Alethea's Reviews > Jane Eyre

I had read this novel once before, a long time ago, but I didn't really remember much about it except the faintest impression of its plot line and that I hadn't been very keen on it. Laid up in bed with a bad cold, I thought I might as well try again!

Overall, I would say I found it an interesting and gripping read, but I don't really sympathise with its spirit. It's probably too Gothic for my tastes! I would definitely read it again, but for its setting, its interesting characters, its evocative & readable prose, rather than because I like its message and conclusions.

(***SPOILER ALERT*** SPOLIERS BELOW! ***)

WHAT I LIKED:
I really admire Charlotte Bronte's writing style. It's clear but mature and musical. I noted down quite a lot of interesting, new (to me) words while reading. That said, the amount of purple prose at times felt irritating, and - on a first read - interrupted the pace of the novel at times (e.g. the beginning of the orchard scene). It might be that so much description would be less annoying on a second read, though, when I'm not caught up in wondering what will happen next.

Bronte also had a real talent for inventing characters who are all different, believable and interesting. This is a rare ability, and I am full of admiration for how every character who walked onto the page for more than a moment was 3D, different from the other characters, and so interesting in their own right that you wouldn't have minded hearing more about their story. For example, I thought the point where Jane left Thornfield would have been boring, but actually the new setting and cast of characters were so fascinating I wished she had given them more space.

Her depictions of nature and animals, her love of the British countryside and evocative descriptions of it changing in different seasons and weathers, is absolutely wonderful, almost unparalleled amongst novels I've read.

The pace of the novel is good and the plotline well constructed. Sometimes with Classic novels, I find myself getting bored and bogged down, but that didn't happen at all here - I desperately wanted to keep reading and was a little sorry to find myself at the end.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE SO MUCH:
My main gripe with this novel is that, although Edward Fairfax de Rochester (what a Gothic name!) is a very interesting character, I was far from convinced that he was a good match for the main character, and annoyed by how the novel tries to get the reader to minimise his bad points and inflate his good ones. I think, perhaps, his character has not aged well - his faults are heavier to the twenty-first reader than the nineteenth-century one. To the modern reader, he comes across as emotionally abusive (with the threat of physical abuse, as well, at the point where he tries to convince Jane to stay) and narcissistic. He is utterly absorbed in his own wishes, desires, feelings, and experiences. Even with Jane, whom he loves as deeply as he can love anyone, his interests throughout the novel are almost always focused on what use she is to him (he sees her as his sole saviour) rather than what is genuinely best for her. In fact, although the obvious mad character in the novel is his wife, he himself comes across as unbalanced, almost insane, as is apparent when Jane fears what he will do in their farewell scene, and also in his overblown emotional language, which she clearly finds uncomfortable in some way and tries to moderate - their conversation in the woods at the end of the novel is a case in point.

Meanwhile, Jane has a co-dependent streak, unsurprisingly given her childhood experience. She is therefore unable to see that, at just 18/19, it's not a good idea to marry an older man, with a very selfish personality, who is dictatorial and controlling, doesn't like children - even his own, enjoys hurting other people's feelings if he feels they deserve it, and utterly obsessed with her and the concept that she will save him from himself. It's an obviously unhealthy relationship, and, even though I remembered the ending from before, I wished she would use the common sense she showed in rejecting her cousin to reject Rochester as well and wait to find a kind, loving, emotionally-healthy person. It's completely believable that an 18-year-old would think that the wrong person is ideal for them, and that after just a year apart they would believe that they'll never love again and never meet anyone who will love them again. What I found irritating was that the reader was supposed to see the relationship between Jane and Rochester as a wonderful romance rather than a tragic mistake.

One also gets the impression that Charlotte Bronte was pretty narrow-minded, even for her day, about ethnicities and cultures other than her own. Rochester (and the novel) also has a subtle but pervasive racist trait as well - this comes across most clearly when he says that, in seeking a mistress, he was looking for the complete opposite of 'the creole' (his hated first wife being from a mixed-race family). The West Indies is depicted as an exotic but undesirable location. Adele's faults are sometimes attributed to her being French, e.g. 'a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects'. The harsh and unsympathetic John Rivers is seen as the right character for evangelising the peoples of India. Etc. She also, very clearly, hates Roman Catholicism, for example Jane pities Eliza for choosing to be 'walled up' in a convent. Actually, a monastic life would probably have done Eliza a lot of good - teaching her the importance of tolerance and unselfishness in a close community life, giving her role models and instructors who would teach her to direct her desires for rules and routines in more helpful ways, and so on. Maybe she became Mother Superior because she learnt so much, spiritually & emotionally, from her time in a monastic community and changed! (Obviously that is not what Bronte wants us to conclude, though!)

This perspective is all rather modern, of course, you might say. And generally I'm not in favour of judging historical novels/works too harshly by modern standards, because they are products of their time, and if we expected every novel we enjoyed to conform perfectly to modern tastes then we would never be able to read any Classic works at all. (And, what would future generations, with their own tastes, make of our novels? We would end up with every generations binning the works of those before, simply because they were not up-to-date enough.) However there were many people, including novelists and thinkers, of Charlotte Bronte's generation who would have held similar views, albeit not expressed in the same modern, psychological terminology. (The examples below are just a few, or this will be a ridiculously long review!) In terms of more healthy marriages and balanced heroes, Jane Austen's work makes fun of Gothic novels, and her male heroes are fairly well-balanced, unselfish, rational good sorts. Equally, Trollope's heroes are, similarly, generally pretty sane and not bad husbands for the period (e.g. think of the heroes of Framley Parsonage), although more realistic and less idealised than Austen's. And Gaskill's heroes, while starting off with understandable human imperfections, do grow, mature, and recognize many of their mistakes and change in the light of them. In terms of less racist attitudes, Mansfield Park contains a passing criticism of the slave trade, and one of Austen's unfinished novels features a mixed-race young woman. (I'm not saying that Austen would have held modern views about race, but that by no means everyone of Bronte's era held to such strong racist stereotypes as comes through at points in the plotline of Jane Eyre.) And Alexander Dumas was himself from a mixed-race background. I have a vague memory that Roger in Wives and Daughters had (for his day) a relatively sympathetic and appreciative view of the indigenous peoples of the places he visited, although I may be remembering that. Finally, lots of British novelists of the period were more sympathetic to Catholicism than Bronte was - the rabid British anti-Catholicism of past centuries was fast declining. It seems that Bronte's rigid views were passé even for her day, which is probably not surprising given her remote upbringing and somewhat secluded life.

Finally, oh, the Gothic drama! Extreme weather ad nauseum mirroring human events. Strange, supernatural events. Heroines fainting and crying. Ridiculous degrees of coincidence e.g. Jane just happening, of all the doorsteps in the country, to end up on that belonging to her long-lost cousins! The whole plotline, to be honest, was a bit over the top: cruel family mistreats orphan; wicked boarding school kills her consumptive only friend; brooding wealthy gentleman concealing mad, biting, foreign wife in attic; innocence young girl almost tricked into bigamy and then nearly dies of starvation; wife - after numerous almost murders- burns mansion house down and almost kills herself; husband survives blind and disabled; but, supernatural event re-unites the star-crossed lovers who henceforth live happily ever after.