Lately I decided to give it a go at some
Victorian Literature, and even though I still didn’t write about it here, I´ve
been enjoying it a lot. So, after reading things like Pride and Prejudice,
Oliver Twist, and Wuthering Heights, I chose Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to
continue my Victorian visit. I confess I was not that excited about it before I
started reading it since I though that this novel would be just another love
story. But I couldn’t be more wrong. The book is a good definition of what
people call in German a “Bildungsroman” (I don’t know exactly how to translate
this to English), which is a story that shows the main character throughout
many years going and living at different places, meting different people and
developing its personality as the time passes. That is what happens to Jane
Eyre. She starts as an orphan child living with some abusive relatives, and
then she goes to a type of charity school first as student and later as a
teacher, to then move to Thornfield Hall to work as a housekeeper, and it
doesn’t end there.
Personally, those Bildungsromans are usually my favourite
type of novels. I wrote a few years ago here in this blog about Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship, which is for many people considered to be the very
first book of this type, and it still is if not my favourite book, certainly one
of my favourites. So, it’s not a surprise that I also felt in love with Jane
Eyre. It is such a rich book in so many aspects. Not only the whole inner
development that Jane goes throughout her life but there is a lot more to it.
It’s even difficult to put this book in only a single literary genre. It has,
for example, a small gothic style to it at times. But it’s very interesting
that this appears in the novel never in a complete form, but always as a fading
thing, as if Charlotte is influenced by it, but also that she was already
moving towards something else. For example, many times at Thornfield Hall,
which very often is described as having a dark atmosphere, mysterious sounds
appear from nowhere and Jane initially attribute them to ghosts, but latter always
realizing that it was simply someone else. There are often conversations about
ghosts that later are always demystified as something ordinary. I loved to see
how the gothic is present in the novel, but always as this fading thing, that
is not really fully there any more.
Obviously, you can say that Jane Eyre is
also a psychological fiction, since there is a lot which goes inside of Jane’s
head along her life journey. She faces herself many times with many strong
dilemmas, testing her beliefs, which sometimes are very strong and rich,
ranging from themes like Christian feelings, to a type of raw but very lively feminism
(remember this is a book from 1847). Those different traits very often do not
live in her personality in a harmonious way. Jane is most of times very polite,
quiet, and live her problems only inside of her head, but at moments, she can
give passage to strong anger and be very active taking surprising decisions.
This is also mirrored by another character that appears in the book, which is a
crazy livid woman jailed in the attic, which theoretically represents this
savage anger side of the feminine psychology, that obviously was not at all
regarded well by society at that time.
But Jane Eyre is also a love story. And
a very interesting one. The ups and downs of the relationship between Jane and
Mrs. Rochester, which often come in very long and beautiful dialogues, also
reflect many of the social and religious complicated issues that Jane, but to
some extend also Rochester, have in their beliefs. It’s just a great and very
rich book. The language is not complicated and the reading flows easily. It was
a great experience and now I am looking forward to read some other books from
her, but also from her sisters Emily and Anne. I confess that so far, from all
the 19th century English books that I’ve read, Pride and Prejudice
is still my favourite. Elizabeth is one of my favourite characters of all time.
But I think Jane Eyre would be my second choice. Jane is also a very very
interesting character. I hope that can instigate you to read it, in case you
still didn’t.
