Lately I have a hankering to watch costume dramas. The custom of 18th and 19th
century England holds lots of appeal. I
imagine it does for lots of us. So I
have raked through Netflix, Amazon and HBOGo to find costume dramas to satisfy
my yearning. To date I have watched
three versions of Jane Eyre and three of Wuthering Heights.
Now I have to admit that both of these novels intrigue young
women in the height of their vulnerable adolescence, as they did for me. I mean I spent years looking for Heathcliff
and finding lots of duds. The flavor of
bad boys and penetrating stares and husky voices seemed mighty appealing to my
young idealized state of mind. To rescue a man trapped by the forbidden ghosts
of his past would seem ridiculous to my adult state today, but then I believed
it highly likely I would find my Mr. Rochester.
Every young woman wants to save some man from his worst
habits. They want to be a shining beacon
in their lost darkness. That is the
stuff of great romance and great romance novels. Unfortunately, for us even Hollywood enjoys
spreading that rumor. But with a more jaundiced eye I see now what becomes of
those plot lines when transferred to the screen and watched over and over, blunting
any romantic notion my female mind might entertain.
Jane Eyre is always cast as about one to two feet shorter
than Rochester. What is that about? Does Charlotte Bronte describe her as
diminutive? It is most awkward in every
scene of the movie. She needs a ladder
to reach his shoulders, much less kiss him.
How awful for both of the actors!
How can they convey the passion Charlotte Bronte intended when Rochester
is reaching for a midget! Seriously. The
Michael Fassbender version, the most recent version of this story, is superior
to the others in that she is almost the same height. Thank goodness for that. No step stools needed. Another point of contention is that Rochester
is always handsome. He asks Jane if she
thinks he is handsome and she replies no.
How can anybody look at Timothy Dalton, William Hurt or Michael
Fassbender and say no? Now George C. Scott, yes. He is ugly. And he does not improve with
viewing.
Each of the films starts at various points in the
novel. A secret I never told anyone is
that when I have read the book, I always skip the part about Jane at her aunt’s
home and life at Lowood. Who cares? Let’s get to the passion and possibly sex! Well, no sex.
This is Charlotte Bronte.
Everything is PG throughout the entire novel. But every young woman who reads the book gets
all stirred up at the possibility of loving the mysterious and
hard-to-live-with Mr. Rochester. We must
all be masochistic! We suffer right along with Jane in the secrets of the
mansion and in Mr. Rochester’s strange behavior.
On the night of the fire when she rescues his lordship, he
tends to some secret chore and asks her to stay in his bedroom. Ah, the reader or viewer thinks, now we are
getting down to it. But no. She starts to leave and he asks if she will
leave him so. What kind of question is
that? What have you done Rochester to
make her want to stay? Jane is as
perplexed as anyone, but her audience thinks they know what he wants. But how could he want it? Just out of the clear blue? The man has no idea of romance. Really. So we
are left longing again for passion and sex.
By this time, there should be some.
Eventually though it is worked out that he loves her. Ignore
that screaming you hear, he tells her and us.
Yeah, well, any young woman knows better than to do that and would
insist on him cleaning out his closets as it were. But not our Jane.
And thanks to a novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, we know who is
in the attic and why. But most of the
readers and viewers are not acquainted with that tome, so they, like Jane, are
a bit befuddled by the mystery overhead.
Needless to say the wedding does not take place, much to the
readers’ and viewers’ displeasure. Sort of like a kiss that gets interrupted or
worse. Ugh. So off Jane goes into the damp, unforgiving
Yorkshire moors which Bronte knew so well.
(In fact the whole damn family knew about them which is why they show up
in every novel or poem the sisters wrote. Bleak, to say the least.)
Okay. Another
confession. I usually skip this part
too. After all, Jane, or rather Bronte,
is not going to marry Sinjean the minister.
He could only love God and rocks.
That’s about it. But Charlotte
Bronte really didn’t write this novel for romance. She wanted us to understand a woman who wanted
to make her own choices and live her own life unimpeded by society or
circumstance. Okay. Got it. Now where is
the passion and sex? Yeah, gods. The
publishing world had just read Fielding’s Tom Jones. Can’t we have some pepper in this pot of
stew?
So, across the moors, she hears Rochester call her and off
she goes, five thousand pounds richer than before. (Bronte inserted a Dickens
moment even before there was Dickens. He is the master of coincidence.) Finds
Rochester blinded and one handed in some versions, just blinded in others. And
even with the scars on his face, the movies still can’t make Dalton, Hurt and
Fassbender ugly. Lost cause.
So with a sigh, our story/movie ends. Satisfaction?
No, not really. I guess
professors of literature will tell me that the story holds much more than
this. But, really? Who reads Jane Eyre for something other than
entertainment, except graduate students hiding in the ivory towers of lit
criticism?
Maybe I’ll turn to Wuthering Heights and try to find passion
and sex? Hmmmmm.
