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Virginia
Woolf writing about
Jane Eyre
in the Times Literary Supplement in 1916:
“The writer
has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what
she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her.
...we read Charlotte Brontë...for her poetry. Probably that
is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering
personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to
open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some
untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of
things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to
observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades
and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct
of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate
passions. It makes them poets....”
Judi Dench
plays Mrs, Fairfax, the housekeeper
And the
strange poetry that is
Jane Eyre
is inextricably bound up in the fact that it is, at heart, a
Cinderella story.
“Last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half
a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse....”
Rochester calls Jane a witch, a sorceress, a mocking changeling -
fairy-born and human-bred, a pale little elf, says her people are
the men in green (fairies). And like every good fairy tale
there is the bookish, headstrong, and opinionated orphan; the
cruel aunt and cousins; the bleak moors; the harsh boarding
school; and then, the great house with its tower-tops and
battlements (Thornfield Hall, and one mustn’t forget that
Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton). The meeting of
Rochester and Jane: a great dog gliding by in the gloaming that
reminds her of the
Gytrash, a tall steed, a rider – man and horse
down on the slippery ice. She is the one to help him up, and
he is to say to her later, when she is his preserver, again.
“I
knew you would do me good in some way, at some time...I have heard
of good genii:--there are grains of truth in the wildest fable."
And it
wouldn’t be quite a fairy tale if there wasn’t an ogre (here the
mad wife locked up in the attic), if there had been no wild flight
away from Thornfield and a separation of the lovers. Even as a
child, to Jane:
"...'Rasselas' looked dull to my trifling taste; I saw nothing
about fairies, nothing about genii; no bright variety spread over
the closely printed pages.”
And then there is the allusion to
“...a certain little French story-book which Madame Pierrot had
that day shown me.”
Pierrot close
enough to Perrault, this is Cinderella made more dramatic by
adding a few stones from Bluebeard’s castle, a rose from Beauty
and the Beast. It’s a fairy tale that ends with
“Reader, I
married him.”
Cary Fukunaga
(left) on the set of Jane Eyre
Cary
Fukunaga’s
Jane Eyre, inspired by childhood memories of his mother
watching the 1944 film starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine,
takes liberties with the novel at times--all the better perhaps to
serve the film’s own poetic vision. The sunlight is never
quite yellow here--the wild trackless moors are washed in a
Gothic-Romantic blue-grey light and interiors are revealed only by
the luminous glow of candles at night. Everything serves to
propel one along, headlong and breathless, and the film is a creature both
of and separate from the novel. An excuse perhaps, to curl
up with the book again....
See:
Jane Eyre
Read:
Jane Eyre,
Charlotte Brontë
Tags: film
literature language
books love england
Romantic
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"Tell me, now, fairy as you are, - can't you give me a charm, or a
philter, or something of that sort, to make me a handsome man?"
"It would
be past the power of magic, sir...."
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