I read this over a
weekend when many of my fellow Ruritanians (and dare I say, most of them
female) were transfixed by the wedding of Meghan Markle and Harry Wales(or Mountbatten-Windsor, I'm not sure which is correct). That
piece of live costume drama was but one more on-schedule production from the
House of Windsor, the latest addition to our Ruritanian cultural world which fills the leisure
hours of its subjects with sit coms, rom coms, and costume dramas heavily
dependent on out-of-copyright Victorian triple-decker novels, like the one I
was reading while others were viewing a marriage made in Hollywood.
Jane Eyre gives us the phrase Reader, I married him - in my edition, you wait until page 544 to get that.
Jane Eyre gives us the phrase Reader, I married him - in my edition, you wait until page 544 to get that.
There must come a time,
even in demented Ruritania, and perhaps even within the next hundred years,
when all but a few antiquarians tire of nearly all these Victorian novels, at
least in their original written form. The accomplished descriptions of nature,
the carefully painted human physiognomies, the long set-piece speeches, the
heavy stamp of moral rectitude, all of which fatten up the volumes, will cease to
charm. The books just go on for so long. People will settle for adaptations
which play fast and loose with the originals. The story of Jane Eyre and Mr
Rochester cut down would do nicely for an overwrought opera, the arias and
duets set against a background of a very energetically pumped wind machine. The
madwoman in the attic could be filmically Gothed-up to the nth degree and still legitimately claim
fidelity to the original.
Even now, these
triple-deckers are no longer read and studied for literary merits which may in
any case often strike one as limited (Jane
Eyre does go on and on and on). They are read now for the scope they provide
for ideological contestation. You can be of the party of Jane, the party of Mr
Rochester, the party of the madwoman in the attic, even I suppose the party of
Rosamund Oliver, though not the party of St. John. Indeed, confronted by St.
John’s attempts to induce Jane to marry him, there can scarce have been a modern
reader who has sat through it without mounting anxiety (literary merit there) and
a desire to shout for the whole valley to hear Tell him to fuck off! (and there). What Victorian readers
exclaimed, I have no idea, but clearly many felt the same way. That is part of
the novel’s achievement, though it would be hard not to be persuaded against a St. John who is capable of saying things like this, "As a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance will be to me invaluable" ( p 488). But when St John goes off from her rejection saying "that he had nothing to forgive" (p 495), Jane comes out with a startling sentence, "I would much rather he had knocked me down" (p 495) which jumps out from the page to close a chapter.
Nowadays, you are
already free to read the novel as anachronistically as you like; no one is
going to stop you annexing it to some favoured cause though most of them will
be marked Feminist and given good grades accordingly. However, the essay by
Elaine Showalter which closes the edition I have read is really very weak; it
is not so much a structured piece of criticism, feminist or otherwise, as a
rather random (and even desperate) assembly of remarks pointing off in wildly
different directions. Most notably, it does not engage with the core of what
the book is “about”: the development of the relationship between Jane and Mr Rochester
in which both change and develop so that Jane becomes less priggish and prudish
(at the end, she is even the coquette sitting on Rochester’s lap, teasing him) and a chastened Rochester sheds the vanity of seeking to refashion Jane outwardly into a bejewelled vision
fit for a sultan’s eye.
