A second look at 'Jane Eyre'
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A second look at 'Jane Eyre'
New film version of legendary book prompts rereading
Julia Keller
CULTURAL CRITIC
10:36 AM CST, March 11, 2011
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Doodles don't lie.
I still possess a great many of the books I was assigned to read in adolescence, and there is a simple way to gauge how bored I became during the forced perusal of a specific work: Look at the doodles. I always read with a pen in my hand, and if the average doodle-per-page count exceeds, say, three, then it's safe to assume I was not exactly mesmerized. (All-time high: Twelve doodles in the margin of a single page of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel "The Scarlet Letter.")
My doodles came in bunches: cowboys with big hats and droopy mustaches; circles inside squares; horses in full gallop; pine trees. (Freudians, I am certain, would have a field day with these, but let's move on.)
When I learned that yet another film version of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 classic "Jane Eyre" was on the way, I decided to reread the novel. I fished out the very volume that I'd read in high school. And guess what?
It's curiously devoid of doodles. Beyond the scrawled, proprietary signature on the inside flap, the margins are as clean as Jane's conscience. A dearth of doodles can only mean one thing: I loved "Jane Eyre." I must have been so smart, so precocious, I told myself, that even at 16, I understood the novel and absorbed its wisdom. Jane was a good girl — and she still got the guy. Love conquers all.
Funny thing, though. As I reread "Jane Eyre" last week, I realized my folly. Then and now, I happily devoured the tale of a young orphan who endures ill treatment at the hands of cruel relatives and a flint-hearted parson. She then takes a job as a governess in the strange household of the brooding Edward Rochester, only to discover that he has stashed his cackling wife in the attic. But upon first reading, I'd missed the point entirely — although part of this is not my fault. The "Jane Eyre" you read as a kid is not the same "Jane Eyre" you read as an adult. A first reading of any book is almost always about the plot: what happens when, and to whom. It's like being carried along by one of those galloping horses I was always doodling, the kind with the flowing mane. Subsequent readings, however, are about something else. Nuances come to light. So do textures, shadings and shadows. Concealed but crucial truths work their way to the surface.
What was different this time?
For one thing, I realized that "Jane Eyre" isn't really a love story. That is, it's not a conventional love story between consenting adults. It's about the relationship between a woman and her own voice, her own perspective and desires. Jane decides that her self-respect is more important to her than being with Rochester, the man she loves and hoped to marry. She leaves him — temporarily, that is — and suffers through another round of hunger and hardship, an echo of her childhood, before things work out. As Lucasta Miller puts it in "The Bronte Myth" (2003), the book "offered access, unheard of in the novel at the time, into the depths of the individual psyche," as well as "a new and specifically female form of self-expression."
Bronte's nuts-and-bolts narrative skill, too, was an aspect I missed in my initial hunger to find out if Jane ends up with Rochester or with that annoying prig of a preacher. The novel shifts constantly between past and present tense, but it's never confusing. Bronte knew exactly what she was doing.
It also occurred to me, as I sped my way through "Jane Eyre" last week, how jaded we've become about storytelling. Here in the 21st century, we're too sophisticated for our own good. We make fun of the kinds of coincidences that keep a novel such as "Jane Eyre" zipping along — the fact that Jane's uncle is acquainted with the relatives of Rochester's wife in a faraway place, for instance, or the fortuitous fire and fall that render Rochester an eligible bachelor once more — would, in a contemporary novel, come in for a heap of sarcasm-flecked ridicule. We love our cool logic.
But in rejecting the unlikely and the uncanny and the just plain weird — except in graphic novels and in the Charlie Sheen saga — we also strip the world of a great deal of imaginative fire. The word "magic" is often restricted to supernatural literature these days, but it's a term that belongs as well to stories that aspire to describe the real world — the nonwizard, nonvampire, nonsuperhero world. A woman's fiery, passionate determination to follow her own voice, to forcibly grasp her own destiny and not allow anybody else to tell her how to live, is as wondrously magical as the ability to fly.
It is, in effect, a different kind of flying.
Not all classics resonate. I still can't force myself through "The Scarlet Letter" again — and believe me, I've tried. But "Jane Eyre" is as brash and beautiful in 2011 as it must have been in 1847. The title character is a real handful. If I'd doodled her image in the margins, I would've made her eyes wild and her hair electric, with sparks leaping from her fingertips. With a character this brave and stubborn and clever and strong, who needs Wonder Woman?
jikeller@tribune.com
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