Brontë Odyssey: Part Two

Attention everybody: Jane Eyre is really good.

I knew it was better than Wuthering Heights literally by the time I finished the first sentence. Charlotte Brontë's narrative style is very direct, clear, and evocative. (The only part that gets too wordy, I think, is the dialogue; it's odd to me that that's the least briskly written aspect of the book.) Furthermore, in Wuthering Heights, the narrator is two steps removed from the real story most of the time; in Jane Eyre, the narrator is the story. And it's a more interesting story, too. In fact, I'm not even going to synopse it here, because it has SURPRISES! and MYSTERIES! and if you haven't read it, I hope you will, so I don't want to spoil it.

I will address two things, though:

First, there's the feminism, which (at least as far as I can tell from Wikipedia that one episode of Friends) Jane Eyre is pretty well known for. And yes, it's in there. There's a fairly impassioned passage about a fourth of the way through the book arguing that women need something fulfilling to do just as much as men do. There's also (as my friend Wikipedia points out) a continuing theme of Jane's efforts to assert her own personality in the face of efforts of particular men to dominate her--and the man she loves is the one who loves her for being herself, not what she could be under his tutelage. But on the other hand, she keeps calling the man she loves her "master" even when he's not her boss anymore, and that skeeved me out. Nobody's perfect.

Secondly, perhaps you might ask, "Whither the unintentional humor?" As you may recall, the unintentional humor in Wuthering Heights derived from Emily Brontë's apparent uncertainty about where babies come from. (I'm still hoping, although not 100% sure, that some of the foibles of the characters in Wuthering Heights fall under the category of intentional humor.) Charlotte could perhaps have shared a thing or two with Emily, as the seedy past behavior of Mr. Rochester shows that she had at least the general idea of man-and-lady-special-private-time. So we must look elsewhere! And we find it in that trusted standby, making fun of the French. The little girl for whom Jane is governess (the little girl that Jane governesses?) is French, and this is clearly a handicap. There's not a whole lot of this in there (it turns out that the little girl is not very important in this book), but there is a line near the end that cracked me up: "As she grew up, a sound English education correct in a great measure her French defects . . . ." She used to be a flibbergibbet, you see, but English boarding school blasted the silliness right out of her. And made her "well-principled." Awesome.

On my Brontë enjoyment scale, I'm giving Jane Eyre a 9.2 out of 10. For those of you keeping track at home, that means Charlotte Brontë has taken a commanding lead!