After a few minutes she stopped before the picture she had painted at the free government art class for school kids last winter. There was a picture of a storm on the ocean and a sea gull being dashed through the air by the wind. It was called ‘Sea Gull with Back Broken in Storm.’ The teacher had described the ocean during the first two or three lessons, and that was what nearly everybody started with. Most of the kids were like her, though, and they had never really seen the ocean with their own eyes.

That was the first picture she had done and Bill had tacked it on his wall. All the rest of her pictures were full of people. She had done some more ocean storms at first–one with an airplane crashing down and people jumping out to save themselves, and another with a trans-Atlantic liner going down and all the people trying to push and crowd into one little lifeboat.

Mick went into the closet of Bill’s room and brought out some other pictures she had done in the class–some pencil drawings, some water-colors, and one canvas with oils. They were all full of people. She had imagined a big fire on Broad Street and painted how she thought it would be. The flames were bright green and orange and Mr. Brannon’s restaurant and the First National Bank were about the only buildings left. People were lying dead in the streets and others were running for their lives. One man was in his nightshirt and a lady was trying to carry a bunch of bananas with her. Another picture was called ‘Boiler Busts in Factory,’ and men were jumping out of windows and running while a knot of kids in overalls stood scrouged together, holding the buckets of dinner they had brought to their Daddies. The oil painting was a picture of the whole town fighting on Broad Street. She never knew why she had painted this one and she couldn’t think of the right name for it. There wasn’t any fire or storm or reason you could see in the picture why all this battle was happening. But there were more people and more moving around than in any other picture. This was the best one, and it was too bad that she couldn’t think up the real name. In the back of her mind somewhere she knew what it was.

Mick put the picture back on the closet shelf. None of them were any good much. The people didn’t have any fingers and some of the arms were longer than the legs. The class had been fun, though. But she had just drawn whatever came into her head without reason–and in her heart it didn’t give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music.

This remarkable passage, quoted in full because how could I not, describes the artwork of Mick Kelly, from Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Mick has inside of her somewhere an inside room and an outside room. Everyday responsibilities, school and work, and tending her brothers, are in the outside room. Everything she cares about is in the inside room — plans for the future, music, and very very few people — only one by the end. It’s a place she can be alone with her thoughts and the things she cares about, even in a room full of people. Mick Kelly is a 13-year old tomboy who lives in rural Georgia. She’s got a few older brothers and sisters and a couple younger brothers, and her family struggles constantly to make ends meet. She goes to vocational school, which she doesn’t hate because she can use the piano there, and she dreams of a future somewhere else, in cities where she composes music and everyone wants to hear her play it. Though her dreams are quite lofty and the life of her mind is rich and wild, her reality is very different. She doesn’t have many options, and deep down she knows that.

The life of Mick’s mind is also incredibly, frighteningly, dark at times, as her drawings and paintings demonstrate. She is full of chaos and violence, but it must have grown naturally from all that she has seen and all that she has been taught as a child of poverty in the Deep South. If her drawings are an expression of her anger and dark thoughts, music is the opposite. It lifts her out of her present, it transports her, and it gives her an idea of something that can carry her away from her reality to a new and better version, in the future.

There’s always music in her mind, in her inside room, no matter what else she is doing or thinking about. “There were all kinds of music in her thoughts. Some she heard over radios, and some was in her mind already without her ever having heard it anywhere.” Her family takes on boarders, and she sits on the stairs to hear the music playing on their radios. In the summer she runs through the neighborhood and lies in the grass outside the windows of people who play classical music on their radios. “There was one special fellow’s music that made her heart shrink up every time she heard it. Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.” (That’s Mozart.)

And then she discovers Beethoven. Apologies for once again quoting in full, but again, how could I not?

She only halfway listened because she wanted to walk some more and she didn’t care much what they played. Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her fist went up to her throat.

How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her–the real plain her.

She could not listen good enough to hear it all. The music boiled inside her. Which? To hang on to certain wonderful parts and think them over so that later she would not forget–or should she let go and listen to each part that came without thinking or trying to remember? Golly! The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough. Then at last the opening music came again, with all the different instruments bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart. And the first part was over.

This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms held tight around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. It might have been five minutes she listened or half the night. The second part was black-colored–a slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before. One of those horn kind of instruments played a sad and silver tune. Then the music rose up angry and with excitement underneath. And finally the black march again.

But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved the best–glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

Beethoven, famously, was deaf. And so is the only human in Mick’s inside room, Mr Singer. It would take a book’s worth of writing to discuss what Mr. Singer meant to everyone in the town, and fortunately, McCullers wrote that book. He is what many people need him to be. He is what they imagine him to be. He listens without hearing, and people assume a sort of understanding or complicity that may or may not be there. They assume that what is important to them is important to him, and for Mick, this is music. “She wondered what kind of music he heard in his mind that his ears couldn’t hear. Nobody knew. And what kind of things he would say if he could talk. Nobody knew that either.”

Mick plays the piano in the gym and pays a classmate her lunch money to teach her a few things, and she starts to copy music, and then to write songs of her own. “And she made up new music too. That was better than just copying tunes. When her hands hunted out these beautiful new sounds it was the best feeling she had ever known.” The music is always in her mind and it sustains her no matter what goes on around her. It becomes a place where she can be alone. A place of her own.

Eventually Mick’s family’s need is so great that they trick Mick into taking a job at the ten cent-store. She drops out of school and works and gets tired of standing on her feet, her face gets tired from smiling a salesgirl smile so much. She wonders what the hell good it was to have made plans, to think about music. She’s mad all the time and she doesn’t have anything to be mad at or anyone to take it out on. She doesn’t have music in her head, and she feels locked out of the inside room because she’s so tense and tired. But even in her weariness she starts to make plans to get back to the inside room. She’ll use the money from her job to make payments on the piano and she’d hide it away and if anyone tried to take it away from her she’d knock them down and give them black eyes and broken noses. Because that’s the thing about the inside room the music in our heads, nobody can take it away from us.

“But maybe it would be true about the piano and turn out O.K. Maybe she would get a chance soon. Else what the hell good had it all been–the way she felt about music and the plans she had made in the inside room? It had to be some good if anything made sense. And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good.

All right!

O.K.!

Some good.”

Moving from a Southern Gothic novel to a Victorian Gothic novel, we find Jane Eyre as a child creating a space for herself in a window nook with the curtains pulled closed around her. She has a book with her, Bewick’s History of British Birds “They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape … Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.”

Like Mick Kelly, Jane probably has never seen the ocean, either, and she is poor and has few prospects in life. She is dependent on and abused by her cousins. When she fights back, almost involuntarily, she is locked in a room alone, the red room, and becomes so frightened that she falls ill of a sort of fit. Jane, too, has a wild, dark side that is unfathomable and even frightening to those around her. And Jane, too, has a rich and vivid world in her head with which she sustains herself, and it expresses itself in imagined drawings, “That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes, or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings: I feasted instead on the spectacle of ideal drawings, which I saw in the dark; all the work of my own hands.”

Jane, too, tries to paint the world in her head, and her drawings are much like Mick Kelly’s, both in subject and in their strangeness and their darkness.

These pictures were in water-colours. 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; its 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.

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star.

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head,—a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil; a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was “the likeness of a kingly crown;” what it diademed was “the shape which shape had none.”

Jane’s employer, Mr. Rochester, asks to see the drawings, examines them closely, and then quizzes her about them. He recognizes that they took much time and some thought, and she explains that she did them during vacations at school. He asks where she found the inspiration for them, and when she says “out of my head,” he replies, “That head I see now on your shoulders? … Has it other furniture of the same kind within?” And in this phrase, it almost seems he’s seeing Jane’s mind as a room full of strange things, and perhaps she sees it so herself. We know she has spent plenty of time there, alone, throughout her lonely childhood.

He asks her if she was happy when she painted the pictures, and she replies, “I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.” She doesn’t think she executed the pictures well, she is tormented by the contrast between the idea and her handiwork, but the process was pleasurable to her, as composing songs was to Mick. She says, “In each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise.” But it is the imagining itself that is valuable, the visions and beauty and darkness and light in her mind, and the rare and precious time to devote to these imaginings.

Jane’s imagination creates a restlessness in her that sometimes makes her quiet and confined life unbearable. Like Louisa Bounderby, who also imagined more than she could express, she sees castles in the embers of the fireplace, whole burning cities. Jane rails against the expectations or opportunities for women to express themselves, a situation that had not changed that much by the time Mick Kelly was composing songs in her head.

Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Jane Eyre is a complicated book, and imagination with its discontent and even madness is at the core of that. The inside room is not always a safe and magical place, and the things created there might be monstrous rather than delightful. During Jane’s feverish time locked in the red room, when her imagination runs wild and she is seen as frightening, difficult, even dangerous, she is locked up for her own good and the safety of others around her. This mirrors the dark secret Jane will discover at the climax of the novel, when she learns that Mr. Rochester has a wife, Bertha, locked in a room in his attic. Bertha is deemed mad, dangerous, wild, violent, and a danger to herself and others, just as Jane was as a child. Her only way out of the inside room is to burn the whole thing down. Bertha creates a true burning castle and turns the grand house to embers. This should turn Mr. Rochester into a horrific villain, but somehow it does not.

Mr. Rochester is a deeply flawed, fascinating, and appealing character. And that is the point. He is a character, he is a figment of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, just as Jane’s and Mick’s paintings are creations of theirs, as full of darkness, as far from perfection. Despite his one big flaw and all of his smaller foibles, Mr. Rochester is exactly what Jane needs. Brontë has given her this gift. He recognizes that she has an inner room and he is fascinated by what goes on there. As he reads her face he imagines her saying, “I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld.” He loves her for her strangeness and her wildness. He values her vision and her imagination.

Brontë has given Jane a rich man who can offer her a house full of rooms, rooms with beautiful views. She doesn’t need to work. She can spend the whole day painting, wandering, imagining. She is not held back by dull cares and responsibilities.

And most importantly, Brontë has given Jane someone to talk with. Someone who is glad to discover the worlds in her head and to share those in his as well. He has offered her, “every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in,—with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind.” He feeds her imagination with tales of all he has seen in his many travels, “It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways … and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion.” And he lives in her imagination because she has created him, too, he is what she needs him to be. “I walked a little while on the pavement after tea, thinking of you; and I beheld you in imagination so near me, I scarcely missed your actual presence.”

Jane has company in her inside room, and a person to venture out of it with, to make the whole world an inside room. She is not lonely, but she has space for her thoughts and imaginings. “To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long.” Carson McCullers was not as kind to Mick Kelly as Charlotte Brontë was to Jane Eyre. But she has given her strength and a ragged sense of hope. She has given her beautiful music in her head that nobody can ever completely take away from her.

And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good.

All right!

O.K.!

Some good.