So I Finally Read Jane Eyre

Here’s my discombobulated review that I posted on another site:

I don’t know why I’ve waited so long to read Jane Eyre. I absolutely loved this book and did not want to finish reading it. The beginning was very Dickens-esh, but I though Bronte’s writing was considerably better than Chuck’s. The characters were not decidedly all good or all bad as in Dickens, as I soon learned, and even the supposedly evil characters were well-sculpted.

I love that Jane was not beautiful (nor is, expectantly, Charlotte!) and that Rochester wasn’t handsome and that one’s looks did not control one’s manners and/or demeanors. The witty repartee was, at times, a little too much, but most times enjoyable.

What an interesting commentary on slavery, race and insanity Jane Eyre is! Yes, insanity, although I’m not sure it is parallel with the other issues assumed in that sentence. I wasn’t expecting to find it here, but I think, in spite of some obvious PC problems Bronte could not have anticipated from me (or my kind, for that matter, closer to Bertha than Eyre), was for the most part handled well. At many points in the novel, I thought, “How British of you to shun the French,” or “What do you really think of darker women, Miss Jane?” and in turn, of course, Miss Bronte. And other times, I thought Jane’s character altruistic when she spoke of the Eastern beauties trapped in harems, responding to Rochester’s jesting of “bargaining for so many tons of flesh and an assortment of black eyes”:

 

I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved–your harem inmates amongst the rest. I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw [pasha, or a military officer in Turkey and N.Africa] as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands: nor will I, for one, consent to your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred.

Read that as you like, but I’d like to think that Jane has an abolitionist heart here and elsewhere in the novel.

It is also a very Romantic novel, dwelling in the beauty of the woods, the storms, and the sublime of life in general. Nature is as much a character in Bronte’s chef-d’oeuvre as well as any Briton, West Indian or French person.

With all that said, I think there were too many liberties taken at the end of the novel with coincidences. That aspect reminded me of Dickens, again. But, there is a bitterness to the happy conclusion!