Rochester vs Darcy

A Mr. Rochester vs Mr. Darcy article is published today in The Telegraph. And Judith Woods thinks Rochester is the winner.

Can Jane's broken heart ever heal? What of lustful Mr Rochester, furiously tending to mad Bertha in the attic? And does this (praise be!) mark an end to the tiresome lionisation of Mr Darcy? I say Mr Darcy, but of course we all know I mean Colin Firth.

That's the thing about literary adaptations: no matter how we try to fight it, as soon as an actor pops up sporting snug breeches and an ambiguously furrowed brow, he supplants the carefully constructed mental image we have nurtured since our sensitive teens, like some unwelcome froak-coated cuckoo. (...)

So let's make it plain: although Ruth Wilson instantly chimed with my reading of Jane, I was initially deeply suspicious of Toby Stephens as Mr Rochester; he wasn't nearly as saturnine nor as sinister as he ought to have been. In fact, he was disconcertingly flirtatious from the get-go, looking Jane in the eye and wantonly indulging in picnics and the like. (...)

I must confess that the opening episode of Jane Eyre set my teeth on edge, as vast tracts of the text were excised, characters axed and the interior shots of (a preposterously palatial) Thornfield Hall filmed in such stygian gloom, as to require the viewer to deploy infra-red night vision.

The script was also peppered with all manner of metachronistic language. It was wrong, all wrong. But I continued to watch because on Sunday nights, as in times of national crisis, one instinctively tunes into the BBC. And I was amply rewarded. (...)

So what if it had been sexed up for modern audiences? We haven't got all evening to hang about decoding elliptical 19th century demonstrations of drawing room concupiscence.

Admittedly Stephens is on the short side, and there's a touch of the cut-price Hugh Grant about him. His hair is also quite silly. But his Rochester carries with him the unmistakable, intoxicating whiff of sex, and a dark undertow of danger.

Add to that an emotionally-damaged psyche, a tormented sense of responsibility to a crazed, imprisoned wife and what right-thinking woman could possibly resist? Apart from Jane Eyre, it would appear. But she was only 19, so her biological clock wasn't yet ticking.

All of which brings me back to the disagreeable cult of Mr Darcy, who in recent years has been consistently voted the greatest romantic hero in literature.

Last year a survey of heroes (romantic or otherwise) by the literary website Books.co.uk saw the aloof incumbent of Pemberley Hall triumph over the likes of Romeo Montague, Heathcliff and Rhett Butler, with Mr Rochester languishing very unfairly, I feel, at 15th - just ahead of Mr Pickwick.

It doesn't take a Nostradamus to predict malign forces at work; Mr Darcy's position has rather more to do with Colin Firth than Pride and Prejudice. How else can one account for the fact that Mark Darcy, of Bridget Jones' Diary - also played by Firth - somehow managed to insinuate his way into seventh position.

But why? Charlotte Bronte's Edward Rochester is a passionate, powerful man, by comparison to whom Jane Austen's Fitzwilliam Darcy appears not merely repressed, but sexually continent to the point of constipation. Yes, he's proud and insufferably arrogant, which - shhh! don't tell the feminists - always goes down well with us career girls, but there's something rather unmanly about his prickliness.

Toby Stephens is lazily beguiled by Jane Eyre's wit. Colin Firth, however, always seemed peeved by Elizabeth Bennet's clever ripostes. Firth may have dazzled us as he emerged, shirt dripping, from the pond, but that's all a bit old hat now, as demonstrated by the fact that Ambridge milksop Nigel Pargetter recently emulated him in The Archers to impress his wife, Elizabeth, and contracted an effete chill.

Rochester, on the other hand is altogether more complex, and therefore infinitely more fascinating. Call it a fatal weakness, call it multi-tasking, but women love nothing better than the challenge of mending a broken man.

Ireful and thwarted, with a murky hinterland and now with a broken heart to boot, who among us doesn't yearn to clasp Bronte's damaged hero to our collective heaving decolletage?

We don't think that to vindicate Rochester (or Jane Eyre) it has to be necessary to denigrate Darcy (or Pride and Prejudice). Is this the whiskers and breeches version of the Star Wars vs Star Trek kind of discussion? We like the Brontës... and Jane Austen. What's wrong with that?

Our much beloved David Belcher writes in The Herald replying an email of Miss Eyre (the owner and creator of this huge and indispensable list of Brontë links) :

A Miss Eyre, whose e-mail address claims she hails from thornfield_hall, definitely isn't a member of the David Belcher Gang after what I wrote about the dreary tome for the emotionally-stunted that is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

According to her pseudonymous cyber-missive, I'm an ignoramus. Be that as it may, madam, the TV Jane Eyre is better than the book, even though Toby Stephens has chosen to play the brooding Mr Rochester in the manner of Prince Charles (stiff gait, hands behind back, vaguely preoccupied air, quizzical gruntings through clenched teeth). So stick that in your e-pipe and smoke it.

According to her and according to us that we also called him an ignorant. Oh, please... to read the ramblings of a walking 'irreverent' cliché could be almost funny, but when you insult your readers it's rather pathetic.

Categories: In_the_News,Movies-DVD-TV, Jane_Eyre