In Open Letters Monthly, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein has an interesting feature in how "studiously inoffensive" film adaptations of Jane Eyre don't match up with the heated and varying responses of readers back when it was published in 1847. People argued, she writes, about how Jane and Rochester matched up (or didn't) with ideals of femininity and masculinity, and whether the novel mocked or idealized religion.
Jane Eyre was, to use a popular nineteenth-century turn of phrase, strong meat. If many readers felt that its merit and originality were undeniable, there remained some suspicion that the novel was not, to say the least, altogether respectable.
Ah, but the film and television adaptations? Again and again, they are quite respectable. Air-tightly respectable, in fact. And that is a shame.
The caution in question rests in a concerted (and surprisingly consistent) effort to pull back from the novel’s weirdness—a weirdness that resides in precisely the thing that screen adaptations handle badly, a first-person point-of-view. Jane Eyre’s energetic voice—“racy,” in the nineteenth-century sense of the term—is one of the Victorian era’s most distinctive. It’s also potentially one of the more disturbing.
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