The Brontë family is one
of the most celebrated collection of writers that English literature has to
offer. During the mid 19th century, three sisters embarked on a
writing spree that resulted in the
arrival of a number of classics that have been, time and again, held up as
masterpieces of writing; Jane Eyre from
Charlotte, Wuthering Heights from Emily,
and Anne – something of the Lepidus of the Brontës – wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall. I have time again voiced my apprehension and dislike for
Victorian literature, a prejudice based not insignificantly on the fact that I
was subjected to Jane Eyre at school,
and hated just about every moment I was forced to devote thought and energy
towards this long, dreary book.
Let me say, first of all, how deeply I apologise to
Charlotte Brontë for ever thinking such things about her excellent novel.
I suspect that now I have a greater understanding and
appreciation for the English language, I am better able to get to grips with Jane Eyre and see it for what it is
truly worth – a heck of a lot. The Victorian prose no longer seems stuffy and
overpowering, the characters no longer strange and lacking humanity, and the
story no longer tedious and dull. And compared to Pride and Prejudice it now feels fresh and abounding with life,
filled with countless separate moments of genius, and fully accessible to a
reader of not especially great intelligence such as myself. Yes it deserves to
be read in this day and age, and I hope it will survive long into the future.
The story concerns... you guessed it: Jane Eyre herself, a
young woman trying to make her way in the world of 19th century
Britain. Orphaned as a baby, she begins the novel as a 10 year old living under
the watch of her vindictive aunt Reed, who thinks nothing of inflicting
psychological torture on a helpless child. Packed off to an unhygienic boarding
school of Lowood, Jane is one of the children lucky enough to not die of
illness during her time as pupil, and after a few years go by she sets out on
her own in order to ply the trade of governess – a live-in tutor for the children
of those who want to pay for her service. Her first job lands her at
Thornfield, the domain of the curious Mr. Rochester, and the story proceeds
from there – a story of love, heartache, lunacy, secrets, tragedy, mystery and
providence, with a side-order of religious zealotry.
What makes Jane Eyre such
a good book – something that long ago once put me off the whole thing – is the
sheer weight of the prose used. It’s very Victorian; old fashioned, packed to
bursting with lots of lovely words, sentences that run on for whole paragraphs,
and liberal uses of punctuation (especially the semi-colon, for which I have
never seen it so handsomely and so often used).
Of course I cannot possibly hope to convey the skill of a
writer such as Charlotte Brontë in so few words, and so as to not risk reproducing
large quantities of the book itself – something that would have to be done in
order to satisfactorily quote from any part of Jane Eyre – we must abandon this train of thought before we find
ourselves having long-since missed our station. It’s good – intelligent,
elegant, communicative. Unlike Jane Austen who seems to use about five times as
much language as is strictly necessary, an approach I feel is more designed to
show off education and ability more than anything, Brontë only uses about two
or three times more language than needed – and always to great effect. She
instead tries to write something fluid, something that requires a bit of effort
to get through but should not bog down the reader; something to entertain and
engage rather than to merely impress. At least that’s the way it seems to me.
My thoughts on Pride and Prejudice are
still recorded in one of my previous reviews should you wish to pick any bones,
and just for the record I consider Jane
Eyre to be its superior in every way. Give me a Brontë to read, not an
Austen.
One of the most apparent aspects by which Jane Eyre is an improvement over Pride and Prejudice is the protagonist. Whereas
the story of Georgian courtship rituals struggled to establish anything that
could be considered a character, our tale of a Victorian governess begins off
the bat by making the right choices. One of the best ways for a character to
gain the attention of a reader is to call for sympathy; and nothing calls for
sympathy more than by seeing really awful things to happen to them as a child.
Jane herself begins life as an orphan whose guardian, aunt Reed, truly despises
her for the basic crime of existing; her older cousin John is a sadistic tormenter
who has been given free rein to bully her, and Jane’s one attempt to defend
herself – when her health and very life were at risk to John’s brutality –
results in nothing less than psychological torture as punishment. Lowood
school, where Jane is sent not long after this opening incident, is likewise a
dreadful place for a child – although I got the impression that Jane, despite
the malnutrition, the cold, the lack of hygiene, the enforced humiliations; at
least preferred this place to living under aunt Reed’s roof. The Jane who
eventually emerges from all this years later is one that is very difficult not
to sympathise with, one whom we see is talented, clever and self-assured, and
we can happily follow her through all the subsequent chapters as she faces the
challenges of Thornwood and beyond. A section I particularly like, one where
Jane’s glibness is on full display, is when she finds herself in the company of
a Gipsy soothsayer who desires to read her fortune:
“ ...her eye confronted
me at once, with a bold and direct gaze.
‘Well, and you want your fortune
told?’ she said in a voice as decided as her glance, as harsh as her features.
‘I don’t care about it, mother; you
may please yourself: but I ought to warn you, I have no faith.’
‘It’s like your impudence to say so: I
expected it of you; I heard it in your step as you crossed the threshold.’
‘Did you? You’ve a quick ear.’
‘I have; and a quick eye, and a quick
brain.’
‘You need them all in your trade.’
‘I do; especially when I’ve customers like
you to deal with. Why don’t you tremble?’
‘I’m not cold.’
‘Why don’t you turn pale?’
‘I am not sick.’
‘Why don’t you consult my art?’
‘I’m not silly.’
The old crone ‘nichered’, a laugh
under her bonnet and bandage: she then drew out a short black pipe, and
lighting it, began to smoke. Having indulged a while in this sedative, she
raised her bent body, took the pipe from her lips, and while gazing steadily at
the fire, said very deliberately: -
‘You are cold; you are sick; and you
are silly.’
‘Prove it,’ I rejoined. ”
[Excerpt, pp.227-228]
Our supporting character, Mr. Rochester, is certainly an interesting
choice to pair her against – one whom I might say is a hundred times more
noteworthy than Pride and Prejudice’s
Mr. Darcy. Rochester’s much darker nature is an excellent contrast to Jane, and
it’s quite clear that the main reason he’s attracted to her is because she is
able and willing to talk back to him, and can hold her own against his mental
sparring. That both he and Jane are made out to be not especially attractive is
an unusual choice in such a genre; whereas both sides would normally have to be
noticeably pretty or handsome in order to appeal to one-another, and whereas Pride and Prejudice makes it plain that
money accounts for everything where love is concerned, here we have a romance
sparked purely by the intellects of both parties. Rochester falls off his horse
for this mere governess because this mere
governess is Jane Eyre, not just any girl who wanders into his life. A
decent proportion of the book is taken up by their dialogue, their unending
back-and-forth that can go on for page after page after page, and it always
took a while for it to start becoming tiresome. Likewise, while the characters
feed off one another, the plot is driven by Mr. Rochester’s mysterious past and
the regiment of skeletons in his closet, and it takes a great deal of time for
the whole story to come out and for the whole back-story to make sense – though
the number of times Rochester alludes to said skeletons in said closet during
conversation with Jane, it makes me wonder if he was really quite so keen on
absolute secrecy as he’s made out to be.
One last character to dissect, a guy who fills up the last quarter
of the book, is a certain Mr. St. John Rivers (St. John, a strange and tricksy
first name which is not pronounced ‘Saint John’ as logic would dictate, but is
apparently said as ‘Sinjin’). Due to circumstances which have driven her from
Mr. Rochester’s company, Jane finds herself in the care of the priest St. John
and his sisters, and what a strange turn the novel takes at this point. St.
John is basically an example of when religious belief is taken way too far.
He’s presented as a good man, devoted to his practical work as a Christian, but
he is unable to enjoy or appreciate life or his fellow human beings. His eyes
are ever focused on God, and considering that God is a little less solid than
the members of his own family whom he purports to care about, one might be
inclined to feel a certain dislike for him. He is often likened to a Classical
statue, beautiful and perfect, but hard and cold to match. He has no warmth for
anyone he supposedly cares about – his sisters, and Jane of course – and has
his heart set on becoming a missionary, thereby winning salvation for himself
in heaven. What makes him an arsehole is this; he’s so damned certain in his
own, particular interpretation of his religion – officially Anglican, but
theologically closer to Calvinism – that he will not tolerate anything like
human frailty, especially not in himself. For Jane, who falls more deeply into
the pit of religion during last third of the book, St. John presents a very
different challenge to everything else she’s faced before – especially when it
becomes apparent that St. John pretty much believes he IS God. Listen to his
words to Jane at the end of chapter 34:
“ ‘...To-morrow, I leave
home for Cambridge: I have many friends there to whom I should wish to say
farewell. I shall be absent a fortnight – take that space of time to consider
my offer: and do not forget that if you reject it, it is not me that you deny,
but God. Through my means, He opens to you a noble career; [...] Tremble lest
in that case you should be numbered with those who have denied the faith, and
are worse than infidels!’ ”
[Excerpt, Pg. 461]
This guy really is crazy. So the girl shows she has a mind
of her own, and all of a sudden St. John says she’s denying God? And by refusing him, she’s therefore refusing Him and
is thus something of a heretic and an apostate? I don’t believe in such a thing
as zeal, but there is madness, with all its varied and curious forms. No
matter; he’s an interesting character this St. John, and certainly makes the
novel more striking because of it.
Do I have any criticisms of this book then? Well, while not
a battle to get through like Pride and
Prejudice was, it’s still a little on the long side – but then that’s not
really a bad thing, if you can stand devoting yourself to these things we
nowadays call ‘books’, as it always makes actual progress and the reader’s time
is never wasted in its course. The one thing that irritated me at any point
during the book was the refusal to print certain place-names:
“ Millcote, ---shire; I
brushed up my recollections of the map of England; yes, I saw it; both the
shire and the town, ---shire was seventy miles nearer London than the remote
county where I now resided: [...] Millcote was a large manufacturing town on
the banks of the A---; a busy place enough, doubtless: so much the better. ”
[Excerpt, Pg. 110]
The refusal to name names, like ‘---shire’, which appears
more like censorship than anything, is something that genuinely irritates me –
that it should so often be used by Brontë here is a deep shame, for it is the
one thing that spoils her otherwise flawless prose. I have no idea whether this
was a fashion of the day or something, (this technique, for want of a better
term, was used in other 19th century novels like Pride and Prejudice and Black Beauty), but I hate it. I really
hate it, and would rather they have just made up names or used real place names
rather than cause this juddering halt in the writing every time they wish to
refer to a county.
Jane Eyre is a
perfect novel, and the only reason that I can see for not tackling it is for
the same reason I did not enjoy it at school; I was too young to appreciate it.
Now, many years later, I have well and truly chowed-down on the bullet and
picked the thing up again, and found to my delight a fresh new book in my
hands, complete with interesting and engaging characters, an exciting and
complex plot and genuinely beautiful writing. This is why I love reading;
whereas a film adaptation can only condense the plot and regurgitate a fraction
of the dialogue, here we can look upon the words of someone who lived over a
century and a half ago and so successfully captured a story on mere paper with
nothing more complex than a pen and her own brain.
And what I expect must
have been some incredible feats of editing.
Bibliogatory
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Collins. (1953 [First
Published 1847])
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