Trinity News chats to Betsy Cornwell about her book
Reader, I Murdered Him. As you can gather from that title, she's no fan of Mr Rochester.
Historically, many classic texts for young adults have followed the same trend. When rereading Jane Eyre during Ford’s hearings, author Betsy Cornwell had a sinking feeling. She recognised this story as a harmful twist on a tale as old as time, a narrative romanticising abuse.
When I spoke to Cornwell last month, she explained how she became disillusioned with Jane Eyre. Firstly, she always saw Mr. Rochester as a villain rather than a romantic hero. She recalls: “I experienced it as a very scary gothic story much more than as a sort of aspirational romance,” which is understandable given that the supposed hero keeps his wife locked in the attic. Dismissed as mad, this woman poses a dangerous threat to the novel’s domestic ending. The titular protagonist, though clever, can only find fulfilment, as in a fairy tale, when she is uplifted from poverty by her unpleasant husband. [...]
Likewise, Cornwell wrote her young adult re-version of Jane Eyre, Reader I Murdered Him, to challenge the novel’s portrait of women having their identities irrevocably linked to their passive dependency on male figures. Instead, her characters embrace different sexual identities – and kill domineering and abusive men. The word ‘slay’ has suddenly been endowed with new resonance.
Like fairytales, classical texts have been ingrained into our heads over repeated readings in secondary school and college. Inevitably, so are societal norms. Cornwell recalls: “ I think Jane Eyre or the works of Jane Austen have almost become fairy tales in the way they exist in our cultural consciousness.” Considering this influence, she felt very uncomfortable with Jane’s limited capabilities for individual expression posited by the novel. She says: “Every time I reread it [Jane Eyre], I came at it with all of these feelings … anger really and resistance to the text even as I really admired it and its complexity and brilliance.” Her primary objection to the novel was the misleading narrative that the text reinforces through the narrow contrivance of the ‘happy ending’ and Jane’s eventual acceptance of Mr. Rochester despite his gaslighting and manipulation.
Writing her version of events was a cathartic experience for Cornwell. Instead of a docile plot device, Mr. Rochester’s adopted daughter, Adele, is depicted as a bisexual vigilante who exacts justice for women limited by the patriarchal marriage plot. These demands resonated with Cornwell because, as a young person in a serious relationship during college, Cornwell felt “claustrophobic” and trapped by a similar pressure to settle down in a heterosexual relationship. She refers to the imagery of Sylvia Plath’s branching tree, where societal expectations of womanhood limit every path.
Analysing the unhealthy dynamic between Rochester and Jane, Cornwell also dismantles the overly simplistic power dynamics construed by fairy tales. She says: “There is no perfect ‘victim’ … There is so much hyper fixation on how victims of violence respond to that violence and hyperfixation on being the perfect fit victim. If there’s anything wrong with you, you can’t stand up for yourself, or you don’t deserve protection or justice.” Her heroine struggles but is ultimately unrepentant about killing the abusers of women who have been wronged, subverting the moral shame often associated with tales of female revenge and those seeking justice for themselves. On the other hand, Jane is depicted as an intelligent woman in a relationship with an abuser, which also displays that anyone, regardless of intelligence and overall life experience, can end up in these relationships.
Simultaneously an abuser and father figure, Mr. Rochester’s characterisation upsets the standard, and deeply flawed, abuse narrative. Cornwell says processing abuse that happens to you is often difficult because rather than two-dimensional monsters who are abusers, it is people and “it’s statistically far more likely to be people you care about than strangers.” She muses that it is how we “distance ourselves from the idea of abuse and violence by thinking that only monsters perpetuate it … Mr. Rochester turns out to be fairly monstrous, but I didn’t want him not to be a human being.” The author refers to the difficulty of coming forward based on her own experience and why it takes people a long time to come forward because “you probably care about the person who hurt you. And second of all, they’re human beings too.” (Jayna Rohslau)
So it all boils down to. Jane Eyre meets Promising Young Woman. And while it's great that Jane Eyre is a neverending source of ideas, whether in favour or against it, we would also like to point out that violence and murder are never justifiable, however righteous you might think they are. And having the Jane-inspired character exact revenge on Rochester and being 'ultimately unrepentant about killing' is not necessarily a better message than Rochester keeping Bertha in the attic. Violence is not empowering or feminist--it's a highly patriarchal response, actually.
Could you provide an overview of your book and your inspirations for writing it?
My biggest life event was moving from Sudan to Scotland with two children at the age of 26. Most of the novels I write are about women away from home. That became the subject that fascinated me and I got very interested in the work of Jean Rhys, who wrote about women drifting in Europe on their own. She’s most famous for “Wide Sargasso Sea.” She wrote the whole novel from the point of view of “The ‘Mad Woman’ in the Attic” from “Jane Eyre.”
She picked up a character from a classic and told us about this character — how she was a woman of color, how she came from the West Indies islands, and how she was exploited. Everybody who reads “Jane Eyre” sees her as an impediment in the plot, but then Jean Rhys makes her into the heroine of her novel. (Emma Kozina)
Ultimately, where the notion of “we could all be perfect if we just tried a little harder” is replaced by Jane Eyre’s “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” (Clare Jenkins)
"Unreclaimed, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.”
Was Catherine referring to Heathcliff, the original toxic hero, or the moors, the dark, boggy surrounds that set the tone for almost all that happens in Wuthering Heights?
Published in 1847, Emily Brontë’s only novel traces the life of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, and their turbulent relationships with Heathcliff, a foundling who becomes the Earnshaws’ foster son.
Initially published under the pen name Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights impressed and appalled early reviewers with its sexual passion. This became even more pronounced when it was known that it was written by a young woman who had led a sequestered life – by the moors. (Teja Lele)
A contributor to
The Telegraph claims that kids only need to learn what they like and are good at:
Start as you mean to go on. Not fiddle about with exams young people don’t want to sit. For a child who hates maths, the idea of being force fed numbers (bonjour kids, time for your co-ordinate geometry gavage!) past GCSE is the stuff of nightmares. And for STEM kids, instinctively drawn to science, the prospect of ploughing through Jane Eyre would feel like an unspeakable punishment. I know this because as the mother of two daughters, I have one of each. (Judith Woods)
How great it will be to have adults who can only do or are interested in what they enjoy and find easy. 'No, I don't go to art galleries because I was a STEM kid and am only instinctively drawn to science'. 'No, I don't read books because I was a STEM kid and reading feels like an unspeakable punishment'. 'No, I can't work out whether I'm being short-changed in this shop because I love Jane Eyre'. The more kids learn, the better.
People in Bradford are still angry at Lee Anderson's so-called 'light-hearted joke' ('Mr Anderson, the Conservative Party's deputy chair and MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, replied: "Would you want to get there quicker?"') and keep furiously listing all the good things in the area, including the Brontës of course, such as in this article from
The Telegraph and Argus.
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