Jane Eyre: The Return!

[3113]

Yep! They've made yet another version of Charlotte Brontê's timeless classic, the book that created the gothic romance cliches we love and adore like plain, orphaned heroines, clinically insane, hot-blooded Spanish wives with an obsession for arson, and meeting your true love by making him fall of his horse.

It's the return of ...Jane Eyre

Only a PG-13 rating? How disappointing.

 

[ishtat]

I'm not sure that Jane Eyre was the original Gothic novel. Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho (parodied in Northanger Abbey) was fifty years sooner, but maybe Charlotte Bronte invented the first anti-hero hero in Mr Rochester.

I suspect that even today's emancipated women have a yearning for the dark soul, the barely suppressed emotional power of a Rochester... the bodice ripping moment when they surrender (willingly?), prey to their baser desires.

Or not.?

 

[3113]

I'm not sure that Jane Eyre was the original Gothic novel. Ann Radcliffes

I didn't say she created the original gothic novel. I said she created the gothic-romance novel's clichés and she did.

Mrs. Radcliffe was predated herself by Horace Walpole's Castle of Ontronto in the creation of the Gothic Genre. BUT both these authors, like Mary Shelly, simply created gothic novels with creepy castles and wicked uncles with nefarious purposes in mind. They did not infuse any of the classic "romance" elements into these novels that have since dominated modern bodice-rippers.

Like, as you say, dark-souled love interests, but also secret wives, passionate yearnings between hero-heroine that can't be fulfilled, and other little things like bumping into your "soulmate" by accident and discovering that this ill-tempered person is your employer. Also plucky heroines (not the fainting type typical of Mrs. Radcliffe's stories) who banter and argue with their ill-tempered lovers.

Credit for all that goes to Bronte and Bronte alone.

 

[Weird Harold]

Yep! They've made yet another version of Charlotte Brontê's timeless classic, ...

You know Phineas and Ferb predicted this in a June 2008 episode

 

[ishtat]

I didn't say she created the original gothic novel. I said she created the gothic-romance novel's clichés and she did.

Like, as you say, dark-souled love interests, but also secret wives, passionate yearnings between hero-heroine that can't be fulfilled, and other little things like bumping into your "soulmate" by accident and discovering that this ill-tempered person is your employer. Also plucky heroines (not the fainting type typical of Mrs. Radcliffe's stories) who banter and argue with their ill-tempered lovers.

Credit for all that goes to Bronte and Bronte alone.

Given your final observation how do you think Jane Eyre and Helen Graham (from The Tenant of Wild Fell hall) compare as heroines. I agree with your point about Charlotte's plucky heroine and it has always seemed odd to me that Charlotte Bronte objected so much to the portrayal of Helen Graham by Anne Bronte. I can never make up my mind whether Charlotte was irritated by her sister's writing or whether it stemmed from something else in their relationship.

 

[rgraham666]

I never knew she was gone.

 

[3113]

Given your final observation how do you think Jane Eyre and Helen Graham (from The Tenant of Wild Fell hall) compare as heroines. I agree with your point about Charlotte's plucky heroine and it has always seemed odd to me that Charlotte Bronte objected so much to the portrayal of Helen Graham by Anne Bronte. I can never make up my mind whether Charlotte was irritated by her sister's writing or whether it stemmed from something else in their relationship.

Wow. Talk about taking me back to obscure seminars. I had to re-read the Wiki summary to bring that book back up from the depths. Let me say, I haven't re-read it since that first, obscure time, and I'm not sure if I'm going to remember things right, but I'll give the question a stab...

There are similarities, like both heroines being artists, both being seen as the salvation of desperate men, both having impediments to marriage (i.e. a spouse in the way), and both inheriting money at the end, making their lovers feel that they are now beneath said heroine--and making said heroine completely independent at last.

Charlotte's main objection might be that her sister's book was a best seller and she didn't like the competition. But the Wiki article notes that a lot of people objected to the scenes of "debauchery" and found it coarse and brutal. Hard as it may be for us to see it, they may have viewed this as people view movies with too much sex and violence. Maybe it read as too raw, or just too much "debauchery" for debauchery's sake rather than to make a point. Or maybe it was just too real and true. Movies with very little violence, but which show that violence realistically, bother people while others with a lot more violence that is "cartoon" don't. So maybe Anne's scenes of life with men drunk and bad tempered were too true for comfort.

Charlotte references Mr. Rochester's debauched past, but never shows him being debauched. In Jane Eyre, as in a Greek tragedy, the violence happens off stage and we hear about it, we don't see it. And Jane, in her virtue, redeems her "brutal" man--brings out the good man that was always in him. Helen isn't able to redeem her brutal husband for all her virtue.

But I think Anne herself in her preface, where she defend herself, might give us the answer. She says that she "wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it..." I wonder if Charlotte didn't find Anne's book a criticism of her own book. As if Anne was saying, "Yours is a crazy fantasy" (which it is), "Here's what Mr. Rochesters are really like and what really happens when Jane Eyres marry them."