Sorry, National Review, Jane Eyre Really Is Awful

 

Wednesday, at National Review Online, Jessica Hornik Evans wrote about a conversation she overheard in a bookstore in (where else?) Portland, Oregon*, about all the racism and toxic masculinity in Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre isn’t racist or toxically masculine (or any other kind of masculine), but it is a dumb book.

(Spoilers ahead, but you should thank me for spoiling it.)

Almost every character in it is insane. The only exceptions are a couple of maids and Jane’s devoutly Christian boarding school roommate, which is ironic because all the other characters in the book need Jesus. Midway through the book, Jane is about to marry a “Byronic hero” (literature-speak for a male drama queen) named after some town in upstate New York, and the author goes on for about four pages on how silly the “if anyone objects, speak now or forever hold your peace” thing is at weddings because nobody ever objects.

Three guesses what happens next.

Turns out ol’ Schenectady has an insane wife he’s hiding in his attic, and bigamy in the 19th century is only for Mormons. Wedding’s off.

(Keep in mind that Charlotte Bronte, the author who tells us how insane Bertha (Wife #1) is, thinks Jane and Binghamton are the ideal relationship, which tells you how reliable she is. Also, there’s a pretentious umlaut over the “e” in Bronte, which I could probably look up how to type, but I’m not going to.)Meanwhile back at the ranch, Plan B for Jane is to marry her cousin and run off to India. She backs out at the last minute, not because, oh I don’t know, marrying your cousin and running off to India is a really bad idea, but because she hears voices that tell her Utica is back in the market.

Voices. In. Her. Head.

Out of the incestuous frying pan into the schizophrenic fire.

Turns out there was a fire over at Irondequoit’s place, and it just happened to kill the woman standing between him and Jane, and he just happened to be close enough to get severely injured himself, because that’s not completely suspicious. Reader, she married him, and sadly Charlotte Bronte died of really bad morning sickness in 1855, because the two deadliest things (other than civil wars) in the 19th century were being artistic and being pregnant, so she didn’t have time to write the sequel in which Ithaca got tired of Jane the way he did with Bertha, and starts trying to off her in hilariously inept ways while she’s oblivious, and everyone realizes the whole thing was supposed to be a dark comedy.

*Perhaps we should just be happy that there’s one business in Portland that hasn’t been burned down yet.

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  1. DrewInWisconsin, Oaf Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oaf
    @DrewInWisconsin

    Came across this recent article . . . very good. Read it, you haters!

    The Christian Men of Jane Eyre

    • #31
  2. I. M. Fine Inactive
    I. M. Fine
    @IMFine

    And for both the lovers and haters of Jane Eyre, let’s not forget that Broadway had to have its turn at bat and the musical version opened in 2000. (It only played for 209 performances but it was not considered a total failure.) Short montage of some of the songs below. I leave the judgement to others.

     

    • #32
  3. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Seawriter (View Comment):

    I liked Jane Eyre, but I really like your review of the book. 

    You might like The Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre written by Jean Rhys. Or Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. Both, in different ways, mock Jane Eyre.

    Ditto.

    • #33
  4. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    I started listening to audiobooks in about 1995.  I decided I’d listen to all the books I should have read in high school.  So I’ve listened to Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Lewis, and Dostoyevsky.  I liked all of them except for one, Moby Dick. I thought it was the worst book I ever dealt with; then I listened to Ulysses.

    • #34
  5. Seawriter Contributor
    Seawriter
    @Seawriter

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I started listening to audiobooks in about 1995. I decided I’d listen to all the books I should have read in high school. So I’ve listened to Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Lewis, and Dostoyevsky. I liked all of them except for one, Moby Dick. I thought it was the worst book I ever dealt with; then I listened to Ulysses.

    Moby Dick has only one purpose. As a soporific. It puts me to sleep every time I read it. I tried listening to it as an audiobook and nearly fell asleep commuting to work. It was too dangerous for me to finish it. I gave up on it. 

    • #35
  6. She Member
    She
    @She

    Marjorie Reynolds (View Comment):
    Just a word to defend poor Rochester, locking his homocidal wife in the attic might not seem very nice, but it was much nicer than the mental institutions of the time in which she would have undoubtedly have ended up otherwise.

    Yeah, although, of course, his unconscionable, careful, plan to commit bigamy, or his subsequent one to take the young Englishwoman who’d fallen under his spell as his mistress and escape to (I think it was) France with her makes it difficult to defend him much further than that.

    Rochester might have done better to have sent poor Bertha off to an out-of-the-way attic in France (or even one back home in Jamaica) before the book began.  Of course, then it would have been (mercifully, IMHO) much shorter.

    Sorry, I realize it’s probably just me: I’ve just never found the self-pitying, self-involved, brooding, narcissistic “Byronic hero” all that interesting, either IRL on on the pages of storybooks.  It’s a dynamic that gets really old, really fast, for me.

    I’ve not read any of the sequels/prequels.  I do sometimes wonder what would have happened, had Jane returned to Thornfield at the end of the book to find the house still intact, Bertha still alive, Grace Poole still drinking heavily and taking the rap for Bertha’s misdeeds, and Edward still married.  Would Jane have stuck to her Christian principles and new spirit of independence?  Or would she have succumbed to Rochester’s blandishments, jumped in the sack and, shortly thereafter, raced off with him to the more sexually-liberated Continent?

    Fortunately for the plot, by that time though, Retribution had struck and Edward had redeemend himself, so Jane got her heart’s desire without any taint of indecency, and all ended well.

    • #36
  7. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    She (View Comment):
    Fortunately for the plot, by that time though, Retribution had struck and Edward had redeemend himself, so Jane got her heart’s desire without any taint of indecency, and all ended well.

    There’s nothing wrong with happy endings.

    • #37
  8. She Member
    She
    @She

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):
    Fortunately for the plot, by that time though, Retribution had struck and Edward had redeemend himself, so Jane got her heart’s desire without any taint of indecency, and all ended well.

    There’s nothing wrong with happy endings.

    Especially really convenient ones.

    • #38
  9. Podkayne of Israel Inactive
    Podkayne of Israel
    @PodkayneofIsrael

    I read Jane Eyre on my own in high school and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. 

    • #39
  10. JustmeinAZ Member
    JustmeinAZ
    @JustmeinAZ

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    And for both the lovers and haters of Jane Eyre, let’s not forget that Broadway had to have its turn at bat and the musical version opened in 2000. (It only played for 209 performances but it was not considered a total failure.) Short montage of some of the songs below. I leave the judgement to others.

    That was…..pretty awful. Did they actually charge people to see it?

    • #40
  11. colleenb Member
    colleenb
    @colleenb

    Charlotte (View Comment):

    I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are actually the same book.

    It would save money for the library system if they were.😉

    • #41
  12. colleenb Member
    colleenb
    @colleenb

    kedavis (View Comment):

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    So Mr Ditzler, I was discussing the bare bones of your review of Jane Eyre with the spouse. He immediately countered, without any self censor, “Just what is so bad about keeping one’s wife in the attic?”

    Should I explain the matter to him, or let the divorce attorney handle it?

    The attic usually has poor temperature control. Even in our finished and insulated garage attic, which you enter above my heated garage office, tends to be cool in winter and hot in summer. Not a good place to keep your wife. It was a good place to keep our harvest of sweet potatoes and onions, though.

    So, in terms of consistent temperatures, wife-storage is something more suited to the cellar? Good to know.

    Also don’t have to move as far for the burial. Heh.

    • #42
  13. She Member
    She
    @She

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):

    And for both the lovers and haters of Jane Eyre, let’s not forget that Broadway had to have its turn at bat and the musical version opened in 2000. (It only played for 209 performances but it was not considered a total failure.) Short montage of some of the songs below. I leave the judgement to others.

    Crimenutely.

    When my granddaughter was very small, my sister sent her a zippered case full of CDs of all the Beatrix Potter stories, read mostly by fairly well known British radio and TV personalities.  They were wonderful, and accompanied my granddaughter and her mother on all their car rides, with my granddaughter begging for her “stories,” before her mother started the engine.

    One of the CDs was the “musicification” of Beatrix Potter’s Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes, a small book full of short, traditional nursery rhymes illustrated in Beatrix’s inimitable style and set to modern music.  The music was pretentious, overblown, over-loud, and over-emotive.

    My stepdaughter calls it “The Andrew Lloyd Weber version of Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes.”

    Clearly, whoever was responsible for it, this was “The Andrew Lloyd Weber version of Jane Eyre.”

    • #43
  14. I. M. Fine Inactive
    I. M. Fine
    @IMFine

    JustmeinAZ (View Comment):

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    And for both the lovers and haters of Jane Eyre, let’s not forget that Broadway had to have its turn at bat and the musical version opened in 2000. (It only played for 209 performances but it was not considered a total failure.) Short montage of some of the songs below. I leave the judgement to others.

    That was…..pretty awful. Did they actually charge people to see it?

    Considering that the average price for a Broadway musical ticket back in 2000 was around $75 … the answer to your question is yep.

    • #44
  15. I. M. Fine Inactive
    I. M. Fine
    @IMFine

    She (View Comment):

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):

    And for both the lovers and haters of Jane Eyre, let’s not forget that Broadway had to have its turn at bat and the musical version opened in 2000. (It only played for 209 performances but it was not considered a total failure.) Short montage of some of the songs below. I leave the judgement to others.

    Crimenutely.

    When my granddaughter was very small, my sister sent her a zippered case full of CDs of all the Beatrix Potter stories, read mostly by fairly well known British radio and TV personalities. They were wonderful, and accompanied my granddaughter and her mother on all their car rides, with my granddaughter begging for her “stories,” before her mother started the engine.

    One of the CDs was the “musicification” of Beatrix Potter’s Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes, a small book full of short, traditional nursery rhymes illustrated in Beatrix’s inimitable style and set to modern music. The music was pretentious, overblown, over-loud, and over-emotive.

    My stepdaughter calls it “The Andrew Lloyd Weber version of Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes.”

    Clearly, whoever was responsible for it, this was “The Andrew Lloyd Weber version of Jane Eyre.”

    Your stepdaughter is very insightful and has a deft sense of humor. I can’t imagine a worse pairing than Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque composition. (Although, in defense of The Lord Lloyd-Webber [yes, Lord], even his severest critics must admit a key aspect of his success is in picking material that matches his overtly-emotive style. At least he knew to stick with Eva Peron and leave Jemima Puddle-Duck alone. But watch out. The next thing you know, Lord LW will go setting exquisite T.S. Eliot poetry to music!)

    • #45
  16. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    Your stepdaughter is very insightful and has a deft sense of humor. I can’t imagine a worse pairing than Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque composition. (Although, in defense of The Lord Lloyd-Webber [yes, Lord], even his severest critics must admit a key aspect of his success is in picking material that matches his overtly-emotive style. At least he knew to stick with Eva Peron and leave Jemima Puddle-Duck alone. But watch out. The next thing you know, Lord LW will go setting exquisite T.S. Eliot poetry to music!)

    Wasn’t Jesus Christ Superstar an Andrew Lloyd Weber deal?  I liked that.

    • #46
  17. She Member
    She
    @She

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    Your stepdaughter is very insightful and has a deft sense of humor. I can’t imagine a worse pairing than Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque composition. (Although, in defense of The Lord Lloyd-Webber [yes, Lord], even his severest critics must admit a key aspect of his success is in picking material that matches his overtly-emotive style. At least he knew to stick with Eva Peron and leave Jemima Puddle-Duck alone. But watch out. The next thing you know, Lord LW will go setting exquisite T.S. Eliot poetry to music!)

    Wasn’t Jesus Christ Superstar an Andrew Lloyd Weber deal? I liked that.

    Yes, with Tim Rice.  It was in the early days, before ALW began believing all his own press releases.

    I liked it too.  The only live performance of it that I’ve ever seen was when I was in high school.  A traveling troupe of semi-pros were making the rounds, and they performed it during the school day in the high-school auditorium.  Anyone who wanted to see it could take time off class to do so.

    Can’t imagine that happening today.

    • #47
  18. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    She (View Comment):

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    Your stepdaughter is very insightful and has a deft sense of humor. I can’t imagine a worse pairing than Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque composition. (Although, in defense of The Lord Lloyd-Webber [yes, Lord], even his severest critics must admit a key aspect of his success is in picking material that matches his overtly-emotive style. At least he knew to stick with Eva Peron and leave Jemima Puddle-Duck alone. But watch out. The next thing you know, Lord LW will go setting exquisite T.S. Eliot poetry to music!)

    Wasn’t Jesus Christ Superstar an Andrew Lloyd Weber deal? I liked that.

    Yes, with Tim Rice. It was in the early days, before ALW began believing all his own press releases.

    I liked it too. The only live performance of it that I’ve ever seen was when I was in high school. A traveling troupe of semi-pros were making the rounds, and they performed it during the school day in the high-school auditorium. Anyone who wanted to see it could take time off class to do so.

    Can’t imagine that happening today.

    Now it would have to be Chairman Mao, Superstar or something along those lines.

    • #48
  19. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    She (View Comment):

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    Your stepdaughter is very insightful and has a deft sense of humor. I can’t imagine a worse pairing than Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque composition. (Although, in defense of The Lord Lloyd-Webber [yes, Lord], even his severest critics must admit a key aspect of his success is in picking material that matches his overtly-emotive style. At least he knew to stick with Eva Peron and leave Jemima Puddle-Duck alone. But watch out. The next thing you know, Lord LW will go setting exquisite T.S. Eliot poetry to music!)

    Wasn’t Jesus Christ Superstar an Andrew Lloyd Weber deal? I liked that.

    Yes, with Tim Rice. It was in the early days, before ALW began believing all his own press releases.

    I liked it too. The only live performance of it that I’ve ever seen was when I was in high school. A traveling troupe of semi-pros were making the rounds, and they performed it during the school day in the high-school auditorium. Anyone who wanted to see it could take time off class to do so.

    Can’t imagine that happening today.

    I just had the soundtrack.

    • #49
  20. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I started listening to audiobooks in about 1995. I decided I’d listen to all the books I should have read in high school. So I’ve listened to Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Lewis, and Dostoyevsky. I liked all of them except for one, Moby Dick. I thought it was the worst book I ever dealt with; then I listened to Ulysses.

    On a internet forum devoted to writing and all things book, we had the topic up of what classic really seems to be the most pointless thing you ever read. Moby Dick was the runaway winner of that topic. (Maybe Ulysses would give it a run for that championship, except who among us really reads Ulysses, except for English lit people.) 

     

    • #50
  21. JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery Coolidge
    JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery
    @JosePluma

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    Your stepdaughter is very insightful and has a deft sense of humor. I can’t imagine a worse pairing than Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lloyd Webber-esque composition. (Although, in defense of The Lord Lloyd-Webber [yes, Lord], even his severest critics must admit a key aspect of his success is in picking material that matches his overtly-emotive style. At least he knew to stick with Eva Peron and leave Jemima Puddle-Duck alone. But watch out. The next thing you know, Lord LW will go setting exquisite T.S. Eliot poetry to music!)

    Wasn’t Jesus Christ Superstar an Andrew Lloyd Weber deal? I liked that.

    Screaming Jesus.  Yes.

    Though I like Godspell a lot more.

    • #51
  22. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    She (View Comment):

    Marjorie Reynolds (View Comment):
    Just a word to defend poor Rochester, locking his homocidal wife in the attic might not seem very nice, but it was much nicer than the mental institutions of the time in which she would have undoubtedly have ended up otherwise.

    Yeah, although, of course, his unconscionable, careful, plan to commit bigamy, or his subsequent one to take the young Englishwoman who’d fallen under his spell as his mistress and escape to (I think it was) France with her makes it difficult to defend him much further than that.

    Rochester might have done better to have sent poor Bertha off to an out-of-the-way attic in France (or even one back home in Jamaica) before the book began. Of course, then it would have been (mercifully, IMHO) much shorter.

    Sorry, I realize it’s probably just me: I’ve just never found the self-pitying, self-involved, brooding, narcissistic “Byronic hero” all that interesting, either IRL on on the pages of storybooks. It’s a dynamic that gets really old, really fast, for me.

    I’ve not read any of the sequels/prequels. I do sometimes wonder what would have happened, had Jane returned to Thornfield at the end of the book to find the house still intact, Bertha still alive, Grace Poole still drinking heavily and taking the rap for Bertha’s misdeeds, and Edward still married. Would Jane have stuck to her Christian principles and new spirit of independence? Or would she have succumbed to Rochester’s blandishments, jumped in the sack and, shortly thereafter, raced off with him to the more sexually-liberated Continent?

    Fortunately for the plot, by that time though, Retribution had struck and Edward had redeemed himself, so Jane got her heart’s desire without any taint of indecency, and all ended well.

    These days someone is sure to glom onto that scenario and tell the tale from the viewpoint of the demented wife.

     

    • #52
  23. DrewInWisconsin, Oaf Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oaf
    @DrewInWisconsin

    JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery (View Comment):

    Though I like Godspell a lot more.

    Me, too.

    • #53
  24. Seawriter Contributor
    Seawriter
    @Seawriter

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):

    Marjorie Reynolds (View Comment):
    Just a word to defend poor Rochester, locking his homocidal wife in the attic might not seem very nice, but it was much nicer than the mental institutions of the time in which she would have undoubtedly have ended up otherwise.

    Yeah, although, of course, his unconscionable, careful, plan to commit bigamy, or his subsequent one to take the young Englishwoman who’d fallen under his spell as his mistress and escape to (I think it was) France with her makes it difficult to defend him much further than that.

    Rochester might have done better to have sent poor Bertha off to an out-of-the-way attic in France (or even one back home in Jamaica) before the book began. Of course, then it would have been (mercifully, IMHO) much shorter.

    Sorry, I realize it’s probably just me: I’ve just never found the self-pitying, self-involved, brooding, narcissistic “Byronic hero” all that interesting, either IRL on on the pages of storybooks. It’s a dynamic that gets really old, really fast, for me.

    I’ve not read any of the sequels/prequels. I do sometimes wonder what would have happened, had Jane returned to Thornfield at the end of the book to find the house still intact, Bertha still alive, Grace Poole still drinking heavily and taking the rap for Bertha’s misdeeds, and Edward still married. Would Jane have stuck to her Christian principles and new spirit of independence? Or would she have succumbed to Rochester’s blandishments, jumped in the sack and, shortly thereafter, raced off with him to the more sexually-liberated Continent?

    Fortunately for the plot, by that time though, Retribution had struck and Edward had redeemed himself, so Jane got her heart’s desire without any taint of indecency,and all ended well.

    These days someone is sure to glom onto that scenario and tell the tale from the viewpoint of the demented wife.

     

    Wide Sargasso Sea. Already mentioned it.

    • #54
  25. I. M. Fine Inactive
    I. M. Fine
    @IMFine

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    I started listening to audiobooks in about 1995. I decided I’d listen to all the books I should have read in high school. So I’ve listened to Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Lewis, and Dostoyevsky. I liked all of them except for one, Moby Dick. I thought it was the worst book I ever dealt with; then I listened to Ulysses.

    On a internet forum devoted to writing and all things book, we had the topic up of what classic really seems to be the most pointless thing you ever read. Moby Dick was the runaway winner of that topic. (Maybe Ulysses would give it a run for that championship, except who among us really reads Ulysses, except for English lit people.)

    Alright, I know I’m straying from the topic of Jane Eyre, but since you brought up MOBY DICK … especially since you crowned it the worst book you ever dealt with (and I know oh so many would agree with you) … I can not resist posting what is unquestionably the most jaw-dropping piece of musical theatre I’ve ever come across.

    Moby Dick the Musical

    If you have trouble understanding the lyrics in this short clip from the show, it’s because it’s in Greek. This is an all-Greek production I ran across two years ago in Athens. And believe me, it was THE show to see in town. Why the cradle of Western theatre — the home of Sophocles and Aristophanes —  would decide to create this and then produce it is completely beyond my poor ability to understand. 

    As I understand it, they’re trying to get to Broadway. They haven’t made it yet.

       

    • #55
  26. JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery Coolidge
    JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery
    @JosePluma

    I. M. Fine (View Comment):
    If you have trouble understanding the lyrics in this short clip from the show, it’s because it’s in Greek.

    Ok, what’s the excuse for the Jane Eyre clip above?

    • #56
  27. Django Member
    Django
    @Django

    I would like to hear/read your review of the works of Paul Bowles. Specifically, a collection  of short stories called The Delicate Prey. 

    • #57
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