orientalist exoticism” of Romantic art (Kromm 379–80). Jane Kromm explains that each painting features a “disturbing . . . dead, fragmented, or cropped figure” (380), combined with a seascape, landscape, or polarscape. The backgrounds of these watercolors are heavily dominated by green and blue, the colors of nature favored by the German Romantics (Pastoureau 132), with the first painting consisting of a cormorant, a bracelet, and dead arm dominated by a sea of “green water,” and the second of a woman’s bust, pictured over a grassy hill in an “expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight” (Brontë, Jane Eyre 107). The last provides the sharp contrast of the white polar landscape with the black Oriental elements of the “sable veil” and “turban” of a colossal head, but color resides here as well, in the “muster of northern lights [that] reared their dim lances” in the sky above (107). The colorful, inventive nature of these paintings, so unlike the art produced by Brontë herself,⁵ illustrates that Jane’s imagination expresses itself in both form and color.

Yet the pleasure of color in these paintings is a guilty pleasure for Jane, who justifies her use of color through the painting’s Eastern elements. The figures, in particular, are associated with “the exotic eastern accouterments, the turbans, jewels, diadems, and diaphanous dresses” of the Orientalist genre (Kromm 379). Jane’s narrative description of these elements emphasizes their exquisite coloring, as Jane depicts “a gold bracelet, set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart” (107). Yet the “brilliant” color in the painting, however pleasing, also constitutes an accusation of luxury, as the colorful bracelet, in the beak of a cormorant, has been plucked from the disembodied arm of a drowned woman. The corpse’s bracelet, a beautiful ornament in life, is shown to be worthless in her death, where only the spirit maintains value. Likewise, in the next painting, Jane has outlined a “woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine” (107). The woman, alluded to by Jane as “the Evening Star,” is also Orientalized by her “dark and wild” eyes and “stream[ing]” hair (107); while beautiful, she is also condemned for her sensuality, argues Kromm, as her features invoke both “ecstasy” and “madness” (381).⁶ This approach of associating color with Oriental wealth and sensuality allows Jane to take pleasure in color through her art while recognizing and distancing herself from its socially censurable qualities.

Jane negotiates the binary between chromophobia and chromophilia by displacing the desire for color onto other women, from the drowned owner of the bejeweled bracelet to the Evening Star, while asserting a monochrome morality for herself, the self-described “plain, Quakerish” Jane who dresses in black and gray (220). This pattern of linking color to a lack of morality is repeated throughout the narrative and applied to its characters: Blanche Ingram, a rival for Rochester’s affections, and Rosamond Oliver, a love interest of St. John Rivers, are associated with color, not only in the narrative description of their dress and manners but also in the portraits of both that Jane paints. Jane executes vibrant, lavishly colored portraits of her rivals (and class superiors) Blanche and Rosamond while sketching herself and her lover Rochester in monochromatic restraint. The extensive use of color in the paintings gives Jane a vicarious pleasure but also suggests a luxurious sensuality that she enjoys denouncing in her more well-to-do rivals.

One of these privileged rivals is Rosamond Oliver, the young heiress at Morton, who is described by Jane as possessing “a face of perfect beauty” (309). In Jane’s description, Rosamond’s beauty derives from her colorful complexion, a combination of the “pure hues of rose and lily” (309). Jane comments that the pale coloring of Rosamond’s skin “adds such repose to the livelier beauties of tint and ray” to be found in her rosy cheeks, “ruddy” lips, and “dark” eyes (309). When asked to paint Rosamond’s portrait, Jane reports that she “felt a thrill of artist-delight at the idea of copying from so perfect and radiant a model” (314). In her excitement, Jane quickly completes the initial sketching of Rosamond’s miniature, but postpones the coloring process, telling the reader, “I promised myself the pleasure of colouring it” later (314). On the next school holiday, Jane indulges herself by coloring the portrait:

[I] fell to the more soothing . . . occupation, of completing Rosamond Oliver’s miniature . . . there was but the background to tint and the drapery to shade off; a touch of carmine, too, to add to the ripe lips—a soft curl here and there to the tresses—a deeper tinge to the shadow of the lash under the azured eyelid. I was absorbed in the execution of these nice details. (315)

The great joy that Jane takes in painting the miniature of Rosamond has been noted by critics; for instance, Mary A. Armstrong comments on “the revealing repetition of the word ‘pleasure’ that surrounds the process” of producing the painting (119). Armstrong reads this scene as representative of the “female homoerotic gaze” (120); it also illustrates Jane’s sensual connection to the feminine aspects of color. The “thrill of artist-delight” that Jane finds in painting Rosamond is actually the joy of painting Rosamond’s colors (Brontë, Jane Eyre 314).

Rosamond is the vehicle for color in Jane’s artwork, but she does not fare well in the exchange, as Jane also uses color as a weapon to undermine Rosamond’s wealth and beauty. Jane’s painting associates Rosamond not only with color but also with the cosmetic. The mention of her “carmine” lips and “azured eyelid” combines the artistic discussion of Jane’s paint box with the luxurious and false colors of cosmetics (316).⁷ Jacqueline Lichtenstein explains that ever since Plato equated cosmetics with the lie,⁸ Western civilization has been the heir of a “righteous alliance” of “moral puritanism and aesthetic austerity” that aligns the “colorless” with that which is “true, beautiful, and good” (42), leaving color and the cosmetic to be negatively associated with surface and artifice. By referencing Rosamond’s carmine and azure features, Jane implies that the colorful Rosamond possesses an artificial and therefore surface-level beauty that contrasts unfavorably with Jane’s spiritual depth. Jane’s accusation of color is reinforced by her description of Rosamond just a couple pages before as a “coquettish,” “vain,” “unthinking,” and “not profoundly interesting” girl, comparable to the young and vapid Adèle Varens (Brontë, Jane Eyre 313–14). Jane’s harsh assessment of Rosamond’s character, combined with the moral accusation of cosmetic color, emphasizes tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Purple: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
• 2 Blue: Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch
• 3 Red: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native
• 4 Yellow: Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Yellow Face” and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
• Conclusion
• Index