Brontë’s impossible experiment with desire and feminism

A Younger Theatre reviews the recent performances of Jane Eyre by Blackeyed Theatre, giving it 4 stars out of 5.

Featuring Kelsey Short as the titular role, Nick Lane’s script builds a psychological portrait of Eyre as a heroine from early on, aided by McDougall’s skilled direction of those early formative memories. The claustrophobia of the red room is created by three white sheets, lit in red and closed in around a nine year old Jane, creating the sense of the red room not as a physical space, but as a child would remember it as if it were something from a nightmare. [...]

This is, in every sense, a typical gothic romance where the emotional development of the characters run deep, and sensation takes priority over practicality. [...]

The only major issue I found with this production was it’s treatment of Bertha Mason, the original ‘mad woman in the attic’, confined there by Rochester. While what Rochester does to Bertha is unforgivable, I found that there was a little too much sympathy for him for my liking; although Jane is understandably horrified when she finds out what he has done to Bertha, we see her only briefly for one scene before she is, almost too conveniently, killed off. While of course this is what happens in the source material, I felt that there was a distinct lack of empathy for Bertha as anything more than an obstacle to Jane and Rochester’s relationship.

Camilla Simson is a committed and clearly talented performer throughout many of the roles that she takes on during this adaptation, and while her portrayal of Bertha is well delivered, I have to question the choices made by the writer which led to Bertha’s only appearance in the piece to be her screaming and trying to claw Jane’s eyes out, especially when immediately followed by Rochester portraying himself as the victim of the Mason’s plot to pawn off their mentally ill daughter on him. As somebody who suffers from mental illness myself, I found it uncomfortable how little Rochester’s coldness towards Bertha and the presentation of her as something almost demon-like is challenged. There seems to be very little sympathy towards her in the gaze of the audience, and it feels as though she is villainised in a way that doesn’t seem particularly fair.

Of course any adaptation of a classic text cannot be blamed for the social attitudes of the time of writing, but there are ways to challenge the more problematic aspects of the story while staying true to the source material. This didn’t happen, instead Bertha turns up, screams while Rochester dismisses her as his crazy ex, she dies, then that is the end of the matter. The iconic ‘Reader, I married him’ line is delivered as a romantic proclamation, rather than a confession from a woman who knows that the man she is marrying is capable of such abuse.

Despite my discomfort with this particular take on Bertha Mason, Blackeyed Theatre’s Jane Eyre is an excellent addition to the company’s long history of successful classical adaptations. It’s unexpectedly funny in places, sweepingly romantic and captures the dark, melancholic heart of Brontë’s novel excellently. (Alice Flynn)

The Irish Times invites several writers to share their favourite lockdown classics.

Sarah Moss on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

Jane Eyre is one of the books that changes when you’re not looking at it. I read it first, aged about 10, as a school story with a weird romance on the end, an exploration of the shaping powers of education and childhood friendships. As a teenager I shared Jane’s yearning for the damaged (but landed) hero Rochester and couldn’t understand why she would choose moral strength over sexual fulfilment. As a middle-aged reader I see Brontë’s impossible experiment with desire and feminism: Jane longs for the man who will destroy her and comes of age in walking away from him, but the form of the novel itself compels a rather dark romantic resolution, with prices paid for Jane’s uneasy happiness by other outsiders. I wonder how I will read it in later life. In all my readings, I love the celebrations of my own native landscapes and weather in northern England; the tricksy unreliability of the first-person narrator; the perfectly observed details of clothes, firelight, food; the conversations where what is not said hangs heavy in the drawing rooms where Jane the orphan and working woman will never be at home. It’s been filmed and widely received as a romance, but the shock with which Victorian readers received this novel was justified: Jane Eyre is far darker and more interesting than that. (Martin Doyle)

Vox interviews writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

One of the most interesting things about this book is the way it’s building a whole conversation with classic 18th- or 19th-century gothic literature. What is your relationship with gothic literature like, and what elements did you really want to explore in this book?

[...] I wasn’t very much interested in what is called gothic romance or a female gothic. I was always more into what is termed the male gothic, which is gothic books that have supernatural elements, graphic violence, and that kind of stuff. Sometimes we also call it gothic horror, as opposed to what we consider to be the female gothic, which is more like Scooby-Doo types of stories. Jane Eyre kinds of tales, in which a young woman goes to a distant location, meets some dude, and then there’s some kind of mystery to unravel.

There is a happy ending — that is mostly the desire of that kind of story. Especially when you’re talking about the mid-20th century gothic romance revival, the new gothic romances. Those are the ones that came out in paperback form and that we associate with the gothic form, because they have a woman running away from a castle. There’s always a mystery, but there’s not a supernatural element, and the romance is really the emphasis. [...]

A lot of the classic gothic literature from that time is working with a very colonialist set of fears about basically everyone outside of Europe. And as I was reading Mexican Gothic, I kept thinking, well, it was projection all along, because all of those anxieties that they’re attributing to non-Europeans actually apply way more to the British Empire. So how did you think about creating that kind of reversal as you wrote?

[...] And then you have also this idea of decay and danger in things like Jane Eyre, where there’s the mad wife in the attic. She is white, but she is Creole. So she is a white-born woman raised in the Caribbean, and that has a lot of important implications in this time period. If you read the literature of the time and how people are talking about folks that are living and growing up in the Caribbean, there is very much a sense that there is a danger that you are going to be degraded, that something happens physically that brings you down. It diminishes your whiteness and contaminates you. (Constance Grady)

Country and Town House chats to 'adventurer, writer and broadcaster' Alexandra Tolstoy.

 ‘I had quite an ascetic, repressive upbringing,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t allowed to watch television till I was 18. And I had these very long, boring holidays where I read a lot: mostly the classics – Brontë, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Austen, Walter Scott. I lived a lot in my head. Reading allowed my mind to expand and showed me I didn’t have to live the life I’d been brought up to live.’ (Lucy Cleland)

La Nación (Argentina) asks artist and poet Amaranth Borsuk about her preferred reading format.

¿Cuál es tu formato ideal para leer?

Leer, por ejemplo, literatura electrónica interactiva es otra forma de leer, pero no reemplaza a la lectura del libro físico. Te ofrece una experiencia diferente. Amo leer novelas y poesía y no necesariamente me gustaría leer todo en Kindle. Me gusta lo material y físico del libro. Crecí en una casa en la que el olor a libro era palpable, especialmente, por los libros antiguos. El olor de los libros tiene que ver con un proceso químico. Cuando empiezan gradualmente a pudrirse. Es fascinante cómo tanta gente que ama los libros se refiere al olor. La experiencia de leer Jane Eyre en una edición de archivo es diferente a leerla en una edición de bolsillo que te dieron en el colegio o en un e-book. Es porque no leemos solo con nuestros cerebros; leemos con nuestros cuerpos. Todo el aparato físico es parte de la experiencia. Limitarla al contenido es descartar que lo físico es parte de la experiencia de la lectura. Cómo recordamos, cómo absorbemos información, qué pensamos sobre el significado de una obra puede estar fundamentalmente relacionado con cómo la experimentamos físicamente. (Victoria Pérez Zabala) (Translation)

The Guardian's weekend quiz has a Brontë.related question:

What links: [...]

13 Glass Town; Angria; Gondal? (Thomas Eaton)