Loosen your Corsets

The Sidney Morning Herald recommends a whole ABC Sunday evening for Australian viewers, first the Choir of Hard Knocks singing in the Sydney Opera House no less, and next... the second part of Jane Eyre:

We should also be relieved that life is not a Charlotte Bronte novel, because while such potboiling melodrama makes great Sunday bonnet-vision, if we had to live through it we wouldn't have any time for talented, homeless people.
Jane Eyre has it all. And yet, after the blistering abuse and bad luck young Jane endured, not to mention being short and plain, she did not slip through the cracks. You could burn that girl at the stake and she would still find her courageous way back to her beloved, betrayed, deformed Rochester.
One slight quibble: I read Jane Eyre as a kid. Wasn't Rochester an ugly brute before the fire? Hadn't his unhappy, twisted existence contorted him beyond attractiveness? Toby Stephens is hot, in that floppy British way, the poor girl's Hugh Grant. So when he teased plain Jane about his ugliness, the audience was left scratching bonnets.
After all we've endured with the election, escape into a perfect ABC Sunday was more than welcome; it was essential. To be transported from the Sydney Opera House to medieval Haddon Hall was certainly a trip. After everything that Rudd, Howard and the rest put us through, we could all be forgiven for getting lost in Derbyshire indefinitely.
Jane Eyre provides the escape that simply doesn't come with all the forensic cop dramas with the little blue torches. Quite possibly, a modern love story involving a hero (not a bastard or bloke) such as Rochester and a damsel (not a 'ho or sister) such as Jane would be laughed off the screen. Perhaps the archaic social mores, as much as the bonnets and castles, allow us to take leave of our senses, bad manners and loose morals. And if that doesn't loosen your corsets, there's always another series of America's Next Top Model. (Ruth Ritchie)

AuthorLink has an article by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on the use of repetitions in literature. Jane Eyre is quoted as an example:

Another kind of repetition is structural, when it involves the entire design and plot of the story, when events repeat themselves with variations. Le Guin [Ursula L. Guin in Steering the Craft (Eighth Mountain Press, 1998)] gives Jane Eyre as an example. In the first chapter, Jane is timid, quiet, but self-respecting child, the outsider in an unloving household, who escapes into reading, looking at pictures, nature. But when the older boy who bullies her goes too far, Jane turns on him and fights back. As punishment, she’s locked in an upstairs room that they tell her is haunted. The grown up Jane ends up being a shy outsider as well and is forced to stand up to Rochester and finds herself once again all alone. And there is a haunted room upstairs where Rochester’s mad wife is hidden away.

The New York Times reviews On Ugliness by Umberto Eco (English translation of Storia de la Brutezza) and chooses an example from Wuthering Heights:

Readers may strain to discern categorical ugliness in some of Eco’s chosen artworks and passages. In the chapter “Romanticism and the Redemption of Ugliness,” he includes turbulent — but therefore all the more lush — landscapes, and an Emily Brontë passage describing the smoldering Heathcliff, whose “forehead, that I once thought so manly, and that I now think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy cloud.” By Eco’s criteria, anything stirring, or not utterly conventional and saccharine, would seem to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia of the off-putting. (Amy Finnerty)

Laptop Magazine reviews the new Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-505 that apparently comes with a pre-loaded e-text of Wuthering Heights.

On the blogosphere today: A Lady's Diversions has a winner for her Wuthering Heights contest. The Road Less Traveled comments both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Lolaxscarlett has some nice Jane Eyre 2006 icons.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights