Another generation of freedom fighters becoming Eyreheads

In the wake of China's decision to make Jane Eyre compulsory reading for teenagers, Hannah Betts from The Telegraph thinks that 'Jane Eyre is a dating manual for the modern era – but not in the way you think'.

When Emerald Fennell released her cartoonish take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she explained its squishy, S&M silliness as being an adolescent fever dream. Yet, if teenage rebellion were the aim, that other Brontë novel of 1847 might have made a more likely candidate. I refer, of course, to sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre: that manual for how a young woman might live – and love – independent of social norms.

This is why news that the text has been made compulsory for Chinese 14 and 15-year-olds comes as something of a surprise. The Communist Party made clear that this is to steer “the innocent, budding stage of first love”. So Brontë’s classic is now a conformist dating manual.

One wonders whether anyone in President Xi’s regime has read the novel. From the moment Jane fights back against her tyrannical male cousin, toeing the party line is emphatically not our heroine’s thing.

Instead, Brontë’s tale is one of constant rebellion against the conventions of love, work, society – whatever worldly authority is imposed. Contemporary critics linked the narrative to the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Jane was not only a proto-feminist, but a red under the chaise longue. However, she would be just as likely to rebel against the Five-star Red Flag as she would the domestic autocrat.

This, after all, is a heroine who proclaims: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart! … I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are!”

The man she addresses is rich and powerful; her employer has cross-dressed to flirt with her, while concealing his wife in the loft. It’s complicated, as contemporary parlance goes. Yet, what is never complicated – or compromised – is Jane’s autonomy.

The first and foremost lesson our roving rebel gives us is to love – or rather respect – oneself. In her life’s great crisis, beset by the thought “Who in the world cares for you?”, comes the “indomitable” cry: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” A woman who has been haunted by beggary chooses vagrancy rather than terms she cannot accept.

Still, Jane determines that she will be loved body, brain and soul – or not at all. When offered the passionless union proposed by priggish St. John Rivers, she refuses to countenance such emotional deprivation. Rivers is what Love Island contestants refer to as “good on paper”, but intolerable in the sack.

Instead, Jane’s devotions are to, first, another female (the doomed Helen Burns); second, a man who married for money, abandoned a vulnerable wife, shagged his way around Europe, attempted bigamy, and was rendered maimed and vulnerable.

Behold, another love lesson: the right person, may be she/he that society deems wrong. Cathy baulks at Heathcliff. Jane embraces a castrated Byronic hero: mastering her master in a domesticity in which they can at last be equals.

When Jane declares: “Reader, I married him,” it is a triumph of radical self-assertion. Chinese educationalists may believe they’re signing up for Victorian values. However, in Brontë’s moral bruiser, they’re getting a counter-cultural heroine who would have no truck with Marxist-Leninist axioms or Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream”.

And how glorious this will prove: another generation of freedom fighters becoming Eyreheads.

The Indian Express makes a similar point: 'Beijing doesn’t get it – Jane Eyre is no model for domesticity'.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an unlikely heroine for a state seeking to teach young women a moderate face of feminism and the value of domesticity. Plain, financially constrained, lacking in social capital she might be, but Brontë’s heroine wasn’t short on self-awareness. She declares, “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.”

It is probably this insistence on equality that has lent the novel such appeal in China since it was first introduced in translation in the early 1920s. Now, however, the Chinese state has made it mandatory reading for ninth-grade students, arguably for quite different reasons: Beijing is waging an uphill campaign against plummeting birth and marriage rates. A 19th-century romance, with its promise of true love and a value system oriented towards home and hearth, could work as useful propaganda. In this modernist state re-reading, Eyre is rebellious, but not irredeemably so; independent, but not averse to settling down; outspoken, but unmistakably feminine. She is proof that a woman can have a mind of her own without turning her back on the domestic.

And yet, there are postscripts to this reading. Marriage at the end of Jane Eyre is undergirded by clarity. Eyre walks away from it when staying would have meant becoming lesser, unequal. Only later, with an inheritance of her own and the independence it guarantees, does she return to Rochester. Love becomes, in Brontë’s telling, a choice, not a surrender. Perhaps that is the lesson young readers will take away from it.

But Why Tho? reviews the new adaptation of East of Eden we get the mandatory dig at Wuthering Heights 2026.

Where “Wuthering Heights” left me angry, this Netflix Original has restored my faith in adapting classic literature. (Kate Sánchez)

Vulture also reviews East of Eden but mentions Wide Sargasso Sea instead.

How could any contemporary adaptation of East of Eden not linger on Cathy? After decades of perspective-shifting literary retellings like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Mists of Avalon and the current trend of feminist Greek myths, Cathy is an enigma begging for some traumatic backstory to staple her flaws together. (Kathryn VanArendonk)