Yes, apparently I have been on a female Victorian novelists kick. Oh, well. And yes, I have already blogged about the Brontës in general--well, Charlotte and Emily. I've got nothing in particular against Branwell.
However.
Jane Eyre is really really awful. Ladies, you do not have to fall in love with grumpy, bigamous lunatics. Gentlemen, self-effacing and gloomy women who won't wear anything but grey alpaca are really not that great.
Sure, they talk about how perfect they are for each other, but did you ever get that impression? What exactly was it that attracted them to each other, besides Charlotte Brontë's pathetic hope that men like plain, boring women, and her impressive ability to write theoretically unhandsome men whom you can tell that she actually thinks are the lobster's dress shirt?
Oh, god, and then he has to go blind in the end, just so Jane can be the dominant personality and Miss Brontë can write out her weird Florence Nightingale fantasy. I hate psychoanalyzing authors, but she could at least have made an effort.
Of course, if it were really Branwell....
5 comments:
I totally agree with you - Just finished the book & felt embarrassed on Bronte's behalf because it read like a personal daydream.
... A personal daydream of Mr Rochester. Eugh.
What I can't understand are the guys who won't watch romantic comedies or read the Austen books, yet claim to like "Jane Eyre". I completely agree with this assessment of the book. Jane is stoic and passive, yet dramatizes everything that happens to her, and only ever makes one decision that directly affects the story. And the blindness just to make Jane dominant? Exactly how I saw it: Utter bull.
she fell in love with him because he saw her whereas most of her life she was invisible and not regarded as much. He wanted to know more about her and enjoyed her company very much, without it ever seeming like he was pretending to enjoy her company. Even today, it is very hard to meet someone who truly wants to be with us and finds us extremely interesting except family members and close friends of course. Also, they seemed to get each other every time they talked, I was so interested in their dialogue and it seemed like they actually had fun while talking to each other.
And Jane Eyre was not weak and passive, she was always in control of her thoughts and actions. She knew what she wanted and stuck to her beliefs.
Well that's all well and good if the two of them (Jane and Rochester) got along, but if you ask me the whole Rochester affair is a pure and utter slap in the face to the "feminism" that this book supposedly champions. The fact that the only way Jane can reach true equality with Rochester is through him suffering a debilitating injury, DESPITE their apparent compatibility, just supports the idea that women are fundamentally inferior to men.
And I know someone down the road is going to respond with the "you have to understand the social climate back then" argument, but that's just as ridiculous. Good novels tell timeless stories. And I'm sorry, but if the literary merit of a novel hinges on an argument that essentially says "you had to be there," it's just not a good novel.
Post a Comment