No laughing matter

This is talk which was given recently at the CFP: Adapting In and Out of the Classroom: The Third LFA/AAS online conference (22-24 February, 2024);

Antonija Primorac

No laughing matter? Teaching the Byronic aspects of Jane Eyre with the Help of Adaptations 

Adapting in and Out of the Classroom, Newark (DE), United States of America

In her classic feminist analysis of Jane Eyre, “Plain Jane’s Progress”, Sandra M. Gilbert pointed out that Charlotte Brontë’s novel upset its contemporaries in 1847 “not so much by the proud, Byronic sexual energy of Rochester as by the Byronic pride and passion of Jane herself, not so much by the asocial sexual vibrations between hero and heroine as by the heroine's refusal to submit to her social destiny” (1977: 780). Conveying this reading of the novel has been difficult in the classroom post #MeToo, primarily because Rochester is now often perceived as little more than a gaslighting manipulator. Locating Jane’s ‘Byronic pride and passion’ and Rochester as a Byronic hero in the text becomes even more complicated when adaptations are employed in the classroom, since adaptations invariably elide the novel’s literary intertexts to better suit its plot to the generic conventions of a romantic period drama. Namely, most screen adaptations omit Rochester’s long monologue from Chapter XXVII that provides him with a Byronic past and, instead, try to justify his behaviour to this wife; at the same time, they downplay Jane’s passion by depicting her as outwardly meek (1983; 1996; 1997; 2011). This brief paper will discuss the use of Kate Beaton’s humorous graphic novel adaptation Hark! A Vagrant (2009) and its seemingly light-hearted strips on Jane Eyre as a means for posing the difficult questions about the novel’s problematic feminism on the one hand and about the screen adaptations’ generic shoehorning of the novel into the romantic mould on the other.