Bite · 3 min
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847
Ninety years before Bourgeois built a room out of salvaged doors, Brontë built one out of furniture and left a child inside it.
Two chapters into Jane Eyre, a ten-year-old is locked in a room as a punishment. Brontë spends an unusual amount of the scene on the furniture: the bed with its heavy pillars and deep red hangings, the crimson cloth, the pale counterpane, the wardrobe, the looking-glass, the cold hearth. It reads like an inventory because it is one. The room is being catalogued rather than described.
The reason for the inventory is that the room is not primarily a place. It is the room where the master of the house died, kept unused ever since, and Jane knows it. The furniture is not scenery — it is the sediment of somebody's death, arranged and dusted and preserved. She is not being shut in a room. She is being shut in with the past of a family that has told her she does not belong to it.
She is not being shut in a room. She is being shut in with a family's past.
What Brontë establishes, and what the whole novel then runs on, is that enclosure has a temperature. The red room is the cold version — a container that holds memory and refuses the person inside it. Later Jane will find the other kind, the enclosure that shelters. The book is careful never to confuse them, and it is careful never to pretend they are architecturally different.
It is the literary source text for what Bourgeois builds physically: a room made of somebody else's objects, which protects the family and punishes the child with the same four walls. Reading them together makes the Cells much less abstract.