“Jane Eyre”

It’s a funny feeling when you know well some tropes and contexts, but you’ve been reluctant to read its source material for years. Rich guys with with a past. Ordinary heroines one can feel represented by. Mysterious mansions. Dark secrets which will be revealed sooner or later. Of course I’ve read about it in so many books! But only having read “Jane Eyre” I could see where its beginning (probably) lies. I read it and I liked it to my own surprise. I’d already known the reteling-prequel by Jean Rhys and I was really afraid that the original would be boring and biased. It wasn’t boring and it wasn’t as biased as I’d feared.

So, everybody knows the plot, right? Jane Eyre, once a mistreated orphan, is a young governor finding a job at Thornfield, whose owner is the mysterious Mr. Rochester, a haughty and dubious love interest. What she doesn’t know is that he had a wife, a Carribean Creole called Bertha Mason, locked at the attic. The truth comes out on the day of Jane and Rochester’s wedding, and thus she leaves, finding her place in the house of a conceited pastor. There she learns that there was a fire at Thornfield which killed Bertha and destroyed the house, and made Mr. Rochester blind. Only then Jane is reconciled with him and agrees to marry him.

But there’s more to this story than excusing your 1820s bad boy and villyfying a woman with mental health problems. There’s also more to this than the dreariness of an orphan’s life and than religious allegories pervading the text. For I think that “Jane Eyre” deserves a new interpretation, an interpretation which would praise the tropes and fragments which are still surprisingly accurate and examine the ones which have aged not-so-well. For me, it was an amalgmam of surprises actually, and it was so on so many levels.

The first thing is that we may often think about Jane and Mr. Rochester as of a modern love story, but it is by no means so. She is eighteen and he is twenty years her senior, and has a tween girl in his care, a girl who is his former lover’s child but not his own. Did those things shocked me? Yes, they did. I wouldn’t have supposed that Charlotte Bronte wrote so openly about the things Jane Austen would only suggest: About a man who used to have extramarital affairs and who could have illegitimate children. Mr. Rochester is quite open about it and he even talks with Jane about his past. It’s very different from what we get at Austen’s; and at Dickens’ too. And although the double standards aren’t called out, not openly, we learn that Mr. Rochester now seeks a more stable and genuine commitment. He is mysterious and enticing, but unlike in so many romance novels, he isn’t praised for having been a womanizer. However, the gap of experience adds to the gap of age here. There are stories where there’s an age gap while two characters are both adult enough. This isn’t “Jane Eyere”‘s case. From our perspective, it’s hard to see this love story as something romantic and ageless. Mr. Rochester is Jane’s employer, he’s also a person who holds so much power for so many other reasons. Charlotte Bronte is aware of it to a point, which makes some conversations in the story… kinky. Don’t worry, though. This isn’t the “Fifty Shades of Grey” kinkiness. I wouldn’t be able to love a person twenty years my senior and I think that, actually, many other readers can’t imagine it for themselves either.

This is that kind of novel which I don’t need to agree with on every page and every time, but there are still some problematic things which make me more disappointed than outraged. We can’t avoid it: The question of Bertha Mason.

The whole thread made me sad. But it also made me appreciating the work of Jean Rhys in “Wide Sargasso Sea” even more. How deliberate it was, and how contradicting Bronte’s vision… Once I thought that while reading Bertha Mason/Antoinette Cosway as a mixed-race person is legit when it came to “Wide Sargasso Sea” but not in the case of “Jane Eyre”. It was, of course, before reading the latter. I’ve read it, and I can see now why so many people see her as racially coded. It isn’t direct, it is even more implicit than Rhys’ allusions. But it’s definitely there, and as it is often with coding, it’s the opposite of representation. Bertha Mason is wicked, immoral, mad. She is the anti-Jane, your pious if even still strong-willed protagonist. She is vampiric. She is alien. She is the Other. And no matter if Charlotte Bronte genuinely regretted this portrayal, it is still sad. That’s also why “Wide Sargasso Sea” is so important. It gives Antoinette/Bertha her name back. It gives her back her voice, her identity. The possibility of being mixed-race isn’t ominous here, it’s rather an element of a tragic conflict. At Rhys’, Antoinette is a human being. At Bronte’s, she is a monster. Does it mean that “Jane Eyre” is an evil book and there’s nothing there which can be still meaningful to us? It doeasn’t. It hust shows how prevalent some stereotypes and fears where in the early Victorian era. And that we should avoid them nowadays.

In the end, if I have to tell you why this book still deserves to be named a classic, it wouldn’t be for the suspense and romance stuff. It would be for the main characters, believable in their drawbacks and dreams alike. It would be for showing the problems which are still alarming, the question of children’s neglect and school abuse. It would be for the style which, even if quaint at times, is still touching and captivating. It would be for the zeal and the soul. It isn’t a book you need to always agree with. It’s a book whose author was sincere at what she was doing. And that’s why it’s worth to give “Jane Eyre” a try.