Annie Kim on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: The Possibility of a Walk
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(Guest post by Annie Kim)
It’s a shameful thing for a poet to admit: I hate walking. I am what you’d call a bad walker.
Sure, Wordsworth lay blissfully on his back in an empty field, staring at clouds. Wallace Stevens composed whole poems in his head as he strolled to his job each morning at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. I, though, have never been moved by a walk to do anything other than walk faster. Why walk when you can run? Drive?
So it was with a healthy dash of chagrin that I found myself walking the neighborhood a few weeks ago. The weather wasn’t even good: a droopy, sticky mix of winter trying to be spring. I hadn’t bothered to change out of my sweatpants. Week two of quarantine. Here and there, cherry blossoms lit up the branches; somebody’s daffodils huddled close to a mailbox. The corner store, where men usually drift in and out the doorway smoking and talking, was empty, though the neon lotto sign stayed lit.
I felt like a loiterer. I felt unkempt, unbound, like a dog off its leash. Wind whistled through my open jacket. I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the occasional escape walk as a child, when the house was hot and crowded for Thanksgiving or I’d argued with my dad. A walk was the only way that a landlocked, suburban kid like me could claim a few minutes of independence free from the watchful eyes of adults.
That’s when Jane Eyre came back to me.
Charlotte Brontë’s gothic thriller of a bildungsroman had fanned the flames of my young teenaged heart like nothing else I’d read. I’ve forgotten, though, how much a simple walk could define the daily rhythms of landlocked women living nearly two hundred years before me in Victorian England.
We see it in the opening paragraph of Jane Eyre:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
What strikes me on re-reading this paragraph is how bluntly it begins. Like a pen knife slitting open an envelope. “There was,” our narrator explains, “no possibility. . .” Not, as we might expect, “there was once a smart but under-appreciated little girl named Jane.” No, the thing that exists is the impossibility of that walk. And through that one quick sentence Brontë establishes absolute control over tone. A complex one.
For starters, as we discover in the next sentence, the weather outside is frightful. For another, these daily walks don’t seem to be rejuvenating, solitary expeditions: the whole family walks as a unit. That corporate “we” asserts itself immediately in the second sentence. “We” had been wandering in the “leafless shrubbery.” We dined early in the winter if Mrs. Reed had no company. We couldn’t possibly take a walk after dinner because of the rain and wind. This short paragraph ends, as it starts, in paralysis.
Sixty-two words into her novel, Brontë has painted a miniature portrait of the family’s dynamics. Of Jane’s dead ends. Which is worse: being stuck inside with the whole family or being cast outside into all that rain? In the next paragraph, though, Jane the narrator asserts herself with a sly twist of the knife: “I was glad of it: I never liked long walks.” Walks with the family, as it turns out, are pure torture.
With this quick reversal, this inescapable conflict, Brontë primes us for the larger conflict that will drive Jane throughout the novel—swoon into the outstretched arms of powerful men like Edward Rochester and St. John Rivers, or strike out on her own, no matter how severe the storm outside might be?
. . .
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day—
My one chance for a walk came in the morning. So I left my little house at the outskirts of downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, a few minutes after nine, dressed like a runner.
But I didn’t want to run.
I wanted to walk to the first downtown light. I wanted to see the edge of town even if town itself had changed—grayed out, gone silent, like the corners of a dying TV screen. Boundaries matter when all your daily patterns start dissolving. To go outside—that, in itself, feels like doing something.
Everywhere, Nature was smiling. As I walked up the hill from my house, pale pink blossoms fell like virgin snow all around me. I was a girl at a princess party. Transfixed, I snapped a video.
Winding my way through the neighborhood, I tried to empty my mind. This is what good walkers do, right? I smelled things (horsey mulch, some blossoms, trash cans). I made myself look up at branches and count the nubs turning into leaves. When I stepped over a gigantic cabbage-looking weed bursting through a crack in the sidewalk, I tried to focus on growth, not ruin. This was all a lot of work.
What was I (not-)running from?
For one thing, I’ve been finding it hard during this quarantine to write poems. Something about being home all day, working at my day job in my usual writing spaces, all the worries mounting up (my own and others’), has changed the flavor of the water. It’s mine but not mine.
A friend recently started a project (the Enneadecameron) inspired by the current plague and asked if I’d contribute a story. I’m not a fiction writer; I’m a poet. By definition I don’t like to commit to long things, to the intricacies of plot. But as I started inventing people and the problems they had to grapple with, I found myself growing more and more cheerful. I attacked my story with gusto and finished it in a couple of days—just in time for the deadline.
The paragraph I want to share from that story (which will be published soon here) comes about halfway in. Sara, the protagonist, has basically moved in with her boyfriend, Job, after graduation. But Job’s dad, Hank, who recently quit his job as a partner at a big law firm, has moved in with them. Unexpectedly, Sara and Hank start to hit it off. It’s 2008, the start of the Great Recession.
Soon after that dinner Sara and Hank began taking walks together in the woods behind the house. He knew nothing about husbandry; she’d grown up on a farm. While they meandered along the narrow trails, Sara stooping down occasionally to point out an interesting mushroom or a fern, they’d talk about New York, London, Buenos Aires, Tokyo—all the cities he’d visited, sometimes months at a time, living in fancy hotels on his clients’ dime. She’d never been to any of them. Sometimes Hank would talk about Job’s mother, back when she was young and beautiful and they didn’t have kids yet, and about the women he’d dated since—mostly other lawyers, a museum curator, a part-time cellist. They never talked about Job. He was like a birthday card you kept propped open on a desk. You knew it was there, you saw it every day, but you never picked it up to read.
As I read this, I realize how much I long for leisurely conversations. Leisure, period.
And how much I love Henry James. Late James, the James of The Ambassadors—one of my all-time favorites—was a lover of dappled light. Things unspoken in the most intimate conversations. His portraits of Lambert Strether (an exhausted, middle-aged American suddenly dispatched to Europe) flowering in the presence of Maria Gostrey, a savvy American ex-pat who becomes his Virgil and latent love interest, are some of the most finely wrought passages I’ve ever read. Often he doesn’t give us a play-by-play rendition of their dialogue. Instead, James gives us pencil drawings: sinuously long (sometimes agonizingly long) summaries of conversations as related by Strether, weaving in and out of the words actually spoken and the realizations that are dimly forming in Strether’s consciousness. I see now that I’ve attemped a summary of my own. And that writing this particular passage made me happy.
Why? During their woodsy walks, I imagined Sara and Hank becoming slightly different people. More supple, more open. They become absorbed by memory and possibility even though they remain flawed individuals. What should be in obvious sight, the third figure—Job—has been swept off-stage, since Hank and Sara can only re-invent themselves in the warm, dappled light of their own budding relationship. And Job? Well, he needs to figure out a new path for himself, too, and he does.
. . .
Two weeks have passed since I started this essay.
I’ve been walking almost every morning since then. I always walk alone, which is the way I like it. I head out before I have to plunge into my daily mix of Zoom calls and emails. Some days I’m all business—pumping my legs, telling myself to breathe in deeply like the Von Trapp children from The Sound of Music. On others, I find it hard to drag myself back in.
But this is the point of walking, right?
To want to stay outside—good light or bad, balmy woods or punishing winter rain. For the landlocked, it’s our one chance to be elsewhere. To be that slightly different, more supple person that we know exists out there.
Annie Kim is a poet, (ex-) lawyer, and violinist. Her books are Eros, Unbroken (2020), winner of the 2019 Washington Prize, and Into the Cyclorama, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2016), a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Best Poetry Book of the Year. Kim’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Four Way Review, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Plume and Pleiades. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service. She teaches poetry and legal writing, and writes micro book reviews for DMQ Review. Read more about Annie and her work at anniekim.net.