Pride, Prejudice and Popcorn
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Just copying that out makes me so overwrought that I have to go run around the block and then lie down. All of what makes Jane awesome is crystallized in this stunning scene. Sing it, sister.
Chapters XXIV–XXVIII: Disaster!
Rochester turns out to be even more patronizing as a fiancé than he was an employer, and Jane has her hands full trying to keep their relationship grounded as he keeps trying to dress her up like a very rich, fancy doll. Finally the wedding day comes, but who should appear but Mr. Mason, who objects to the wedding on the grounds that Rochester has a mad wife locked in the attic at Thornfield. This does, in fact, turn out to be true (she was the source of the laughter, the fire, and the copious bleeding) so the wedding is off. Rochester claims that he was tricked into marrying the madwoman, whose name is Bertha, and once her madness progressed to an unbearably awful point, he brought her to Thornfield to be cared for as well as possible.
Rochester begs Jane to stay with him. In a heartrending passage, he explains his history with Bertha, and he begs Jane’s forgiveness for keeping Bertha a secret. Then, in a move that is both heartbreaking and incredibly whiny and dick-ish, he tells Jane that she must stay with him, because otherwise, he would be so sad that he would have no choice but to fall into dissolute ways again. Jane is wracked with heartbreak but still sensible enough to point out that neither she nor Rochester is doomed to dissolution; they can both separately endure, and they can choose to live decent lives. Still, Jane is terribly tempted to stay with Rochester, both for her sake and his own. She believes that if she becomes his mistress he will come to despise her, but she also thinks that she should save his life, thinking of her own, “Who in the world cares for you?” At which she answers herself:
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself (239).
Chapters XXIX–XXXV: In which Jane flees Thornfield, becomes rich, acquires relatives and is hit on by a pastor.
Jane wanders the moors and almost starves to death before being taken in by two sisters, Mary and Diana, and their brother, St. John Rivers, a pastor who is planning to go to India as a missionary. Jane gives her name as Jane Eliot, and St. John gives her a job teaching in the village school. This is a long, slow section but here’s what’s important:
1. St. John finds out that Jane Eliot is Jane Eyre, and that Jane Eyre is, in fact, an heiress. Remember that uncle that Aunt Reed mentioned? The one who wanted to adopt Jane? Well, he died and left Jane a huge fortune.
2. The reason St. John knows this is that they are cousins. Jane is, to St. John’s confusion, considerably more overjoyed by learning that she has relatives than by learning that she is rich, and she gives most of the money to her newfound family, although this still leaves a generous amount for herself. She is now financially independent for life.
3. St. John proposes to Jane because he wants a companion to join him when he goes to India, and for propriety’s sake they must be married. When Jane protests that she does not love St. John in a romantic way, nor does he love her, and that being in a marriage of convenience to him in a harsh physical environment would both physically and emotionally destroy her, he pretty much asserts that her life should be sacrificed to God. But Jane has some practice with people telling her not to value her own life or happiness, and she continues to decline St. John’s proposals. After much effort on his part, though, she wavers—until she thinks she hears Rochester calling her name, and she takes off to find him.
Chapters XXXVI–XXXVIII: Reader, I married him.
When Jane gets to Thornfield, it has burned down. She discovers that Bertha escaped the attic again and set fire to the house. Rochester got all the servants out and then tried to save Bertha. She jumped from the roof, died, and launched a thousand feminist essays and works of revisionist fiction (most notably, the excellent but depressing Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, and The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar). Rochester survived the fire but lost one hand and became blind in one eye. Jane finds him and engages in some hilarious repartee as, in an attempt to tease him out of melancholy, she tries making him jealous for a change. They get married, have a baby, find a school for Adele that is close enough to allow for regular visits (boarding schools are the norm at that time, but Jane makes sure that Adele’s school is not Lowood 2.0) and enjoy Jane’s new extended family. The end.
The Big Picture
For any film adaptation to be successful in my eyes, it must touch on the central themes of the book. I don’t care how many details change as long as these things are apparent:
1. Jane maintains her sense of self-respect against all those who disparage her. She clings to a sense that although she should live to a high standard of ethics and of service to others, her own life is important and worthwhile and must not be thrown away. Although the most quoted line in the book is, “Reader, I married him,” the most important line, and the one that has caused the book to be adored for centuries, is “Do you think that 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!”
2. During most of the book, Jane is lonely and frustrated. She longs for both family and adventure, or at least a sense that her life has some importance or meaning. She is quiet and lacks self-confidence, but is smart and funny.
3. Jane has a strong sense of morality and a strong sense of spirituality, which is expressed in both Christian and supernatural terms.
4. There are actual reasons why Rochester is attractive to Jane. Much like my synopsis, many adaptations leap from event to event and skip most of Jane’s conversations with Rochester. Judging from events, Rochester is a shithead. While his shitty qualities cannot be denied, those long passages of conversation reveal two people who like each other’s senses of humor, who respect each other (more or less—Rochester veers from genuinely respecting Jane to thinking she is his “pet lamb”), and who are good companions. Any adaptation should show that Jane and Rochester have great chemistry and that they are great companions for each other. We should root for them because they seem to be kindred spirits, not because they are the only single people for miles around.
5. Despite their chemistry, there are also actual reasons for Jane to stay the hell away from Rochester. In addition to the social gulf between them, there’s the pesky fact that’s he’s often an asshole to her. Jane is completely dependent on him for her livelihood as well, a fact that he exploits every time he orders her to talk to him. She is good and honest and he loves this about her, yet he rewards her for these virtues by playing vicious mind games with her and forcing her to endure public humiliation by his houseguests.
Also, in the book, Rochester is forty years old to Jane’s eighteen (and their romance isn’t a case of outdated values—even Mrs. Fairfax thinks Rochester is too old for Jane).
So why on Earth do we long for Jane to end up with Rochester? Although I consider this book to be an early romance novel, it differs from the genre in one crucial aspect, and that is that the romance is not really the point. We care about Jane. We are Team Jane, all the way, and if being with Rochester will make her happy, by golly, that’s what we want for her. If what she wanted to become a pirate queen, then that’s what we would care about. We just want Jane to be happy.
6. The point of the story is not that Jane gets married. The point is that Jane marries Rochester as his equal. At the end of the book she has not only romantic love but also independent financial security, and family and friends who she respects and who respect her. Additionally, Rochester respects and loves her as a person and not a pet, and she loves him as a husband and not a master.
If Jane had married Rochester at the midpoint of the book, and never found out about the insane wife in the attic, then it would not have been a happy ending even though Jane and Rochester would be together and Jane would have married rich, just like Cinderella. The Rochester she was originally engaged to, the one who tried to dress her up and called her his pet lamb, would not have made Jane happy. Jane has to gain the independence and sense of belonging that she craves, and Rochester has to learn to respect Jane.
The triumph of Charlotte Brontë is that she manages to convince many, probably most, readers that the Rochester we see at the end of the book really will be one with which Jane can have a happy life. Rochester has to change, and so does Jane, but once that happens, he can truly be her life’s companion.
7. Jane Eyre is a gothic story. It’s not as gothic as Wuthering Heights, which out-gothics everything pretty much ever, but Jane is pretty darn gothic. Jane spends a lot of time wandering around creepy halls with a candle. She shares these creepy halls with a mysterious being who cackles evilly and bites people, and who turns out to be an insane woman who is locked in the attic and likes to escape and set fire to people’s beds. Jane is dependent in every possible way on a mysterious and domineering (and sexually attractive) employer. She is so isolated that an escape attempt from the bizarre estate of Thornfield almost causes her to die of starvation as she wanders the blustery moors. No matter how sun-drenched an adaptation of Jane Eyre may be, it should strive to convey that sense of menace, mystery, melodrama and isolation.
Anyone who wishes to adapt the novel has two major challenges. One is that although the novel is not unusually long, there’s an awful lot in it, and some of the stuff that is the least cinematic (long conversations) is the most thematically important. The other is that Jane narrates the novel. Although she speaks fairly little, we hear her thoughts constantly. This is an obvious challenge to a scriptwriter, who has to communicate all Jane’s thoughts to the audience without turning her into a chatterbox.
So, let’s see how well these adaptations do with conveying the central themes of this complex book.
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