Psychics and teenagers

Since it looks like Brontëland is returning to normal after the Jane Eyre frenzy, we will take the chance to post a couple of interesting articles that we overlooked in the midst of the Jane Eyre reviews, etc.

Jeanette Winterson recently wrote in The Times an interesting and insightful article on Cornelia Parker's exhibition and other recent events at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

The Brontë Parsonage in Haworth opens a new exhibition this weekend featuring a cross-media installation by Cornelia Parker, the Turner prize-shortlisted artist. As part of filming for the installation, entitled Brontëan Abstracts, she invited the psychic Henri Llewelyn Davies to pick up the various vibes and visitations going on in England’s most famous — and freezing — rectory. (I am allowed to complain about the North because I was born there — and, like the Brontës, I discovered that the best way to keep your fingers warm is either to play an instrument or to write a book.) Anyway, Henri took a medium with her, and the pair voiced a few sullen servants still sloping around the place, and talked to camera about their spiritual impressions.
They found no Brontës, which is a bit of a relief, but as Henri pointed out to me, “creative people have got better things to do than hang round some old rectory for 150 years”.

Of course they do!

Part of the Brontë celebration this autumn will be a graphic novel of Wuthering Heights with pictures by Siku and words by the poet Adam Strickson. We are told that this will present the “passionate story” in a “completely new, exciting and innovative way”.
I am fast asleep already. Wuthering Heights is fabulous and doesn’t need pictures. Nor does it need Emily Brontë’s language stripped out and refitted by someone else. Reusing the basic story is what Mills and Boon and Hollywood have been doing for years, and I am not convinced that we should be thrilled by this “radical” idea. A picturebook Brontë is really only for people who can’t manage too many words on the same page.

Ah, poor Siku and Strickson! However, we do think that most works that try and take a different look at the classics are very worthy and valid.

The other article was also published in The Times, written by Catherine Paver. She looked into the state of courses on literature at school and how to encourage teenagers to read.

Many of us remember reading Jane Eyre at school, which is why we are gripped by the current BBC series. But I wonder whether today’s sixth formers would care if a new version were aired in ten years’ time.
This is what it’s like to read Jane Eyre in today’s schools. You’re shown the video and given some handouts. You read page one of the novel and wonder why Jane is sitting “like a Turk” but the handouts don’t help. They are full of demands about “literary traditions” and suchlike. [...]
All the confusion stems from a simple fact: you can’t reduce literature to skills. It’s like trying to measure music with string. How did it happen? Again, the original idea was good: to help pupils by taking the mystery out of marking.
When you and I were at school, we had the annoying experience of working very hard on an essay, only to get it back with a low mark and a strange comment. So it was worth trying to make the marking process more transparent. They just went too far and flattened out the shadows. They fitted Thornfield with strip lights.
The coursework marking scheme is the mad Mrs Rochester of English teaching. [...]
One girl kept coming to lessons without her copy of Jane Eyre. “My mum’s reading it and she won’t give it back,” she complained. “She reads it in her hammock and comes in crying.”That mother has done more good than she can ever know. We can’t all arrange to cry over a book in front of our child, but the mere fact that we love books in general is persuasive. Teenagers may respond to what you say only rarely; I think that in the long term, they do respond to what you love. [...]
It may be non-fiction that strikes a chord with them at first. After all, when the young Jane Eyre curls up with a book behind “folds of scarlet drapery”, she drifts away to “the haunts of sea-fowl” and “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone”. [...]
It is time to let the shadows return to Thornfield.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Comics, Wuthering_Heights, Jane_Eyre, In_the_News, Brontë_Parsonage_Museum