Female anger vs Mr Rochester

An article in The New York Times discusses female anger.

I’d loved Rhys for nearly a decade before I read her final novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” whose whole plot leads inexorably toward an act of destructive anger: The mad first wife of Mr. Rochester burns down the English country manor where she has been imprisoned in the attic for years. In this late masterpiece, the heroines of Rhys’s early novels — heartbroken, drunk, caught in complicated choreographies of passivity — are replaced by an angry woman with a torch, ready to use the master’s tools to destroy his house.
It wasn’t that these authors were writing exclusively about female anger rather than female sorrow; their writing holds both states of feeling. “Wide Sargasso Sea” excavates the deep veins of sadness running beneath an otherwise opaque act of angry destruction, and Plath’s poems are invested in articulating the complicated affective braids of bitterness, irony, anger, pride and sorrow that others often misread as monolithic sadness. “They explain people like that by saying that their minds are in watertight compartments, but it never seemed so to me,” Rhys herself once wrote. “It’s all washing about, like the bilge in the hold of a ship.” (Leslie Jamison)

Atwood Magazine has singer/songwriter Unwoman speak a little about each song from her album War Stories, which we already mentioned last week.

Bad Man
This is sung from the perspective of Mr Rochester, from Jane Eyre. He is the actual worst. I’m critical of this trope, the sweet and perfectly innocent young woman saving a dissolute narcissistic man from himself, which unfortunately is still a popular one. (Mitch Mosk)

Metroactive reviews the film The Phantom Thread and focuses on Mr Rochester too.

Anderson claims that The Phantom Thread is a gothic tale—like Jane Eyre's Rochester, Woodcock is made to falter, rising to love a woman loyal enough to survive his scorn. And it's like the dynamics in Rebecca (1940) with Manville as the Mrs. Danvers character. The perverse difference is that Alma finds a way to bring Woodcock low, and it's not through her sterling character—it's via her desire to be the nursemaid of the immobile man. We have signs of Woodcock's tenderness—he's haunted by the stock-still ghost of his mother, and the hollow voice sounds like he's in the grave already. (Richard von Busack)

Broadway World Australia features the show Out of Character, which

considers some of the questions that have rarely been asked, what did fairy-tales really have to say? What would Charlotte Brontë  have made of Edward Cullen? And what did thirteenth century women think about sex?
Taking well-known characters and authors, in monologue and music, Out of Character searches for an answer to what it is to be a woman and whether it is possible to break out of that womanly character. From the Garden of Eden through to 21st century romance, the show celebrates the curious, the strong, and the uncharacteristic women who have featured in literature throughout history.

Spanish actress Carmen Machi tells ABC (Spain) about how she decided she wanted to be an actress.

Tengo la sensación de que desde muy niña entendía el juego interpretativo. Pero hubo un momento decisivo. Casi a escondidas, pues tenía dos rombos, vi la película "Jane Eyre", en la que trabajaba Elizabeth Taylor. No era la protagonista, pero a mí me impresionó cómo moría aquejada de tuberculosis -su personaje tenía más o menos mi edad-, y en mi habitación, yo sola, reproduje la emoción que había sentido. Creo que me fascinó la catarsis de fingir morir. (Carmen R. Santos) (Translation)

Europe 1 (France) had a special programme on the Brontës. You can listen to it (in French, obviously) here.

Les sœurs Brontë. La force d’exister : c’est le titre de l’ouvrage de Laura El Makki, paru chez Tallandier à l’automne dernier. Franck Ferrand reçoit aujourd’hui son auteur. Lorena Martin nous emmènera ensuite sur les traces des sœurs Brontë, à Haworth – elle évoquera notamment le bicentenaire d’Emily Brontë. (Translation)

Svenska Dagbladet reviews the short stories collection Nordisk fauna by Andrea Lundgren:

Här finns en ironisk-seriös allusion på feministiska klassiker som Virginia Woolfs "Ett eget rum" och Gilbert & Gubars analys av "Jane Eyre", "The madwoman in the attic". (Translation)

The Brontë Babe reviews Charlotte Brontë's novelette Stancliffe's Hotel. The Sisters' Room has an article on 'Anne Brontë's silent revolution' and Anne's 198th birthday was celebrated by AnneBrontë.org yesterday.