Jane Eyre, Doubles, And Homosocial Desire
Reading Sedgwick’s Between Men has really opened up some avenues for thought. For example, while she’s talking about the tradition of mirror doubles in Gothic literature, I all of a sudden had this brainwave about Jane Eyre, my favorite book. (Tanith Lee‘s my favorite author, Jane Eyre my favorite book. Yeah, I’m strange.)
So I started putting together a list inside my head of doubles in JE.
* Jane/Bertha (the mad wife)
* Rochester/St. John
* Mary and Diana/the Reed sisters
* Mrs. Reed/Helen
* Blanche Ingram/Rosamund Oliver
* Mr. Brocklehurst/Mr. Lloyd
Jane is referred to as “fairy,” “elf,” and “angel”; Bertha is once and very memorably described as “the foul German (apparition), the Vampyre.” Rochester is a warmhearted Vulcan, St. John a very cold and bloodless Apollo–one is harsh on the outside and a marshmallow within, the other is apparently passive to the will of God on the outside but harsh when Jane rejects him, and shown to be inwardly nasty. I’m still mulling over Mrs. Reed/Helen as mother-figures–the bad and abusive mother and the “good” but extraordinarily passive mother? I would have paired Mrs. Reed with Miss Temple, but Miss Temple is just not emotionally important enough to the story when compared to the effect Helen has, and Helen’s death frees her to become rolled up in the visitation by Jane’s dead mother later in the book (“My daughter, flee temptation!”). Then there’s Mrs. Fairfax at Thornfield and Grace Poole versus Bessie the maid at the parsonage, who rolls up both their good and bad aspects. Adele is a cipher for Jane’s own childhood, something I saw most clearly in this movie treatment of Jane Eyre (the one I think is technically the best even though Orson Welles’s Mr. Rochester has my heart.)
I could geek on all day about this, but I suspect I’d bore everyone involved except my own sweet self. I really do love that book, and I’ve often thought of doing a homage to it, though I couldn’t possibly do it justice. I know Sharon Shinn did a retelling–I didn’t like it as much as the first two books in her Samaria series, but I liked it well enough. And of course I’ve seen just about every movie treatment of it ever.
Sedwick’s other assertions about women as markers in the gambling game between men (the full title is Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire) is thought-provoking, especially when she treats Tennyson and Dickens. (Selkie, you should at least read the Dickens parts. Fascinating stuff.) I can’t wait to finish it and go back to The Epistemology of the Closet. Most lit crit is deadly dull, but every once in a while one comes along that knocks it out of the park and really informs the way I look at words on a page. It’s good to occasionally pull back and take a look at the forest instead of building a few trees at a time.
It makes me wonder what doubles I put in my work, though I’m sure my stuff is more hack than Gothic. I do think about themes and basic struggles and motivations–I think every author worth his or her salt does, and that thinking informs a lot of what we do when in the heat of creation. Writing for a living is not just the act of putting words on paper. There’s a great deal of work that goes on when a career writer is not in front of the laptop.
But I could talk about that all day too, and time’s a-wasting. I have to get my heroine in trouble again. I think she’s sprained her wrist and I have to get her physically somewhere else before I can set off the next chain of coincidence and action.
Over and out, dearies.
Related posts:
Tags: books, pretty shinies
June 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
May I ask which edition you are reading..? I have read mine countless times, but I cannot recalling a visitation by Jane’s mother? :S
A better question might be.. when does it happen? :S
June 10th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
“My daughter, flee temptation!” “Mother, I will” is in Chapter 27.
June 10th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Ahh. Her impetus to leave Thornfield Hall. Thank you!
..we just moved, and Jane Eyre was one of the books I kept with me to read until I could unpack the rest, otherwise I would have been digging around in the garage looking for it!
June 10th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Not boring at all, facinating actually.
June 10th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I hit the campus library today and spent the afternoon reading “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th Century Literary Imagination” — haven’t gotten to the Bronte section yet, though. It’s been VERY interesting.
And here you go putting more books on my list… I didn’t INTEND to spend my summer surveying the difficulties of the female novelist, but I started with a Fanny Burney bio, went to Austen, then Heyer, then on to Tiptree (now THAT was a hugely affecting book), and you should see the little tomes I checked out today…someone would think I was doing grad studies instead of just avoiding writing…
June 10th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
One could also draw a parallel between Mrs. Reed and Mrs. Fairfax, who did take Jane under her wing, in a way.
I find it wonderfully ironic that you made ths post when I have been revisiting everything Jane-ian lately, including but definitely not limited to the lovely version with Orson Welles. Good Lord, no wonder my mother favored him! that was INCREDIBLE. Though now I have to ask if you’ve ever heard the musical–yes, there’s a musical. James Barbour makes a very lovely Rochester, and if Bronte didn’t make you cry, hearing some of that poignant dialogue (I’m thinking particularly of the midsummer marriage proposal) in that voice is enough to break your heart. Seriously.
and now I have to go find Sharon Shinn
June 10th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
The ironic thing to me is that most authors do not seem to have consciously intended all the things that lit critters discuss. So it is with poetry, too. That sort of thing has always made me wonder if there truly is a gestalt effect in writing, or whether the writer/poet is channeling something bigger than herself. (And when one begins to start spouting that sort of thing it’s time to go to bed and rest the muse.)