Tuesday, April 22, 2014

This Charlotte Brontë Novel Is Way Better Than 'Jane Eyre'

HuffPost Books - Claire Fallon
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CHARLOTTE BRONTE


This year, on Charlotte Brontë’s 198th birthday, it’s time for me to finally admit a secret that’s been haunting me for some time. I think Jane Eyre, Brontë’s masterpiece, is kinda overrated. I know what I’m saying sounds radical. It's one of the great Victorian classics -- and trust me, I would never advocate for totally dismissing this beloved novel. When I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, I fell passionately in book love with it, and I was inspired to make the rounds of the Brontës, inhaling Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, over and over again.

Jane Eyre spoke to my very soul, summing up all the adolescent angst that had plagued my uneasy transition into young adulthood. The Brontës and Jane Austen initiated me into the world of classic literature, but Jane Eyre was the book that felt most viscerally true and resonant. So it was with surprise that I realized, upon rereading it some years later for a college course, that I no longer found the novel virtuosic in its verisimilitude. It seemed maudlin, overwrought, almost absurd at points, and the triumphant finale of Jane’s marriage to the deeply flawed Mr. Rochester troubled me. 
Reading A Room of One’s Own, I agreed with Virginia Woolf’s assessment that Brontë’s anger at the restrictions she faced as a woman weakened her control as a writer, leading to unevenness and bizarre shifts in tone throughout Jane Eyre. Studying the racist, colonialist and anti-feminist implications of Rochester’s imprisonment of his “mad” Creole wife Bertha Mason caused me to further question my formerly high regard for the book. For the same course, I read Villette for the first time, and I found myself wondering why Brontë’s fourth novel hadn’t achieved greater fame than the second novel I now found so patchy and weak.

Despite my newfound academic concerns about Jane Eyre’s worth, as time wore on I realized the intellectual establishment still felt comfortably assured of it. It appeared at number 12 in The Guardian’s series on the top 100 novels of all time, and Flavorwire recently put it at number 2 on their list ranking the best 19th-century British novels -- outranking Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice in a decision I can only describe as criminal. (Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic. A bit.) Villette rarely, if ever, appears on these lists (though Flavorwire sneaks it in at number 48); Jane Eyre has been established as “the” Charlotte Brontë novel quite definitively.
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2 comments:

Elaine Housby said...

Totally agree! I am a huge fan of Villette, it is definitely one of my desert island books. The reason for its neglect is probably that its style is too challenging, it is almost surrealist in places.

steve said...

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