Jane Eyre

Do the paintings made by jane have any significance or meaning in the novel?

for examples the paintings she showed to Mr.Rochester when she first came to Thornfield?

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When Jane becomes a governess at Thornfield, Rochester takes interest in three watercolor imaginative landscapes she painted while at Lowood school. They reveal her great awareness for dreams. Jane describes the drawings as visions of her "spiritual eye" and notes, "The subjects had indeed risen vividly on my mind" . Rochester declares, "I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist's dreamland while you blent and arranged these" .

The first painting shows a ship's mast a bare hand, and a bracelet rising out of a turbulent green sea. The second painting is of a wind-rustled hill below a night sky in which a cosmic female form is visible. The third is a monumental bleak human head rising out of the ocean, supported by hands and resting on an iceberg. Adams argues that the pictures represent the scope of Jane's unconscious life. In the first two, the mast, arm, and the hill are Jane's consciousness, while the submerged ship and body and the faint cosmic woman are her consciousness. The third image, "depicts the ice-bound landscape of Jane's despair". Jane's dream art may thus reveal the extent of her suppressed, passionate, unconscious. Please look at the source-link below for this excerpt.

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http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/gordon15.html