Jane Eyre

To celebrate the arrival of summer properly, I saw Jane Eyre yesterday. The latest adaptation. I do have a slight obsession with Victorian women writers and the messed up tomes they wrote. Most of them are bundles of contradictions, but if one wants to understand the complexities of the nineteenth century British capitalism, one doesn't have much option other than to go through them. I had first read Jane Eyre when I was eight or nine, an abridged edition for kids. But it wasn't that abridged. It didn't really exclude the parts which might be considered "inappropriate" for children or anything. It merely simplified the Victorian English. I have gotten back to the text again and again after that, partly because I love it, and partly because it's hard to avoid it if you're a scholar/lover of Caribbean literature.

A large chunk of the film has been told in flashbacks. The opening scene is that of Jane leaving Thornfield. I liked that choice. For me, it's one of the strongest moments of the book, and I would say it's also a coming-of-age moment for Jane: one during which she exercises her feminist agency. She rejects Rochester, rejects what Thornfield stands for. She does not ever deny that she loves Rochester, yet she leaves. A proto-feminist statement that love is not the only place where women can (or need to find) self-expression. But there are other reasons why I think this moment is one of the most significant moments of the novel. As someone who has for the last ten years of her life spent reading literatures on and about slavery, it is hard not to notice the Abolitionist sub-text that runs through that leaving. In leaving Thornfield, Jane walks out of the legacies of slavery, the supremacy of the maritime/plantation bourgeoise. And the time too, is just ripe. The novel was published in 1847. The energy of 1848 is in the air, and slavery has been abolished in British Caribbean in 1838. And of course when Jane comes back, Rochester has lost his eyesight--the total disempowerment-declassment of the plantation aristocracy, and Thornfield itself has been burned to ruins. Jane gets uplifted a little bit in terms of her class, what with her inheritance from the dead uncle and everything, and Rochester goes through a process of being disempowered. So, the class status-quo is restored. Kind of.

The film has done some serious editing of the novel. Understandable. Too little of Grace Poole. Too little of Bertha Mason, not to speak of the fact that she looks distinctly South Asian. I do think the film tries to level out the class and racial sub-texts there. But if one is careful, it can be gleaned from whatever is available. Like, the coachman is black. When Bertha spits at Jane, what comes out is a glob of black phlegm. Blood coagulated into a thick blackness? Once that lands in Jane's white wedding-dress, it makes space for an interesting symbolic blackening of Jane herself. For the white lower middle-class woman from the British empire, to walk out of the confines of imperial femininity, she needs that symbolic blackening. In other words, in order to be a feminist in imperial Britain, white women needed to go through a process of blackening/browning/racialization. I think, that was my favorite scene from the film. Because it's one of the most profoundly politically symptomatic ones. Although, I also think, Jane's childhood scenes were artistically rendered too.

Overall, it was an enjoyable film. Although, if I have to be honest, I think there is something about the best of Victorian novels that resists cinematic narrativization.