If there is one thing that Pride and Prejudice, The Secret Garden, and Jane Eyre seem to be teaching me is "Grumpy Buggers Need Love Too". I mentioned this to my wife and she snuggled close, kissed me on my cheek and said, "I love my grumpy man." For a moment a bit of me felt like protesting, but then I remembered how closely I've been identifying and sympathizing with the "grumpy buggers" of these novels. That and the fact that I got snuggles made me forget that I was going to protest at all. It is rather interesting that these novels seem to have that as at least a component of their theme.
It is difficult to look back 100-200 years into the past and figure out why this seemed important enough for some novelists to include. They touch on it a little bit, but it's important to remember we are talking about Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian etc. England and things are very different now and especially here in America. Manners and deference to the social structure were nigh upon holy tenets of the Church and the nation itself. For someone of great "standing" to behave in the ways Darcy and Rochester have in these novels would have been fairly reputation wrecking in many social circles. It likely would have been considered a defect of character and few if any would be sympathetic with them. These novels give the societal "monsters" a face, a third dimension.
We'll get to more of that later. For now, ONWARD to chapters 9-15!
Spring comes to Lowood, which seems as if it should be a good thing but everything is a mixed bag. With the warm sun and the blossoming green all about comes death. Sickness runs rampant to the point that the teachers are too occupied to teach them and so many of the girls run fairly wild through the forest and surrounding lands. If the foreshadowing of a cough and chest pain wasn't enough of a clue darling, wise, gentle Helen dies.
Honestly this was one of the most moving pieces of writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. Charlotte Bronte proves her genius to me by fashioning such a glowing and realistic scene. One of my favorite bits is when Jane's childhood is effectively over. As they say, "Childhood ends the minute you realize you're going to die someday."
"And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled: and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood - the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid the chaos."
Her going to visit Helen, the emotional rawness, the small almost weeping conversations, Helen's peace, and the quote that follows just glowed inside me which I didn't expect.
"She Kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered. When I awoke it was day: and unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody's arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about; no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in a little crib; my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was - dead."
There's a purity to that ninth chapter that made it good enough as one of the 100BYSRBYD on its own. In reading I had to stop there and bask in that moment. It is so uncharacteristic for a writer, in today's fiction writing universe, to nail that moment so perfectly.
From there we move on and find that the illness sweeping through Lowood brings Brocklehurst under scrutiny and things become much better for the girls as those "who knew how to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy, compassion with uprightness" took over for the now shamed and questionable parson.
We quickly step over 8 years to find Jane as a teacher at Lowood. Miss Temple leaves the school. Jane realizes that her desire to remain a teacher there follows along with her. She places an advertisement for her services as a teacher/governess and gets a reply from a Mrs. Fairfax at Thornfield hall. Bessie (from Jane's time with the reeds) shows up to catch up and wish her well. She gives a report of the Reeds that says things have turned out there pretty much as everyone paying attention figured it would.
She arrives at Thornfield and meet the wonderfully genial Mrs. Fairfax and Mr. Rochester's ward Adela Varens. "She was quite a child - perhaps seven or eight years old - slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face and a redundancy of hair falling in curls to her waist." It's been a long time since I've had a term bring me such ridiculous amounts of pedantic glee as "a redundancy of hair".
Jane gets bored of the tranquility and decides to go out to deliver a letter for Mrs. Fairfax. Along the way she, unknowingly, meets Mr. Rochester who falls, along with his horse, on a sheet of ice. Later Jane discovers who the man was and, after many days and much business with his tenants in the town about, is introduced to Mr. Rochester. He is grim and sardonic, and treats Adele quite strangely. Well, given the time period he treats everyone strangely.
His back and forth conversation with Jane (4(!) pages of him trying to get her to be open and honest and she trying to be polite and respect his position) was quite entertaining and, as mentioned at the beginning, endeared him to my own little sardonic heart. As a modern reader I immediately saw his gruff peculiarities and assumed there was some painful experience behind it. I wonder if someone in the 1800s reading this for the first time would have. I value honesty, bluntness, and "plain dealing". I would rather someone blow me off entirely than engage in polite, self-effacing, "Do you find the weather ever so intolerable?", make nice and happy...well...BS. But would they, in that archaically polite society, give Rochester the benefit of the doubt or write him off as the lesser of the two Rochester brothers? We saw in Pride and Prejudice how wonderfully everyone regarded D-bag Wickham even after he pulled his little tricks. But, I digress.
In the back and forth Rochester plays with her, calling her a witch who bespelled either the horse or the puddle to turn to ice.
"When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse; I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?"
"I have none."
"Nor ever had, I suppose; do you remember them?"
"No."
"I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people while you sat on that stile?"
"For whom, sir?"
"For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?"
(I love Jane's response here)
"The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done.
It's right there that the writer telegraphs, in the same way as we knew Helen would die, that these two will be together, or at least should be together. Rochester ask if she has any aunts or uncles and she replies in the negative. I couldn't help but think that might bite her in bustle later.
Mrs. Fairfax interrupts his stream of badgering questions to speak of her virtues, to which Rochester replies "Don't trouble yourself to giver her a character...I shall judge for myself. She began by felling my horse." I couldn't help but laugh at that.
Other things happen throughout the chapter that I likely should cover (we discover that Adele may be Rochester's illegitimate child via a Parisian singer/dancer who was happy to take his money and affections and then cheat on him, and there is something to do with an older brother who died leaving Rochester with a fortune it doesn't appear he actually wanted), but what I want to write about in this already long post is the art of Ms. Jane Eyre.
At one point Rochester pretty much dares Jane to show him her art because he doesn't at all believe that what he has seen is hers. It's too good and must have been copied or whatever. She brings her portfolio to him and he begins to assess both Jane and her art. I love this scene in particular for three reasons:
1) Bronte so nails the universal artist struggle. "As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived."
As a fiction writer I cannot tell you how huge that feeling is. We are doomed, doomed, to be an imperfect filter for the brilliant, bright white ideas that are in our heads. It is so daunting that it has actually kept me from writing on a number of occasions. I cannot relate to you how disappointing and pretty depressing that can be. The reason writers hate re-writes and hate the editing process is because they are time and time again confronted with how imperfect a filter they are. Metaphorically, it's like having a beautiful child and then you're driving and get in a car wreck and your child suffers burns and lacerations and is disfigured. It's your fault that it looks the way it looks and there's nothing you can do about it. But it's still yours. You are still proud of it and introduce it to people, and take care of it, but that feeling that it was your fault that it looks the way it does always lingers. Maybe a bit morbid, but it's fairly accurate to my experience.
2) What the heck would an art therapist have to say about Eyre's paintings?
I'm sure that they are foreshadowing things throughout the novel to come, or give light to her emotional state during her time at Lowood, but DANG.
3) Rochester's reaction to them.
More revealing than what it says about Jane is what it says about Rochester. "Where did you see Latmos? For that is Latmos." he says pointing at one of the paintings. Latmos, in Greek Mythology, is where the Selene, the goddess of the moon, seduced Endymion. (The footnotes actually came in handy here.) Endymion was a shepherd that Selene fell in love with after watching him night after night. She caused him to fall asleep with his eyes open so that she could watch him in his full beauty. She asks Zeus, I think, to make the shepherd immortal. The shepherd then married the glowing celestial beauty and had 50 children with him. After his realization that he sees Latmos, he abruptly sends everyone away. I presume that is foreshadowing of the tale of Adele's mother.
As with Pride and Prejudice I am surprised at how much I'm loving this book and wondering why I disregarded them before. They have proven to me how engaging non-genre fiction can actually be.
In many ways this project of reading the 100BYSRBYD is a bit of a homecoming for me. When I talk to other people who love the books on the list it's like meeting long lost family. Last night I was at "Small Groups" we attend through our church and someone overheard me talking to my wife about Jane Eyre and was curious why I was reading it. I explained and a couple people piped up about different books and authors that should (and are) on the list. One guy went off on Alexandre Dumas and his work The Count of Monte Cristo, to which many in the room said "Oh, I saw the movie of that. It was pretty good." At least three people replied in unison "No. No, no no no. It doesn't even begin to compare." It's so good to find other members of my tribe here on the blog or out in the world. :)
By the by, I did correct my beloved, when she called me her "grumpy man", telling her that the correct term is "crotchety". Oddly enough I was looking online for shillelaghs at the time I was explaining this. I swear it was a coincidence.
Pax,
W
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