Pride, Prejudice and Popcorn

Three great love stories that started it all…

Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights are three of the greatest novels in English literature. Now joining them is Pride, Prejudice and Popcorn, a decidedly different take on these classics. You will laugh with delight as you learn:

Join blogger and romance aficionado Carrie Sessarego (smartbitchestrashybooks.com) as she takes us to the movies with Jane and Liz and Cathy. In her own unique, hilarious style she discusses the books and the various movie and TV adaptations. Your living room will be graced by heartthrobs like Timothy Dalton (twice!), Colin Firth (he shows up twice, too!), Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy.

Whether you are in the mood for serious academic discussion or lighthearted snark, whether you prefer Regency romance or Gothic passion, and whether you prefer your love stories on the screen or on the page, this book has something for you.

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Dedication

To three generations of inspiring women: Phoebe, Mary and Linden. And to Glen, who always said I could.

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Jane Eyre: In Which Self-Respect Conquers All

Jane Eyre: The Book

The Big Picture

The Adaptations

The Final Scorecard

Part II: Pride and Prejudice: In Which Two People Learn Not to Trust Their First Impressions—and Society Is Much Pleased With the Result

Pride and Prejudice: The Book

The Big Picture

The Adaptations

The Final Scorecard

Part III: Wuthering Heights: Oh, There’s a Romance—but It’s not the One You’re Thinking Of

Wuthering Heights: The Book

The Big Picture

The Adaptations

The Final Scorecard

Part IV: They All Lived Happily Ever After (Unless They Were in Wuthering Heights): Final Comparisons and Conclusions

Part V: Special Features

Behind the Scenes with Charlotte Brontë

Behind the Scenes with Jane Austen

Behind the Scenes with Emily Brontë

Trivia

Playlist—Unofficial Music Connections

Part VI: Roll Credits

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

Introduction

Great books are notable for the fact that your relationships with them as a reader change over time. My relationships with Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights have changed dramatically as I’ve viewed the books through different philosophies and life experiences. They’ve also changed as I’ve watched film adaptations of the books. Some of these adaptations were marvelous, and some were dreadful, but all of them taught me something important about the books.

My relationship with Jane Eyre started when I was about ten years old. I had an aunt (a kind one, who in no way resembled Mrs. Reed) who had a lot of books. I used to crawl between the back of an easy chair and the floor-length window curtains and read. I read adult books because that’s what this aunt had on her shelves. So Jane and I became friends when I opened a book that had interesting pictures, only to discover another girl in the book’s pages, one who was about my size, and who was, likewise, hiding at the window with a book that was difficult to read but had good illustrations.

Jane and I grew up together, and as I became older, I became more interested in the romance. As a young woman, I tried to decide whether or not Rochester was a worthy hero, and I admired Jane for her determination to be free and respected. My relationship with Jane (the book) has become more analytical and critical as I’ve gotten older. I see it through a lens of class, gender, religion and my own more mature view of human relationships. My relationship with Jane (the character) remains fiercely loyal. My relationship with Jane, the book, and Jane, the character, began as a profoundly personal one, and it has stayed that way through thirty years of annual readings. Watching film adaptations of Jane has only reinforced this, even as it has highlighted things that I often overlooked—Jane’s longing to be part of a family, for instance, and how very, very cruel the manipulations of Rochester are. My ire is relentless against any adaptation that fails to address the power of Jane’s spirit and her refusal to settle for anything that undoes her self-respect. My admiration for any adaptation that gets it right is boundless!

My relationship with Pride and Prejudice began in high school when I had to read it for English class. Dear readers, it pains me to tell you that my plaintive complaint to my teacher was, “This book is boring! Nothing happens!” I perked up quite a bit when Lydia ran off with Wickham, but I must admit that Pride and Prejudice seemed dry to me for many years after. Like Charlotte Brontë, I felt that it was passionless and constrained:

I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice,” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses (Juliet Barker, “Letter from Charlotte Brontë to G. H. Lewis” In The Brontës, Wild Genius on the Moors [New York: Pegasus Books, 2012], 724–725)

What kept me interested in Pride and Prejudice was the passion of its fans. Much of my reading and writing involves fantasy and science fiction, and as a passionate fan of these genres, I am never more at home than I am when attending a Renaissance Faire or a science-fiction convention. Likewise, the serious Jane Austen fans, with their Regency Ball reenactments, fit right in to the idea that you can love something so passionately that you want to recreate it as closely as possible, as frequently as possible, with like-minded people. This kept me going back to the book, and every time I read it I liked it a little more, but I still didn’t really get what all these people were so excited about.

For me, it was the film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that opened up the book to me. My husband and I were watching one of the adaptations (I think Colin Firth had just come out of the lake) when he (my husband, not Colin Firth, although it’s easy to confuse them) said, “You know, this is just like science fiction. There’s an alien society, and it operates under a rigid social code, with a rigid hierarchy—one that we don’t fully understand. And they speak in this alien language, and everything is in code, so you have to work really hard to understand what’s going on.”

Triumph! Suddenly, I understood Pride and Prejudice! There was passion, and happiness, and despair, and all the other things that I had been missing, but it’s all in code, under the surface. As I watched actors use their bodies and faces to communicate, the words took on new meanings. Even when actors varied wildly in their interpretations of the text, it still helped me pick apart what was really being thought and communicated (usually not the same thing). I am now an ardent fan of Pride and Prejudice—I’m just sorry that it took me so long to get there.

Finally we come to my nemesis, Wuthering Heights. Prior to working on this project, I would have told you that I loathe Wuthering Heights. I didn’t merely dislike it—I hated it. Every time I would have to mention Wuthering Heights I would start channeling Madeline Kahn in Clue, “I hated her so much, I just…Flames. Flames, on the side of my face….” The one good thing I had to say about Wuthering Heights was that for something to raise my ire so completely it sure must have hit a nerve.

I think my problem with Wuthering Heights was that it has this cultural legacy as a romantic love story. When I read it again for this project, I tried to read it as though I had no preconceptions. And that’s when I discovered that it’s not a love story between Cathy and Heathcliff. It’s a horror story. But it’s also a story in which a secondary couple’s love heals everything, so it ends up being a romance after all, just not with the couple that we all think of when we think about Wuthering Heights. I’ve become a bit of a crazed evangelist about this interpretation. It’s become so obvious to me that I want to stand around on street corners wearing those big sandwich signs. Only, instead of saying “The End Is Near,” my sign would say, “Heathcliff and Cathy are horrible people who do not know the meaning of real love! But the social themes in Wuthering Heights are very important! So you should read this book, even though it will destroy your very soul!” (That’s a lot to fit on one sign, so I’ve tabled my literary-street-sign-activism project for the time being.)

Frankly, I’m not thrilled with the result of any of the Wuthering Heights adaptations. But my understanding of the book got better as I realized why I was so annoyed at the things they left out. Adaptations have a tendency to soften Cathy’s behavior so she is more of a sympathetic victim, and diminish the role of Cathy’s daughter and of Hareton. This helped me understand that the fact that Cathy has temper tantrums in the book is important. The fact that Heathcliff beats Isabella is important. The fact that Hareton and Cathy 2.0 think of each other’s well-being is important. If you emphasize the idea of Heathcliff and Cathy as a tragic romantic couple, you are missing the point of the story entirely, and, of course, most adaptations go for the romantic-couple angle.

I have become an ardent defender of Wuthering Heights, but not as a romance (or rather, not as a romance between Heathcliff and Cathy). I’ve become fascinated with how many topics the book takes on—class, gender, patriarchy, familial relationships, money, race, education, isolation and the legacy of child abuse from one generation to the next. Above all, by reading and watching and rereading the story of Hareton and Young Cathy again, I’ve grown to believe that this book is not even a tragedy. There’s a very redemptive story to be found here, about what happens when you choose to be as happy as you can, as fully realized a person as you can be, within even the most constrained circumstances, and when you are able to think about the needs of another person over your own.

I love all three of these books in many different ways, and I’m grateful to all the film adaptations that have opened up new aspects of them for me (yes, even the MTV version of Wuthering Heights). I hope readers of this work will enjoy the adaptations, and, above all, enjoy the original books!

What You’ll Find in This Book

In this book, I use film adaptations of Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights as a way to better understand the original books. So this book is not so much intended to be a set of reviews but rather a discussion about some of the different ways people have tried to interpret the novels and how those interpretations can illuminate our reading of them.

This book is not a comprehensive guide to the books’ TV and film adaptations, but I’ve tried to provide a sampling from different time periods and of different styles. All of the adaptations described in this book are currently fairly easy to find (I used Amazon.com, Netflix, and my beloved local library). I limited my reviews to TV and film adaptations as opposed to print adaptations and plays purely to limit the scope of this book.

So here’s what you’ll find in each of the main parts of this book:

• The Book. If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, go do that right away! Take your time! But even if you’ve read them, you might have forgotten about Jane’s obnoxious foster sisters, or just how many balls Lizzy attended, or that time that Heathcliff murdered a nest of baby birds because he was mad at Cathy (Gah! I hate him so much!). So this synopsis is intended to refresh your memory and tease out some of the important moments and themes of the books.

• The Big Picture: I’m not a purist when it comes to adaptations. Want to have Lizzy climb through a magic portal into a modern-day person’s bathroom or express herself by way of vlog? I’m cool with that. But I want adaptations to stay true to certain key themes and messages in the original books. In this section, I list what I consider those key points to be. A filmmaker can make those points in all kinds of ways, but I do not consider an adaptation to be successful unless it has covered these points.

• The Adaptations: And we’re off to the movies! Popcorn…check! Brownies…check! Wine and/or hot cocoa depending on your personal preference…check! Let’s do this!

• The Final Scorecard: This section lists some of the high and low points of the adaptations.

Then, following the discussions of the three books and their adaptations, I tie everything together and wrap it all up in the “Final Comparisons and Conclusions” section. Finally, as a bonus, a “Special Features” section is included providing “Behind the Scenes” biographies of Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, and a little bit of context as to how their work was received during their lifetimes. And what’s a “Special Features” section without trivia and a music playlist?

I hope my readers have as much fun reading this book as I did writing it. I wish we were all hanging out in a big living room, eating popcorn together and arguing about whether or not Heathcliff is really a romantic figure. (No! He’s not! Don’t even go there!) But since we can’t hang out in person, I wish you happy reading and happy watching!

Jane Eyre: The Book

Here’s the story of Jane Eyre, as told in the original novel by Charlotte Brontë. Before we begin, have you read the book? No? Go read it. I’ll wait.

Oh, good, you’re back. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Here’s the story:

Chapters I–X: In which Jane survives a miserable childhood and applies for a job.

Once upon a time there was an orphan who was raised by a cruel guardian (Aunt Reed) and tormented by her guardian’s evil children. This child, Jane Eyre, is first seen reading a book and immediately being whacked in the head with said book by her cousin. Thus does Jane instantly win our sympathies, for not only does her cousin try to give her a concussion, but he also loses her place. What an ass.

Jane tackles her cousin, the ass, and is promptly shut up in a room by Aunt Reed. It happens to be the same room in which Jane’s uncle had died, and Jane has a fit brought on by either her imagination or a visit from a ghost. Aunt Reed sends Jane away to Lowood Institution, a charitable school run by the vain and corrupt Mr. Brocklehurst. Some readers find this part of the story to be tiresome, but you can’t skip it, because here Jane finds two important mentors—Helen, a friend who teaches Jane about forgiveness and patience, and Miss Temple, who clears Jane of Mr. Brocklehurst’s accusations (he tells the other girls to shun her because she is a liar). Jane learns many valuable lessons at Lowood:

1. Hypocrisy is a bad thing. It is also a bad thing to either live your life in total self-indulgence or in total self-sacrifice (shown by the needless suffering of the Lowood students and the disgust with which Jane regards Mr. Brocklehurst’s spoiled, overdressed daughters).

2. If you simply rage bitterly all the time, you will destroy yourself. If you practice restraint and forgiveness, you will be more likely to find justice and you will certainly be happier.

3. It is very important to wash your hands frequently and to cover your mouth when you cough.

Alas, it is only my own wishful thinking at work with regard to number three. A typhus epidemic strikes Lowood, and Helen, who has been suffering from consumption all of this time, dies in Jane’s arms. With her final words, Helen reminds Jane of the glories of heaven. In almost every film adaptation, she does this while coughing directly into Jane’s face, as if to bring Jane along as quickly as possible. But Jane is made of tough stuff, and she does not contract typhus or consumption. She graduates from Lowood and works as a teacher there until she grows restless and applies for a position of governess at the remote Thornfield Hall.

Chapters XI–XV: In which Rochester appears.

Jane likes Thornfield well enough, although it is a confusing place, as gothic estates so often are. The first mystery is who everyone is—Mrs. Fairfax, who Jane assumes to be the owner, is in fact the housekeeper, and Adele is not Mrs. Fairfax’s daughter but is rather the ward of Rochester, who is absent. There’s also the mystery of the strange laughter Jane hears at night. Mrs. Fairfax blames this laughter on Grace Poole, a servant who doesn’t seem to do much except drink port.

Eventually Rochester shows up. In true gothic fashion, Jane is walking through the woods in the mist when Rochester almost runs over her (with his horse) and calls her a witch. The next day, Rochester tells Jane to have an after-dinner chat with him, as he is, evidentially, bored. Over the course of the next few weeks, Rochester and Jane have many talks, in which she forces him to use some semblance of decent manners toward her, and he tells her all about his past life of scandal, including the fact that his last mistress claimed that Adele was his daughter, an accusation he does not believe.

Jane and Rochester are drawn even closer when she saves his life. She is awakened by strange laughter, smells smoke, and follows it to Rochester’s room, where his bedclothes have caught on fire. Jane awakens Rochester by throwing water in his face, which leads to the hilarious line, “Is there a flood?” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [New York: Random House, 1943], 110). They put out the fire and he tells her to stay in his room. He leaves, comes back, and concludes the fire was probably caused by Grace Poole. Jane, ever the voice of reason, points out that maybe the homicidal, cackling, drunken maniac should be ordered to leave, but Rochester says not to worry, everything’s fine. He proceeds to gaze at Jane with such evident adoration that she freaks out, goes back to her room and stays awake all night in a state that will be painfully relatable to any of us who spent junior high school wondering if That Boy liked us, and if so, did he really like us, and if so, did he like us as more than a friend, or what? Alas for Jane, when she wakes up in the morning Rochester has gone to visit friends, at least one of which is gorgeous, single and female. Drat.

Chapters XVI–XXIII: In which Rochester is a total jerk, with happy results…or are they?

Rochester shows up at Thornfield with a group of rich, snobby people, including Blanche Ingram, the book’s Mean Girl. In a particularly cruel twist, Rochester order Jane to attend all the guests’ venomous little get-togethers, so that she can witness every second of flirtation between Blanche and Rochester himself. She’s also treated to rants about how useless and despicable governesses are.

Rochester leaves for a day, and while he’s gone, two strangers arrive. One is Mr. Mason, who claims to be a friend of Rochester’s. The other is a gypsy woman, who insists on telling everyone’s fortune. She tries to get Jane to admit that she (Jane) likes Rochester, but Jane won’t admit a thing. Kudos to Jane—because the gypsy woman turns out to be Rochester in disguise. Rochester is quite smug about his game until Jane mentions that a Mr. Mason has arrived. Rochester is horrified but with a great deal of moral support from Jane, he sallies back to the party looking cheerful as ever.

An aside: Readers, I love this book. I have a copy of it wrapped in plastic in my earthquake/flood/zombie-apocalypse emergency kit in case I have to restart civilization from scratch (I also have The Lord of the Rings and many, many ballpoint pens). But please do not date a guy who stages an elaborate plan to publicly humiliate you and make you jealous. Just don’t.

Later that night, everyone wakes up to the sound of screaming. Rochester sends everyone back to bed but has Jane come with him to a secret room where Mr. Mason is bleeding copiously. Jane has to sit alone with Mason, “sponging” the wound (apparently no one in the Victorian age knew about applying direct pressure) while Rochester fetches a doctor. With the dawn, Mason is smuggled off to the doctor’s place.

Not long afterward, Jane goes to visit Aunt Reed. She’s dying and has asked for Jane. Here we get another lesson about the problem with living life at one extreme or the other: of Aunt Reed’s three children, Eliza is about to become a nun, a path Jane views as something of a waste of Eliza’s formidable intellect; Georgiana is looking for a rich husband and is regarded by Jane as hopelessly frivolous; and John, the cousin who was an ass, is now a dead ass, having wasted his life and his money with gambling and drink. Jane forgives her aunt, and her aunt reveals that Jane has an uncle who had asked about Jane long ago and wanted to adopt her, but Aunt Reed, who hated Jane, told him Jane had died at Lowood. The aunt dies, and Jane goes back to Thornfield. This is such a tangent that many adaptations leave it out, but in addition to being thematically important, it sets up a later plot twist.

Jane tells Rochester that when he marries Blanche, she (Jane, not Blanche) will have to leave. More parties ensue until finally, there is great joy, for Rochester proposes to Jane! He was never going to marry Blanche! He was just trying to make Jane jealous! He adores her! Everyone is happy, except Blanche, who is still looking for a rich husband, and Mrs. Fairfax, who finds the entire situation to be appalling. Of course, before proposing, Rochester has to test Jane by making her jealous one last time and telling her she should stay at Thornfield even after he marries Blanche. It is here that Jane has her greatest, though not happiest, hour:

Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? A machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? 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! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. 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 (190)!