A Little Bronte Delight

That's one of the first screencaps from the upcoming Jane Eyre, to be released in 2011. It stars Mia Wasikowska as Jane, and the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. Though I'm not as enamored with Michael Fassbender as some people (*cough, everyone on the freaking internet) he supposedly oozes sexual charisma, so that's.......goood. I just hope this adaptation will be as passionate as the book. The most misguided complaint about Jane Eyre is that it's a boringly reserved cautionary tale.

Jane's entire personality is led by passion (and modulated by morality). Jane Eyre is very much the proper sister of Wuthering Heights, with the same underlying veins of passion and contrariness. Austen may have had a tongue-in-cheek attitude towards social norms, but the Bronte sisters outright rejected them. To be fair, the world Charlotte and Emily inhabited was of a more primal, desperate nature than Jane Austen's. They were probably more engaged with battling (and ultimately losing to) consumption, illness, scarcity, and the other many diverse ways of dying before the age of thirty, and overall weren't too bothered about observing societal norms. Jane Eyre has much less action than Wuthering Heights, but I think it's just as fierce and impassioned.

Jane Eyre has become my go-to book this summer, for some reason. Every time I'm bored, I just rife through the book again, rereading passages and discovering new details. And what I found is that the book is surprisingly hilarious, especially Jane's exchanges with Mr. Rochester. Rochester is the scandal-slut of the pair, so readers always end up reading his monologues more intently, but Jane's answers are equally fascinating, IMO, for their eloquence and unconventionality. Like Cathy Earnshaw, she's simply immune to standard notions of romance. The morning after she and Rochester get engaged, she tells him semi-sarcastically:

"I suppose your love will effervesce in six months or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the furthest to which a husband's ardour extends."

Basically, I see Jane as how Elizabeth Bennet would have turned out if she'd also been orphaned, abused, and impoverished from an early age. Her attitudes and movements are restricted by her circumstances, but the entire point of her oft-emphasized plainness is that within that plainness is a rare, smart, and feisty gal. She's not, as people often think of her (or actresses always play her) doddering or severe. In one of Mr. Rochester's swooningly observant Jane-analyses, he tells her that "you looked thoughtful; not despondent. You were not sickly; but not buoyant, for you had little hope and actual pleasure.....I saw that you had a social heart; it was the tedium of your life that made you mournful".

Other released screencap - dying to see Fassbender in full Rochester soon!

More instances: the month lapsing between their engagement and marriage is rife with erotic tension. Jane teases and vexes Mr. Rochester to keep him at arm's length, provoking a kind of sexual frustration on Mr. Rochester's part and forcing him to physically vent through "pressure, pinches, and tweaks of the ear." Rawrrrr, right? In what is my opinion one of the more sexy-tense scenes in the novel, Mr Rochester approaches Jane after he gets aroused (I interpreted as) singing a lover's song, and he comes at her "face kindled and eye flashing" and is about to - what? Pounce? Embrace? Indecent physical foreplay? - something of a physical nature, before a fearful Jane saves the day by breathlessly diverting him with one of her witty questions.

Too often, Jane is portrayed in movies as a Mary-Sue type, as a girl who is outshined by Rochester until he loses his arm, eye, and becomes fitting to be her partner-in-loserish-ness. The spark, the genuine chemistry and fire of their courtship are always left out. That's the point of their romance. He meets a girl whose passion, intellect, and stimulation transcends their social boundaries and surpasses the courtly reserve of everyone else (and whose gamine frame he happens to find weirdly attractive).

People don't realize that Jane's more than just Rochester's foil; she's his equal, just as provocative and saucy. If the film adaptation realized the spirit of the novel, it would be an absolute firecracker. I can only hope that they didn't get Fassbender in order to compensate for the screen heroine's dullness, rather than to upgrade both characters.

I want an adaptation that portrays Jane the way Mr. Rochester sees her, not the way society sees her, not a plain square who manages to hook a guy with a schoolmarm fetish - but rather, a manic pixie dream girl in Gothic orphan mode, whose independence and total self-assuredness has a weird implicit charisma of its own. One that shows exactly why Jane is such an exciting prospect to Rochester, not just because romancing her is a cool "fuck you" to society, but because Rochester is sincerely enchanted by her - by the "strange, unearthly" air about her, the "soft excitement in her aspect", her "glowing eye", "curious hesitation", and mannerisms that are "piquant" "aerial" "frail" , the "soul of fire". The curious smile that is endlessly fascinating to Rochester for its "sagacious grace, inexplicable uncanny turn of countenance", on the whole, a "wild, shy, provoking". The complex and tumultuous spirt roiling beneath her plain face needs to be illuminated and worshipped by the camera the way Abbie Cornish was in Bright Star, so that the audience can understand Rochester's enchantment, and agree with his assessment of Jane as an "elf", a "witch", a "minx".

Let's hope this is the one.