Showing posts with label Jane Eyre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Eyre. Show all posts

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: JANE EYRE, A WOMAN OF WILL AND RESILIENCE

 

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: JANE EYRE, A WOMAN OF WILL AND RESILIENCE.

 

 

„A chance encounter“ had to be – and indeed it was. Spain, 2010. Akin to those meetings in a railway station, when eyes connect for a few seconds, both man and woman considering the possibility of eternity, a day-dream destined to vanish after a few minutes. I had to spend some days in a flat in an almost deserted urbanization, not far away from the Mediterranean coast. I could even glimpse at the peaks of the mountains of Morocco. Abandoned in a shelf, and suffocated by dust, a few books were thirsting for a reader. One of them was Jane Eyre (1847), of Charlotte Brontë (*1816-  †1855), a paperback edition.

 

“It was about time”, I said to myself, who had been procrastinating for years in his resolution to get a “better understanding” of the British femmes de lettres of the 19th century.  I submerged myself into the opening, just to find, to my utter amazement, that I could not abandon the novel until I had arrived at the last page.


 


 (Cover of the Penguin Popular Classics, left by an angel at the Church of St. John, in Berlin, Germany, on the 30th of April 2021. The cover shows a detail from Mending the Tapestry (1835) by Daniel Pasmore (the elder), in the Library at Springhill, County Londonderry.)

 

And a second “chance-encounter” had to be, as can only be expected from someone who since 2010 had been impregnated by the magic of that novel. Indeed it was. A few weeks ago, as I started thinking about a contribution on Charlotte Brontë to the blog, I wondered whether on earth did I lie that copy – or was it just left behind in Spain? An hour afterwards I went out to do some shopping and visited, as usual, the Church of St. John near dem kleinen Tiergarten. And there it was, like the transformation of water into  wine at the Wedding of Cana, according to the Gospel of John (2.3.-5.), on the very top of a pile of books deposited upon a pew outside the church: A Penguin Popular Classics[1] edition of Jane Eyre, no doubt second-hand, yet very much presentable. The miracle continued, as I noticed, once back at my flat, that the copy had been read meticulously by a German woman (no doubt, whatsoever…), with a very good level of English, as evidenced in the ample number of commentaries and summaries of the handling, mostly in English, some in German.

 

To that angel (one of many…)  sent by St. John herewith my warmest thanks.

 

Published originally in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, under the pen-name “Currer Bell”, the opus appeared in three volumes, which roughly separate the three “blocks” (chapters 1-15, 16-27, 28-38) of the novel.  The second edition (1848) was dedicated to William Makepeace Thackeray (*1811-1863), who replied “this is the greatest compliment I have ever received in my life”. It soon became a success, albeit some critical voices were raised, pointing at some “unchristian” deviances in the portrayal of intimate relations and of a young woman who was not afraid to defy conventions, at all levels. Charlotte refuted wholeheartedly those accusations in the prologue to the 1848 edition. Yet it needs only attentive reading to understand that those “defiances” are not “deviances”, rather the expression of a will to survive, which the young lady ranks as paramount within the Christian view-of-the world.

 

We do not know whether the dedication to Thackeray took place before or after he issued his dictum, Jane Eyre ought to be regarded as “the masterwork of a great genius”[2].

 

Let us use a ready-available ranking of the novel, to set up the framework for discussion, summa summarum:

 

The novel revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist’s moral and spiritual development through an intimate first person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the “first historian of the private consciousness”, and the literary ancestors of writers like Proust and Joyce.

 

The book contains elements of social criticism with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core, and it is considered by many to be ahead of the time because of Jane’s individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion and feminism. It, along with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most famous romance novels of all time.[3]

 

Let it all stand, and sound, as written, albeit to categorize anyone as being the “first historian” of “anything” remains a risky, fragile, tentative statement. Yet we need more, in particular the details about the crafty techniques implemented by the authoress in constructing such an achievement, to verify whether those accolades do hold. And whether the films version – nowadays –  do help us to better appreciate the precious raw materials which had been processed into fine art.

 

The plot.

 

Somewhere in Northern England, 1830s or 1840s…

 

Jane Eyre becomes an orphan after the death – typhus– of her parents, thus living in Gateshead Hall with the family of her maternal uncle, Mr. Reed. She is disliked, bullied and epitomised as a burden. To get rid of her, she is then sent to Lowood Institution, a school for poor and orphaned girls, where hardship would seem to be the only way of life:


During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and after their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented out stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church, but within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from severe cold; we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes, and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet.”[4]

 

 


The girls at Lowood Institution, about to break with their mugs the frozen water in their small basins, so that they could wash themselves. [5]

 

There lurks Mr. Brocklehurst, who has concocted his own handy-to-use, abridged and rustic theology, whose essence was “...the more your body suffers, the more your soul shall rejoice...” Responding to Mrs. Temple, who insisted the children could not just eat burnt-porridge and remain fasting until dinner-time, he states:

Madame, allow me an instant. You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying (…) … to His warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His divine consolation, “If ye suffer hunger, or thirst for my Sake, happy are ye”. Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt-porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls![6]

The dreaded Mr. Brocklehurst would be restrained after typhus swamped the hospice, killing dozens of girls, including Helen, Jane’s dearest companion, who died in her arms. To be read: the dialogue between the two, as Helen senses that she is to leave this world, a moving poetic monument which only a great artist could avoid making it sound too lacrimosus.[7]

Jane Eyre becomes then a teacher at Lowood Institution, and having advertised for a position as “governess”, she is invited to come to Thornfield Hall (not just a simple name...), property of Mr. Edward Rochester. She is to educate Mademoiselle Adéle Varens, ward of Mr. Rochester, de facto an unexpected “by-product” of one of his Parisian amusements.

 

It does not take long to Jane Eyre to realise that “something is aloof” in the manor-house, awkward signs during the day, strange voices and bizarre noises at night, Mr. Rochester’s bed being set on fire, not plausible as a mere accident.

Mr. Rochester exhales the allure of a Byronic landlord and world-traveller, yet it does no take long to Jane Eyre to realise that he is, in his innermost, an injured man, still bleeding scars of more than one faux pax in his life:

 

I have travelled all over the world, Miss Eye, and it is very overrated[8].

 

The dexterity of the authoress as a Flemish grand-master of portraying is very much recurrent, as in the case of the “Dowager Lady Ingram”, whose daughter is rumoured to be on her way to become Mr. Rochester’s wife, adding a fine touch of irony:

 

They were all three of the loftiest stature of woman. The dowager might be between forty and fifty: her shape was still fine; her hair (by candlelight at least); her teeth, too, were still apparently perfect. Most people would have termed her a splendid woman of her age: and so she was, no doubt, physically speaking; but then there was an expression of almost insupportable haughtiness in her bearing and countenance. She had Roman features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat like a pillar: these features appeared to me not only inflated and darkened, but even furrowed with pride; and the chin was sustained by the same principle, in a position of almost preternatural erectness. She had, likewise, a fierce and hard eye: it reminded me of Mrs Reed’s; she mouthed her words in speaking; her voice was deep, its inflections very pompous, very dogmatical – very intolerable, in short. A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity.”[9]

 

„...when eyes happen to be more explicit than words... “

 


Mr. Rochester (Toby Stephens) looking at Jane Eyre (Ruth Wilson), 2006, BBC.

 


 ...and vice-versa., shortly after she refused to accept a 50£ note, demanding only 15£ corresponding to her salary. “I read as much in your eye (beware, by the by, what you express with that organ, I am quick at interpreting its language). “[10]

 

Mr. Rochester will make a marriage proposal to Jane, unexpected by most, though anticipated by the beginning of Chapter 23:

A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour, even singly, our-wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion.[11]

 

          „...no better landscape in this world than the face of a woman in love...”


 Ruth Wilson enacting a superb, enchanting performance of Jane Eyre, in the BBC 2006 series, the morning following the marriage proposal of Mr. Rochester. 

 

As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and wondered if it were a dream (….) While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as they had beheld the found of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.[12]

 

Yet even the tiniest and the apparently just ornamental elements in this novel do have a message, for now or later:

 Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adéle came running in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.[13]

 The marriage ceremony is organised in haste, perhaps even too precipitously, with almost no invited guests.

 There was a reason:

 “Mr. Rochester cannot marry! He already has a wife...”, irrupts Mr. Briggs, “a solicitor of_____ Street, London“.

 


            (2006) BBC, Mr. Rochester and Jane Eye, frozen by the fulminant irruption.

 

 


2011 [14], BBC, Jane Eye (Mia Wasikowska) and Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) under a state of shock. The priest, Mr. Wood, even more.

 

The “phantom” in the manor-house has now become a fully fleshy, bony figure, hidden in the attic, the lunatic woman whom Mr. Rochester married in the West Indies.

 There is no other option for Jane Eyre but to leave Thornfield Hall, rejecting all the alternative proposals advanced by Mr. Rochester, as they do not comply with her Christian vision of the world.

 

 Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska, BBC 2011) alone at a cross-road, which promises four roads to nowhere.

 


Whitcross is no town, not even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet, whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness.[15]

 

Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), in the 2011 BBB film version, wandering across nature, not knowing whether any future may still be possible.

 


A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the contrary direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often noticed, and wondered whether it led: thither I bent my steps. No reflection was allowed: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet so deadly sad – that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.”[16]

 

The last refuge, perhaps the only possibility of some answer:

 

Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment – not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow creatures are – none that saw me would have a kind thought or a god wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose.[17]

 

And that is the statement that confirms that we have in our hands a product of the true Romantik.

 

Unable to find any job in a hamlet, and unsuccessful at trading her handkerchief and gloves for food, she will sleep on the moor, to later arrive at the home of the clergyman St. John (what a coincidence…) Rivers and her two sisters, where she is first refused help, taken as a mad vagrant woman. St. John Rivers will intervene, giving her food and lodging. Her new life will thus begin, under still austere yet more tranquil auspices.

 

 

The Bildungsroman

 

 

A “romance novel” no doubt, as defined within the Anglo-Saxon world, depicting the relationship between a man and a woman, from which one has the right to expect an “optimistic ending”. In German and Spanish, and possibly many other languages, such a genre would be translated as a “Liebesroman” or “novela de amor”. Many would tend to equate such a definition with a “romantic novel”, but we shall reject the latter as a synonym of the former, and we will come later to the consequent discussion.

 

Jane Eyre is, above all, as has been duly noted by many, a Bildungsroman – but not only. Usually translated into English as a “coming-of-age” novel (and film), that definition does touch on some facets of the “Sich-Bilden” (the construction of “oneself”), but it does not convey the fullest meaning therewith contained. It is not only an Entwicklungsroman, which would be the equivalent of the “coming-of-age”. The world Bild emphasizes the construction of a relevant “picture” of the world—and of the individual role in it. It is a “coming-to-terms” with the world, but emphasizing the subjective will, the possibility of constructing your-own-world, yet within a religious, in this case a Christian ethical framework.

 

Jane Eyre is also a carefully conceived and craft-fully implemented thriller – perhaps one of the best in 19th century English narrative, at least from a female perspective, containing some features proper to a Gothic novel. Not a few people argued that the plot concerning the “phantom” in the castle may be considered at least a little bit too “far-fetched”. Granted, but it is not implausible, in particular for 19th century social and family structures, to have someone who had been “deprived of its senses” quasi-arrested, or at least isolated, in an attic. It starts as a thriller in the “first block” of the novel, as we do not know whether the orphan girl would survive the hardship and the bullying in her “substitute-family”, even more so in the inhumane hospice.

 

 

 

Much more: A multi-layered novel, woven with quotes and references of dozens of writers, sacred texts and artists, from the Bible to Shakespeare, from Samuel Richardson to Friedrich Schiller, et al. It is also a “romantic” novel, yet in the truest sense of Anglo-German romanticism, die Romantik, which goes beyond the intimate connaissance between a man and a woman. It implies the upgrading of the individual, of the sole soul, who can find soothing solace, and perhaps even answers, in nature. Nature to be understood herewith as the repository of God, “thither ye go”, to get balsam from the Waldeinsamkeit,  a world which will unleash – much later the indestructible passion between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, at least as cinematographically portrayed[18]. Translatable as “solitude in the woods (forest)”, the term captures the possibility of both “being alone” and “accompanied” by the trees and all the “spirits” kicking around, the latter neither elves or goblins, simply metaphors for the souls of the cherished ones, on both sides of the time-barrier.

 

It is not aleatory that Mr. Rochester categorises Jane Eyre since their first, accident-prone encounter[19], as an “elf”,  someone out of a “fairy tale, who had bewitched my horse”:[20]

 

 

A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard. She comes from the other world – from the abode of people who are dead, and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf! But I’d as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis fatuus light in a marsh. Truant! Truant![21].

 


 Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska), BBC 2011, walking through Hay Lane, just before Mr. Rochester’s horse were “to slip on the sheet of ice which glazed the causeway...”[22], and fall.

 

That is why Jane Eyre makes of a walk through the woods, or through the moorland, or in the mountains, the most reliable therapy for any turbulence of the soul, preferring, in many instances in the novel, to alight from the carriage, two or three miles before destination, in order to feel the earth underneath her shoes.  She becomes a “Waldgängerin”, a “forest-walker”, backdating a concept which a German writer in the 20th century was to engrave as the title of one of his most emblematic books[23]

 

She might be alone, but not inevitably lonely – on the contrary.

 

Jane Eyre, die Waldgängerin, the “forest-walker”, the “bonny wanderer”[24] striding from Thornfield Hall to the manor-house of Ferndean, at the end of the novel, to re-encounter Mr. Rochester. 

 

                                  (Ruth Wilson, 2006 BBC series version)

 

The films.

 

The richness of the text is such that it constituted an inexhaustible diamond-mine for movie-makers. There are least 24 film- and television-versions, since 1910, including three muted English films (1910, 1914 and 1921), and one German (1926).  Plus, a Dutch one (1958) and a Greek one (1968). Not to be forgotten, a Czech mini-series in 1972. To be noticed, a 1943 production with Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester and Jean Fontaine as Jane Eyre.

 

It is not altogether impossible that the novel of Charlotte Brontë may well the most filmed in the history of world literature. The screen cannot possible aspire to reproduce the whole constellation of quoted authors and artists, nor all the scenes and unexpected twists, but it can enhance the portrayal of nature, which is the constant “personage” of the novel in the background – and not only there. We refer in particular to the remarkable screen-recreations of 2006 and 2011.

 

Yet the films can also give a more resounding version of the dialogues.

 

The screenwriter of the 2006 film-version did a remarkable job in summarising and rewriting the first stern conversation between Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, respecting the substance of the original text (Pgs. 123-24), but adding the necessary tightness and poignancy required by the dialogues in the screen-version:

-          Where are you from?

-          Lowood Institution, Sir.

-          How long were you there?

-          Eight years, Sir.

-          I am amazed you survived. You are so small. Did they not feed you?

-          No, Sir.

-          And how do you find yourself here and not sill there?

-          I advertised, Sir.

-          Of course you did. What about your family?

-          I have none, Sir.

-          None whatsoever? Friends?

-          None, Sir.

-          None at all?

-          I had a friend once but she died a long time ago, Sir.

-          You are lucky, Miss Eyre. If you do not love another living soul, then you are never going to be disappointed.

-          Yes, Sir.

 

The legacy

 

 

There is an echoing, yet also contradictory and perhaps even ironic, message permeating the whole substratum of the novel, which becomes only explicit after coming to the end and after having taken distance from the text. Had her body and soul not been tested to the utmost during her years at the residence of her aunt, and during her first years at Lowood Institution, Jane Eyre would not have been able to survive the devastating shock of seeing the very ceremony of her marriage being torn to pieces –leading, on top, to gruesome, almost nauseating revelations.  That is a stroke of destiny that few human beings would be able to cope with.

 

The young lady who found refuge and solace on books about exotic fauna and flora, and far-away countries, who used painting as her way of reconstructing imaginary and real landscapes, and subtly positioning herself in those sceneries, and who understood that her “only true home” was nature, above all the forest, had – perhaps unconsciously – erected inside herself a thick granite wall, to protect the feeble flame of her soul, to repel the most ferocious onslaughts of the devil himself.

 

This Innerlichkeit is already striking, and augurs well, when Mr. Rochester expressed his bewildered admiration for the water-colours (“yet the drawings are, for a schoolgirl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish.[25]”), in their first meeting at Thornfield Hall. They are indeed highly symbolic:

 

“The first represented clouds, low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea, all the distance was in eclipse (…) the second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill (...)the third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky...”[26]

 

“-Where you happy when you painted these pictures? asked Mr. Rochester presently. - 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.[27]

 

The young lady had already constructed her own “worlds”, both inside and outside.

 

Jane Eyre survived, “built-herself” thanks to a bullet-proof innermost, and achieved happiness. The tragedy is that such a parcour was not to be bestowed upon the authoress of this magnificent and moving novel. Charlotte Brontë died three weeks before achieving the age of 39, with her unborn child, her health having been permanently deteriorated by the poor environment of the school she went to between 1824-25, where two of her sisters died. Thus depriving us, too early, of one of the most gifted novelists of the English language in the 19th century. But she shall not be forgotten.

 

For fifteen years after the death of Helen, Jane Eyre’s beloved friend, “her grave in Brocklebridge Churchyard was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a gray marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word: Resurgam.[28]

 

Jane Eyre was re-born and did not forget.



[1]Penguin Books, 1994.

[2]As stated in the back cover of the Penguin Popular Classics edition.

[3]Wikipedia,

[4]Pg. 62.

[5]BBC television drama serial, co-production with WGBH Boston, 2006. Screenplay by Sandy Welch, Ruth Wilson (Jane Eyre), Toby Stephens (Mr. Rochester), Lorraine Ashbourne (Mrs. Fairfax), directed by Susanna White.

[6]Pg. 65.

[7]Pgs. 82-84.

[8]Film (2006), 37:56.

[9]Pg. 191.

[10]Mr. Rochester to Miss Jane Eyre. Pg. 136-37.

[11]Pg. 246.

[12]Pg. 256.

[13]Pg. 254.

[14]BBC film,2011, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, screenplay by Moira Buffini, Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre), Michael Fassbender (Mr. Rochester), Judy Dench (Mrs. Fairfax).

[15]Pg. 319.

[16]Pg. 317.

[17]Pg. 319. Our underlying.

[18]ITV Film, 3:12:55, Victoria, 2016. Directed by Sandra Goldbacher.

[19]Pg. 112-117.

[20]Pg. 123.

[21]Pgs. 242-243.

[22]Pg. 114.

[23]Jünger, Ernst. Der Waldgang, first edition 1951.

[24]Pg. 138.

[25]Pg. 128.

[26]Pg. 127.

[27]Pg. 127.

[28]Pg. 84.

CLASSICS REVISITED

VIRGINIA WOOLF, "A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN": OR RATHER, "A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN".

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN : OR RATHER, A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN. 52 Tavistock Square, London, WC1, a pla...