One more review, one more Brontëite

Andrew Billen reviews the first episode of Jane Eyre for the New Statesman.

To be avoided, on the one side, is the Scylla of the OTT Gothic novel: everyone knows there is a madwoman in Rochester's attic, but this adaptation reminds us that there are monsters on Jane's sketch pad, too. On the other side lies the Charybdis of a sloppy romance: Rochester, the Byronic owner of Thornfield, is the prototype for every tall, dark and smirking nob Barbara Cartland ever wrote about. But navigate between the two, and you discover the first great English Bildungsroman in which hero and heroine are given a sentimental education.

What's with today? Barbara Cartland's all over the place.

Let no one tell you this novel lacks absurdities. Rochester at one stage turns up in drag, disguised as a gypsy fortune-teller. On the page, you have Jane's voice to make credible the incredible. On television, you rely on your actors. White has cast perfectly. Jane is played by Ruth Wilson, an unknown 24-year-old fresh out of drama school. There is not a reaction shot in which she does not look intelligent, and not a line she delivers that does not suggest the thinking behind it. Her Donald Duck mouth and heavy eyebrows give her face too much character for beauty, yet any intelligent man might fall for it (particularly if the alternative is Blanche's porcelain mask). "That look," Rochester says. "No judgement, no pity. That look would pry secrets from the darkest souls." He says it with anticipation.

Donald Duck mouth?! Surely that's worse than especulating about her height.

There is no long list of character actors. Tara Fitzgerald, as the infant Jane's unloving aunt, is no sooner seen than gone. Richard McCabe stands out as vindictive Mr Brocklehurst, headmaster of Lowood School - but Eyre's schooldays are done with in ten minutes. Her friendship with Helen Burns is disposed of in half that time. Pam Ferris as Grace Poole, keeper of the first Mrs R in the north tower, is seen mainly bustling down corridors.
These excepted, every long shot is a composition of beauty. Most tell a story, too. The finger of God points down from a mural at a young Eyre, framed for lying. Her fellow pupils, dressed identically in white caps, are like clones. Respectable society is as uniform as the wooden coffins in which Helen Burns's fellow victims of onsumption are carried off.
The Derbyshire countryside has rarely looked so consistently cold and grey, either. Out of its mists, to confront Jane for the first time, rides Rochester: black hair, black cape and black stallion. But once at Thornfield, he becomes associated with warmth: orange hues lick his face at the fireside, the sun illuminates him on a picnic and, at the end of episode one, his bed is engulfed in flames. The question Jane will have to answer is whether the fire within is, or is not, hellish.
The conceit of the book is that while Rochester believes Eyre, in her sinless youth, to be in need of a sentimental education into life's horrors, it is he who ends up taught a lesson in humanity by her. His blinding - the symbolic castration that brings Jane back to him - is the creepiest moment in the book, not to mention the most absurd. I hope this magical adaptation has the sorcery to make us accept it.

It was too long ago since someone mentioned Rochester's - symbolic or not - castration. We were hoping we wouldn't have to hear it until after the last episode.

And now a Cuban Brontëite. Poet Pablo Armando Fernández talks about the moment he became a writer:

I became a writer when I was 10 years old after I heard on the radio the first episode of an adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights. From then on I was another person and I prepared myself to be a poor, abandoned, lonely, and sad Englishman.

And this is not the first time that Mr. Fernández has said something similar.

Categories: Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Brontëites