Salon.com > Jane Eyre

An intense, passionate new “Jane Eyre”

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:01:00 +0000

In reframing one of the most read but least understood of all English novels as a story about two lonely people against an isolated landscape -- a story closer to a John Ford western than to a conventional, BBC-style presentation of Victorian England -- the young American director Cary Joji Fukunaga has very likely surpassed all previous cinematic versions of "Jane Eyre." That's a matter of taste, of course, and I'm not disrespecting the numerous good-to-excellent TV adaptations of Charlotte Brontë's novel, which go back to the '50s and include the superb 2006 version starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens.

But Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini (a prominent British playwright who also wrote the script for Stephen Frears' undervalued "Tamara Drewe") have grasped that cinema is not television, and that just because a famous book contains a lot of words, you don't need to fill up the movie with them. When ramrod-straight governess Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) and her moody employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester (Michael Fassbender), do speak, the lines are rich and resonant with the idiosyncrasy of 19th-century English speech. I haven't gone back to check, but I'm pretty sure Buffini is pulling lines straight out of Brontë. (The terrific cast also includes Judi Dench as Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, and Jamie Bell as St. John Rivers, the young clergyman who takes Jane in after she flees from Rochester.)

Michael Fassbender, future superstar

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:01:00 +0000

If Michael Fassbender's rapid career ascent doesn't lead to a long career as a movie star, he definitely won't have the media to blame. The 32-year-old Irish-German actor, probably best known to general moviegoers (at least until now) for playing Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino's World War II pastiche "Inglourious Basterds," is pretty much a journalist's dream. He's charismatic and handsome -- having placed very high on Salon's 2010 Men on Top list -- but also friendly and unassuming. He's a professed movie buff, who acts completely delighted to be hanging out with me in a New York hotel suite on a chilly afternoon, doing goofball Orson Welles impressions and dissecting the upside-down gender politics in American director Cary Joji Fukunaga's new film of "Jane Eyre," in which Fassbender plays the haunted leading man, Mr. Rochester.

In defense of Jane Eyre

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:20:00 +0000

For a great novel, "Jane Eyre" has endured more than its fair share of misguided, condescending misinterpretations, but none quite so extravagant as an essay published in the British newspaper the Telegraph last week by novelist Sebastian Faulks. "Jane Eyre is a heroine," he announces in the opening sentence, while "Becky Sharp, the main character of Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' (1847-48), is a hero." Furthermore, "No one seems to question the distinction: it's obvious."

In explaining this curious formulation, Faulks acknowledges Jane's "resilience" and "moral calibre" but qualifies this praise by claiming that "her happiness, and her psychological 'completion,' seem to depend on her securing the love and companionship of another, Mr Rochester." This need, he maintains, is incompatible with heroism.

By contrast, Becky Sharp -- a conscience-free climber and high-society con artist -- may be widely viewed as the anti-heroine of "Vanity Fair," but Faulks believes that her "resourcefulness and skill," combined with her refusal to regard her "feelings for a man as a fixed point or priority," add up to a form of heroism. That's because, in Faulks' view, "pairing off is not the goal or completion of the heroic trajectory. The hero imprints his or her qualities on society and by doing so overcomes false or smothering social restrictions."

Reading “Jane Eyre”

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 15:54:00 +0000

Recent research into the reading habits of men and women confirms what people in the book trade have long suspected -- women are much more adventurous in their choice of fiction than the male of the species. The study, carried out by Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College in London, concludes that "[m]en who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men." The study also finds that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, men believe that "great literature" is only written by men.

I confess to having once suffered from this boys-only syndrome. Raised on a steady diet of Hardy, Dostoevski and Faulkner; enamored of the macho antics of Hemingway, Kerouac and Mailer, I spent my school days and early adulthood believing that the creation of serious literature was primarily a male endeavor. Women's writing was the stuff of discussion groups and beach fantasies; men's writing dealt with the big themes like existential angst and stoical heroicism. Of course, women were capable of writing beautifully and memorably, but there was always a suspicion that they were like Danica Patrick taking the lead at Indianapolis or Hillary Clinton getting ready to run for president -- women making a name for themselves in a man's world.

Page turners with a brain

Sat, 29 May 2004 20:00:00 +0000

Readers of America, you have a choice. Although you wouldn't know it to look at many of the titles jostling for slots on the bestseller lists, there's no law dictating that if you want a book with an irresistible, crackerjack plot you also have to put up with crappy writing and tissue-paper-thin characters. Sure, millions of people proved themselves willing to choke down Dan Brown's clunky prose in order to crack "The Da Vinci Code" (proof positive that everyone loves a good conspiracy theory), but why suffer if you don't have to?

Page turners can be smart, as in really smart, and not just the pseudo-intelligence of the reviewers' current darling, "The Rule of Four," by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. With that novel, we were promised Donna Tartt meets Umberto Eco, and instead we got way too much turgid maundering on undergraduate life at Princeton and way too little of the fascinating real-life Renaissance book supposedly at the story's center. Nowhere is it written that smart books must also be overwritten and difficult to follow, either. The hardest thing, after all, is to make it go down easy.

“Lost in a Good Book” by Jasper Fforde

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 21:00:00 +0000

Jasper Fforde sets about endearing himself to readers even before he begins the second in his series of Thursday Next novels, "Lost in a Good Book." His dedication reads, "This book is dedicated to assistants everywhere. You make it happen for them. They couldn't do it without you. Your contribution is everything." A bit over the top toward the end, but sweet, and it gives a sense of the rumpled everyman quality underlying Fforde's larky wit.

Thursday Next lives in 1980s Britain, but hers is an alternate version of our own world, lacking in some of our technology (jet planes) and advanced in others we've barely tapped, such as genetic engineering. (Thursday has a pet dodo and the Neanderthal has been brought back, to mixed success.) In Thursday's world, people can travel through time, but the practice is tightly controlled by a division of the Special Operations police force called the ChronoGuard. Thursday works for SpecOps, too, but in another division. She's a literary detective.

Pundits in the limelight

Fri, 14 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Dallas Observer, May 13-19

"The Nerd Behind the Throne" by Miriam Rozen

Ever since Dick Morris' toe-sucking antics stole the front pages from an otherwise eventless Democratic National Convention in 1996 and Mary Matalin and James Carville elbowed their candidates out of the spotlight, journalists have been catching on to a very postmodern principal: the machine that cranks out the Political Spam is much more interesting than the Political Spam itself. Miriam Rozen takes this concept and runs with it in her excellent profile of Karl Rove, who managed George W. Bush's two successful gubernatorial races and is taking a strong role in his bid for the presidency.

Bush's Dick Morris is a nerdy, middle-class guy who, unlike his candidate, has had to work his way up the political ladder. Rove is paid to simultaneously sedate the press, reel in the cashola and win the hearts and votes of the American people. It's a strange job: He knows what it takes to win an election, but doesn't possess that quality himself.

Jane Eyre, to go

Fri, 13 Nov 1998 19:38:00 +0000

As soon as the first assignment is due for a course, the illusion
of classroom camaraderie crashes to the ground. One day you are all
hanging out talking about Thomas Carlyle, and the next day otherwise
poised and articulate young people are stammering out requests for
extensions. They stop meeting your eyes in class, and they start getting
sick. By the time that happened in the Victorian literature class I
taught at Stanford University this past spring, I had granted extensions
to a third of the class. I surrendered, and let the whole class have an
extra weekend. After all, I wanted them to like me as much as they
wanted me to like them.

Classics Book Group

Mon, 29 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

"Jane Eyre" abounds in mysteries and surprises.

The most immediate, for Charlotte Brontk's contemporaries, was the identity of the author of this controversial bestselling first novel of 1847. So far as readers knew, the novel was by a wholly
unknown individual named "Currer Bell" -- whether male or female, no one seemed to know. Much discussion ensued in the press over the identity of "Currer Bell"; some reviewers believed the novel to be "coarse" (in its frank depiction of emotion and passion), but so intelligently conceived and written that "Currer Bell" had to be a man. ("Jane Eyre" went through several large editions before Charlotte Brontk publicly revealed herself as the author. Today, the author's sensibility seems far more feminine than masculine in its attentiveness to details of girls' and women's private domestic lives and in its wholly sympathetic portrait of a young governess virtuously resisting her employer's plea that she love him despite the fact he isn't free to marry her.)

Personal Best: Lolita

Mon, 30 Sep 1996 12:32:00 +0000

after years of my being asked in public, "What's your all-time favorite book?" I should have a definitive sound bite by now. You'd think. But for this writer, having to choose a best book conjures up terrible visions of schoolyard days when I waited to be chosen as someone's friend. Because my family moved almost yearly, books became my comfort, and I want to embrace them all.

Certainly "Jane Eyre" fits in there with bests. Its setting of gloom and chill matched my emotional interior. I identified with Jane Eyre's alienation, her meager hopes. Moreover, I loved her spunkiness; she was confined by circumstances, yet subtly rebellious and spiritually subversive. From "Jane Eyre," I acquired a literary preference for gothic atmosphere and dark emotional resonance.

I also want to say the dictionary is a best, any unabridged dictionary. I read lists of words as though they were stories. Within their nuances, I see possibilities. Like many writers, I am passionate about words. To this day, I love reading dictionaries, including lexicons of dead languages. I love the sounds and shapes of words, the way that certain consonant blends conjure up related images -- glow, glisten, glimmer, glen versus flabby, flap, flop, flotsam, flatter, flatulence. I am fascinated with the origins of words, when they first came into being, how they were used. Within their histories are stories. The dictionary for me is my Scheherazade. Plus it can spell Scheherazade.