Utterly enraptured by Jane Eyre

In The Atlantic, contributor David Sims tells about what's keeping him entertained.

Something I recently revisited: For some reason, I had Jane Eyre on my Kindle and plowed through it on a vacation weekend; the last time I read it, I was 13 years old and possibly chafing against it as a school assignment. This time, I was utterly enraptured, choking back little sobs as Jane’s dear friend, Helen, falls ill, and seething with emotion at Rochester. I may have to reread Wuthering Heights, my favorite when I was an emo teen, next.

The Oxford Blue discusses 'The Fear of Female Suffering: From Marilyn Monroe to Emily Brontë'.

On the contrary, O’Connor’s Emily is eponymous as the film is named after Emily Brontë. Despite adhering to the biopic convention which makes its subject a titular protagonist, the film, for the most part, conveys a fictionalised account of Emily Brontë’s life in Yorkshire with her three sisters, her brother, and her regimented widowed father. The film beautifully weaves together threads from Emily Brontë’s only novel ‘Wuthering Heights’ with elements of facticity that paint a picture of what Emily’s life would have looked like, had she fallen in love and experimented with opium. O’Connor’s film bends the truth, arguably to a much greater extent than Dominik’s Blonde by introducing a romantic storyline between Emily, played by Emma Mackey, and assistant curate William Weightman. In reality, records indicate that Weightman may have been the romantic interest of Anne Brontë instead. Yet, Blonde has been vehemently attacked by both critics and viewers for the bending of the truth of a much more notorious and controversial celebrity than Emily Brontë. Furthermore, the moments in the film that motivate these attacks are simply moments. For instance, the scene in which Marilyn performs fellatio on US president, John. F. Kennedy and a shot of Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, attempting to drown her daughter in a bathtub, have been accused of being unfaithful to the truth. These moments are insufficient to constitute any kind of plot as opposed to the fictional love story between Emily and Weightman, which drives a hefty portion of Emily.

So, why do audiences hate Blonde and not Emily? I believe it’s because we’re scared of Blonde and its explicit portrayal of the realities of female suffering. The spectator’s proximities to suffering differ in both films. [...]

In contrast, the icon is experienced when the invisible appears through the visible. In other words, viewers experience a more muted presentation of suffering. Thus, in O’Connor’s Emily, it is through Emily’s more subtle reactions to her restrictive and oppressive environment in 19th century, middle-class England that constitute the representation of her suffering. For example, even the billboard for Blonde gets as close as you can to Marilyn’s face, contrasting the billboard for Emily which places the protagonist at a safe distance from the onlooker. Perhaps the fear that viewers experience when directly faced with trauma, particularly female trauma, in the form of the idol, explains their distaste towards Blonde. [...]

As Dennis Bingham states, the biopic should allow for “both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be this person…or to be that person’s audience.”, the latter is particularly important when watching Blonde. Emily is a beautiful depiction of female suffering, but it remains just that, beautiful. Emily doesn’t scare its audiences like Blonde does because it maintains a safe distance and level of subtlety that separates the viewer from Emily’s suffering. Perhaps it is the fear of female suffering in its immediate form that scares audiences the most. Even when we gain access to the biographical truth of suffering, as Freud claims, we simply don’t know how to use it. (Saffron Dale)

A columnist from The Pitt News discusses BookTok.

When I first came across this part of the BookTok community, I was intrigued, expecting the usual objections to “Lolita” ignoring Nabokov’s intentions, or Conrad and Brontë, for the inextricable racism in their novels, as most of the users are students who often read their novels in class. 

As per usual when it comes to TikTok, I was dead wrong. After a few days of watching these videos, I realized that this subgroup is just a bunch of people at each other’s throats about whether fictional infidelity is intrinsically wrong. While this particular brand of depressing media literacy is mostly limited to books that only the people with dogs in this fight would read, the premise that a book loses all credibility if an author is scandalous is quickly becoming more popular. A ridiculous list of “authors to avoid” circulated on Twitter recently, with Shakespeare and Anne Sexton on the same list as John Green and Stephanie Meyer, with their alleged problematic behavior listed. (Sofia Uriagereka-Herburger)

For Remembrance Sunday yesterday, AnneBrontë.org had a post on 'Captain Arthur Branwell And The Brontë Miniatures'.