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Unreliable Narrator
Explanation and Analysis—Sublime Visions:
The imagery with which Jane describes her watercolor paintings in Chapter 13 emphasizes the fact that the novel is told by an unreliable narrator. The watercolors represent landscapes Jane has tried to recreate through the filter of her imagination:
The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam[.]
The vivid imagery here is similar to that which the narrator often uses to describe landscapes themselves. If Jane were to visit the seaside during the course of the novel, it is easy to imagine a passage describing "low and livid" clouds, a "swollen sea," and strange light patterns. The narrator is the first to point out that the watercolors are "representations" of the natural world. For example, she has tried to inject the clouds with a sense that they are "livid." This is the feeling Jane projected onto the clouds when she saw them, and it helped her to paint them as she saw them, not necessarily as they were. Because of the similarity between the paintings and the narrator's descriptions of landscapes, the idea of painting as representation draws attention to the fact that throughout the entire novel, the narrator is representing her story. As with a painting, it is impossible to deliver an exact and objective copy of reality.
All narrators are "unreliable" in that they always represent events in their own language. Jane (both the character and the narrator) begins to look more unreliable as she continues describing the painting:
[I]ts beak held 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. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.
Jane's watercolor builds a fantastical horror plot into the landscape: the bird has stolen a bracelet off the arm of a drowning corpse. It seems unlikely that Jane actually witnessed this event. If she did, the gold bracelet would likely have appeared with less "glittering distinctness" than Jane renders here. She makes the bracelet the focal point in order to draw the viewer's attention to the innate horror of the scene. The watercolors demonstrate that Jane is interested in the sublime and the ways in which natural scenery can terrify the viewer. Just as she distorts objective reality in the painting in order to emphasize one aspect of it, the narrator is likely distorting objective facts in order to emphasize the horror and fantasy she feels are central to her own autobiography.
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