The latest movie adaptation of Jane Eyre is slowly rolling out nationally via art-house theaters, but the plot of Charlotte Brontë’s three-volume novel remains wonderfully commercial.
The spookily pale Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) plays the poor but plucky governess, while Michael Fassbender is her rich but moody employer, the Byronic Mr. Rochester.
Wasikowska, 21, is made up to look as old-fashioned and Plain Jane as possible. When illuminated by candlelight, she resembles the subject of a Vermeer painting or of Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine. Wasikowska delivers her dialogue with the impassioned precision required to render Brontë’s highly august lines comprehensible: “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.”
Appropriately for Mr. Rochester, whose secret misfortune has led to dissipation, Fassbender is 33 but looks 40. In a role made famous by Orson Welles in 1944, this previously obscure actor is also terrific.
Dame Judi Dench portrays Mr. Rochester’s head housekeeper, a character rather like Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Potts in Disney’s cartoon Beauty and the Beast. Indeed, Jane Eyre resembles a sternly Victorian feminist retelling of that famous fairytale.
In the Brontë sisters’ annus mirabilis of 1847, Emily Brontë’s wilder, crazier Wuthering Heights took longer to catch on, while Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was an immediate bestseller.
The primary markets for 19th-century novels were commercial lending libraries, which operated much like the now-fading Blockbuster video stores. They preferred novels that were long enough to be split into three books, each of which could be lent out simultaneously. This gave Charlotte a sizable canvas.
In an era when images were expensive to reproduce and novelists were paid to create pictures in the mind, Charlotte went a little lighter than expected on the landscape descriptions, leaving her more room for story. So she shoved in every damn thing imaginable, mashing up numerous genres—romance, social criticism, Bildungsroman, Gothic horror, and even proto-detective. Yet somehow, Charlotte made it compulsively readable.
Some of the plot will seem peculiar today, such as that staple of Victorian literature, the (164-year-old Spoiler Alert!) unexpected bequest of a fortune by a distant relative. By making Jane Eyre an heir, this windfall allows the heroine to marry Mr. Rochester not as a Cinderella, but as an equal partner in that emerging Victorian England ideal: the companionate marriage of two intertwined souls.
Not many people in the 21st century are lucky enough to receive a surprise inheritance. Then again, not many of us are unlucky enough to have all our more likely heirs die before us. The high death rates among the young in 19th-century England would more often trigger a series of increasingly implausible if-then-else instructions written into wills.
The topic of inheritances seems strikingly underexploited in 21st-century fiction. We like to think we’re beyond all that. Unlike 19th-century heroines such as Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, we simply go out and earn our own fortunes. Yet in my own experience, the question of who inherits what remains a hot button, albeit one we consider distasteful to push.
The main question in adapting Jane Eyre into a 115-minute movie is what to exclude. This latest Jane Eyre skimps on the novel’s more Romantic and Gothic aspects, such as the ghostly scratching on the walls of the isolated country estate. Similarly, Jane’s gift (or curse) of hearing loved ones’ voices in her head is reduced to one tasteful scene. Mr. Rochester’s dog Pilot, a significant figure in the book, gets merely a cursory shout-out at the end. The most bizarre plot twist, Rochester cross-dressing as a Gypsy fortune-teller, is tastefully excised.
What we are left with seems rather like Jane Eyre if Jane Austen had written it. Austen, who died in 1817, was a witty, levelheaded product of the 18th century. She would have gotten along well with Ben Franklin. In contrast, the Brontës were the quintessence of the 19th century’s Romantic mood.
After the neo-Romanticism of the 1960s-70s, tastes have moved away from the Brontës and toward Austen. (The name “Emma,” Austen’s second-most-famous heroine, was merely the 448th most popular girl’s baby name in the 1970s. By 2003, it was the 2nd.) Thus, the new movie features much about the Austen-like topics of class and gender battles. Fassbender’s Mr. Rochester comes across more like a bigger, bolder version of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy than like Wuthering Heights’ demonic Heathcliff. Yet Jane Eyre is so expansive and lively a source that this rendition remains authentic and entertaining.
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