Archive for the 'Romance Roots' category

Romance Roots: Dracula, by Bram Stoker (part 2)

Aug 18 2010 Published by under Reading Reflection, Romance Roots

(Part 1 here)

This post assumes you have read it. Here’s a cheat summary if not.

Did I enjoy Dracula? The first four chapters, when Harker is visiting Count Dracula on business in Transylvania, were terrific. Gothic, tense, absorbing. When Harker cuts himself shaving, when he looks out the window and sees Dracula scaling the castle wall like an insect … that’s great stuff. Then I noticed that Harker started doing things that were unintelligent, like breaking into locked rooms that his scary host has told him to avoid, but, remembering that as a 21st century reader I know what all of Dracula’s odd behaviors signify, while Harker doesn’t, I tried to be charitable. Another great scene is when the ship carrying Dracula, the Demeter, arrives in the midst of a great storm (the Gothic flourishes are so fun) on the English shore, with the crew is disappeared and the dead captain, clutching a crucifix, tied to the wheel. There’s a lot of great story telling here.

The novel is an epistolary one, meaning it is written as a series of letters, and sometimes news clippings (more on this below). I guess the book was originally conceived as a play with one of Stoker’s good friends as Dracula.  The effect is to mute the action, because as a reader you are never “there” when the good stuff is going down. It has already happened. I guess the fact that the letters are written from the point of view of characters who only know part of an unfolding series of events might enhance the suspense, but I found most of the vampire slayers so incompetent that it didn’t work that way for me. Surprisingly, there isn’t all that much action, perhaps because had the story been staged, complicated action sequences would have been too difficult to enact. There is talking. A LOT of talking. I would guess the ratio of talking about what to do to actually doing it is 10 to 1.

I did enjoy the book, although I was always reading it through the lens of all the other vampire stories I consumed first: Stephen King, Ann Rice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampire romances, etc., and a lot of the time I was thinking about how this version was similar to and different from those others, as well as about big picture themes like gender and sexuality, science versus superstition, etc.

There is so, so much to say about this book. But here are a few things I wanted to talk about:

0. Writing

These people are obsessed with writing things down. I know it’s an epistolary novel, but still! They even write about writing. This journal entry from Mina is typical:

There may be a solemn duty, and if it come we must not shrink from it. I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required.

Yes, because the typewriter is just the thing to foil the undead!

Also from ch 14:

I am so glad I have typewritten out my own journal, so that, in case he asks about Lucy, I can hand it to him.

I am sure there’s a lot to be said about the power of the written word, about publicity and privacy, about writing as exorcism, as therapy, etc. But my super intelligent reaction was “WTF”?

1. About Mina

She is strong and smart, but she’s also got that masochistic streak — and not the fun kind. After nearly being killed in a traumatic encounter with Dracula, she says:

“And oh, my God, my God, pity me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!” Her husband groaned again. She clasped his hand harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if he were the injured one, and went on.

She also gets kicked out of the Scooby Gang after their first meeting. It’s like Stoker changes his mind mid stream. At the end of Mina’s Journal in chapter 18 we get this muddled logic from Van Helsing:

Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain, a brain that a man should have were he much gifted, and a woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination. Friend John, up to now fortune has made that woman of help to us, after tonight she must not have to do with this so terrible affair. It is not good that she run a risk so great. We men are determined, nay, are we not pledged, to destroy this monster? But it is no part for a woman. Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors and hereafter she may suffer, both in waking,from her nerves, and in sleep,from her dreams. And, besides, she is young woman and not so long married, there may be other things to think of some time, if not now. You tell me she has wrote all, then she must consult with us, but tomorrow she say goodbye to this work, and we go alone.

2. TSTL

So what kind of a brains do Van Helsing and his crew posess? Hmmm…. well, Mina starts exhibiting the same symptoms Lucy had, and Dracula lives thisclose, yet nobody thinks for a second that Dracula has gotten to Mina. Is it because of her “man’s brain”? They notice she is tired, and send her to bed. Over and over. Finally, Renfield enlightens them, they arm themselves and rush to Mina’s room, where they have this exchange:

Outside the Harkers’ door we paused. Art and Quincey held back, and the latter said, “Should we disturb her?”

“We must,” said Van Helsing grimly. “If the door be locked, I shall break it in.”

“May it not frighten her terribly? It is unusual to break into a lady’s room!”

*headdesk*

3. My favorite scene

Of course, it’s when they do break in and find Mina with the Count:

His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion.

How many dissertations were launched by this tableau? So many overlapping metaphors and allusions. Mina as mother giving her blood. As suckling babe. Sex kitten.

Dracula even sounds downright Biblical when he says:

And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, kin of my kin, my bountiful wine-press for a while, and shall be later on my companion and my helper.

4. The menages

Dracula escapes  (of course) and then there’s this weird moment between Mina, her husband, Jonathan, and Van Helsing:

Then she raised her head proudly, and held out one hand to Van Helsing who took it in his, and after stooping and kissing it reverently, held it fast. The other hand was locked in that of her husband, who held his other arm thrown round her protectingly.

Mina has already shared her literal marriage bed with Dracula. So how many people is she married to, exactly?

And that isn’t even the first suggestion of a threesome in this book. There was this exchange earlier, when Van Helsing was transfusing Lucy. He mentioned Holmwood’s notion that exchanging blood makes Lucy his bride:

Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride… If so… Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone – even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist.

Everyone says Dracula is a book about transgressing boundaries — geographic, gendered, sexual, bodily, material and spiritual. So why not have three — or 4 –  people in a marriage?

5. Bloodsucking = sex, blood = semen.

I always knew that there were these linkages, but I never realized how darned obvious they would be. Then again, perhaps they are obvious to me because I am a 21st century reader. For example, this one from Mina, after her episode with the Count in her bedroom:

When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the – Oh my God, my God! What have I done?”

What? Some of the WHAT? I am dying to find out what she meant, because I have NO IDEA. ! ;)

And when Van Helsing says not to tell Arthur that other men have given their blood to Lucy, it’s because he might get jealous (chapter 10)

No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.

6. The gang rape of Lucy

But all of this pales (heh) in comparison to the top scene for the kind of deep analyses favored by a certain type of highly educated literary critic   — the stabbing of Lucy. Lucy had been beautiful, the perfect chaste, virtuous woman, with no fewer than three suitors. But somehow — and it was never clear to me in reading the text — she was susceptible to Dracula. She had to have invited him in at least once, naughty girl. Or maybe she thought he was a homeless person in need?

Eventually, after multiple fuckings blood suckings, she is turned, and starts killing infants. This makes sense. If the perfect woman is maternal, then the opposite of the perfect woman is a baby killer. I loved it that Lucy went around killing babies and trying to seduce everyone. Terrifying stuff.

The more evil she is, the more beautiful and the more alluring. Or is that the reverse? From Chapter 16:

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said, “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the tinkling of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another.

In other words, they are all getting off. Together.

As horrible as it is to the men, several of whom are in love with her, and one of whom — Arthur — is engaged to her, they must go to her grave and kill her. Here’s how it is described:

Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercybearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it.

Whew. I need a cigarette. How about you?

7. Dracula as alpha male

Ian Holt, a Dracula authority and coauthor of a sequel, has written that:

There have been many schools of thought on why Dracula and vampires hold such sway on the masses. In my opinion, the root is that Dracula represents freedom. Dracula is not bound by the rule of law or man’s self-imposed morality. He has the strength of ten men. His powers over the human mind allow him his pick of women. These are all powerful fantasies to many an adolescent boy.

For women, Dracula represents the ultimate alpha-male. Wealth, power, will and strength define him. He exists on a higher plane than human men, appealing to the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mentality.

Holt here assumes that female readers place themselves in female character positions in the novel. We know better than that. But does Dracula represent the alpha male? Is this a romance, with Dracula trying — but failing — to find his soul mate? I know that’s how the 1992 film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola understood him, but I don’t see it in the book at all. While I find a lot of sex in this book (assuming a depth reading) I don’t see much romance. I was never sure what motivated Dracula, exactly (he’s upset that his former glories are former. He wants control and power, but over what, and why? Or maybe I am not supposed to ask why someone would want control and power), but it’s not love.

It is easier for me to connect Dracula with the alphhole heroes of the past in romance than with the vampire heroes of today’s romance novel. The obsession with consent and coercion, with moral and sexual purity, with control of women, was there in Old Skool romance.

Consider these passages:

With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so, `First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet. It is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!’

And Mina, confused about her complicity:

I was bewildered, and strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. (chapter 21)

Women engaging in sex against their will, or their better judgment, impossibly alluring men, the attempt to find happiness with the average Joe, all of that is echoed in some ways in older romance novels I have read. And not just older ones: the idea that female sexuality is dangerous, fraught, powerful, debilitating, and in some way bad for women (and men), is still with us in many a romance novel today.

But, to get superficial for a minute, Dracula was not good looking, a prerequisite for a romance novel hero. Here is Harker’s description when he first meets him:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Except for the strength and vitality, and the “cruel-looking” mouth, there’s little here to compare to romance heroes of today or yore. But Dracula is the strongest, the most free, the most alluring and intense. And that’s who the hero is in most romance novels.

There’s so much more that could be said about this book. For example, I was very interested in Van Helsing as physician/researcher, and of course in Dr. Seward and his patient in the asylum, Renfield. I think I am going to use Renfield as a case study the next time I give a hospital talk on waxing and waning decisional capacity! But this is long enough.

Have you read Dracula? What did you think?

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Romance Roots: Dracula, by Bram Stoker (part 1)

Aug 18 2010 Published by under Reading Reflection, Reviews, Romance Roots

An interview with my spouse, Stephen M. Miller, Ph.D., F.R. Hist. S.. He’s a historian specializing in the British Empire (the “F.R. Hist S.” is the Royal Historical Society to which Stephen was elected a couple of years ago. I swear he doesn’t normally use it, although he may or may not have asked me to shout it during intimate moments).

Before we start, he wants me to say that he has absolutely no expert knowledge of Victorian fiction and is being dragooned into this. Also, we’re assuming you have read it. If your recollection is rusty, here’s a character list.

In this interview, we talk history. In my next post (coming later today), I talk Dracula as fiction and relate it to romance.

Jessica: Is this an imperial novel? What about the theory that Dracula represents the Other in that political sense?

Stephen: Well, I would say yes and no. There were lots of improvements in transportation in late Victorian Britain, among them the introduction of electric trains in the London underground system in the early 1890s. Railroad expansion is occurring rapidly throughout Britain and most of the continent.  Remember when they are trying to catch up with Dracula, he says there are three ways they can go after him, land, sea, and railroad?  That was a bit odd because Eastern Europe was well behind the north and the west in linking its cities via rail.  But of course there were some lines, and Stoker mentions the Orient Express whose service was about ten-fifteen years old when he wrote the book.  These improvements made it easier not just for Britain to go out to the rest of the world and subdue large tracts of it but it also made it easier  for the rest of the world to come to Great Britain, and that was a  very scary notion, albeit it opened up exciting possibilities as well. All in all, the world seems smaller, and thanks to improvements in communication (telegraph, submarine cables), it got smaller still.  Technology — like electricity, lighting, use of gas — would have been on people’s minds at the time, but there was little of that in the book.

But I think Stoker uses these advances as a device to set up the book, and then kind of leaves it.

Although there are some references to empire, and it’s written in an era in which empire would have been in the minds of the British public, it is not, in my opinion, an overt book about the empire. To read it that way assumes a level of subtlety in Stoker’s writing which in my opinion he doesn’t possess. One of the things Stoker often does is repeat for emphasis any point he is trying to make. If he is trying to say something, the reader knows it.

So, for example, to speak of Eastern Europe … they only meet one Jew in the book. If it’s about Eastern Europeans, there are few if any references to them in London, but there would have been many recent immigrants about. Although there are references to gypsies in Dracula, and references to Slovaks, there’s very little about their culture. If someone was really interested in the Other coming, they would talk more about that. So to me, it is more of a setting.  This is not Joseph Conrad or even Haggard writing about setting, for example, in which the setting takes precedence regardless of the author’s intent.  This is Stoker re-telling a well known tale, and the road to Transylvania was well-worn before 1897.

There are a few references to India, which suggests that Stoker had some knowledge about the empire. There are no references to Africa. In late Victorian Britain, the British army was engaged on the average in two to three wars a year. Most of those were fought along India’s frontiers and in Africa. Some of the other big events going on would be the French threatening British interests in Egypt, which would bring Britain to war in the Sudan against an Islamic theocracy (again). Stoker was writing at a time when Islam would have been feared, yet there is no mention in the book. The British public held certain beliefs about the followers of Islam, most of which today we would consider prejudicial and inaccurate. Yet war and religion do not appear in the book.

J: Yeah, why don’t they get a priest? Why are no characters going to church? Wouldn’t the church have been important to Londoners at that time?

S: Those are good questions. There is no doubt that the Church of England’s influence over British society is in decline, but it is still a force, especially among the respectibility-seeking middle class.

J:  I found it really interesting that the person in the book who seemed the most religious was the one who worshiped Dracula, Renfield. He has the ecstasies, blind unselfish devotion, all the hallmarks of a kind of intense religious experience. While Van Helsing and the gang use religious artifacts like the host, they do so in a very detached, scientific way, almost draining all the spirituality out of them.

What do you make of Van Helsing’s nationality, by the way? Van Helsing is the one who realizes that natural science alone will not defeat the enemy. He is open to supernatural possibilities.

S: That is a mystery to me. The British viewed the continent as very different, but the border is pretty open. The British elite travel throughout Europe. Many speak French, German. The British and German royal families are closely connected. From the 1870s especially (until the buildup of the German navy around the time Stoker is writing), there is a strong interest in all things German and much sympathy.

J: Does Van Helsing have to be from the Continent to recognize what Dracula is? Is Stoker trying to say the British are of such pure mind they can’t even contemplate a Dracula?

S: Maybe*, but the problem with that theory is Morris, an American, doesn’t recognize Dracula. Stoker praises Quincy Morris for his “American” traits, like his spirit. So perhaps he is trying to say that Dracula represents the old Europe. They do talk about a few of the old battles that Dracula participated in. Oddly, those were battles in which Dracula fought Muslims, so in that way he would be viewed as a protector against Islam. So we don’t want to read too much into this … because in my view it doesn’t all cohere on this level of analysis.

*You have to hear how he says this. It sounds like “maaaaaaaaaay -bee and he’s always looking down when he says it. I have been married to this man for almost 15 years. “Maybe” is his way of saying “God you are clueless.”

J: How about economics?

S: The Great Depression (not what most people in the US think of, but one that affected industrial Europe from 1873-1896) was coming to an end. It had been caused by excess capital and led to a decline in interest rates, causing investors to look for new sources overseas, rather than investing at home. Economically, though, things in Britain were fairly good at the time. That said, the landed class are not as wealthy as they once were. The reason to include the elite character — Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming) — is not so much for his money, but for what he represents. In a way it’s like a throwback — the Christian gentleman. Arthur has to help them, by bankrolling the vampire hunt, but his title is just important, as is his moral fiber. He’s the one who ends up freeing Lucy’s soul.

In 1897 London, it would have made more sense to have an industrialist, a banker or merchant in that role, but in this book money is portrayed as kind of negative.  Dracula pursues and talks about money in away Stoker seems to criticize, to find ungentlemanly.  There is no Dickensian condemnation of utilitarian middle class virtues, but more of a praising of the virtues of the upper class.

J: So when we look at the Scooby Gang: in Harker and Seward he has science, in Van Helsing, a kind of spiritual openness, in Arthur, a pure knight of Old England, and in Morris, a fresh fighting innovative spirit from the New World. Now what about Mina? Is she a kind of ideal in Stoker’s view?

S: Maybe, but Mina is much too strong a character to represent the ideal Victorian woman, She would have to be seen as a new ideal, an ideal for a very small educated class of women, that ten years later will be the ones that take to the streets to fight for the vote. She’s almost like a Florence Nightingale. I don’t think of that as an ideal for Victorian women.

J: I think we disagree about Mina, but thanks a bunch! You are the sweetiest.

S: Wait don’t you want to hear about what I have to say about guns and why all the men know how to use them though none are in the army?

J:  NO!

S: O.K.  Now you have to read Graham Greene’s The Human Factor.

J: Er — I have to wash the cat.

S: You promised!

J: *sigh*

Marriage, compromise, you know the drill.

Part 2 here.

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Romance Roots: Jane Eyre

May 26 2010 Published by under Genre musings, Reading Reflection, Romance Roots

My romance reading has mostly been confined to late twentieth and early 21st century titles, but of course the genre did not spring up ex nihilo. Pam Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) situates contemporary romance within a tradition she traces back to 1740′s Pamela. Among the earlier books Regis analyzes is Jane Eyre, along with Pride and Prejudice, Framley Parsonage, and A Room With a View). Regis chose them for their chronological distribution, representation of different styles of English literature, popularity with critics and public alike, quality, and vivid heroines. She writes, in a statement that may not be widely accepted by today’s readers, “In a genre whose focus is the heroine, novels portraying intense, vigorous women provide the purest account of the genre.” (p. 55).

Regis departs from earlier efforts to define the romance novel by focusing on narrative elements (courtship and betrothal) rather than themes (“love relationship”). According to Regis, a romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines. It has eight elements, and Jane Eyre has all of them.

1. Society Defined: near novel’s beginning; probably in some way flawed.

Society, especially Jane’s place in it,  is a major preoccupation of the novel

2. The Meeting: usually near beginning — hero and heroine meet.

A gripping meeting that brings together so many elements, including the Gothic, romantic, and feminist elements of the novel. An enigmatic man on horseback literally falls at our heroine’s feet!

3. The Barrier: series of scenes — reasons why they cannot marry.

The biggest one, obviously, is that Rochester is already married. Also class and gender issues (her I mean the internal barrier presented by Jane’s reluctance to be a charity case, even in the context of love). And then the fake barriers Rochester erects, as in his courtship of Blanche Ingram.

4. The Attraction: scene or series of scenes — reason they should marry.

Like an old school romance (by which I think is normally meant a romance written in the 1970s through the 1980s), we only directly get Jane’s version of falling in love. But how wonderfully Bronte captures the complex, uncontrollable, emotion, based on both things that can be named, particular qualities (his respectful treatment of her, his kindness, etc.), but also on the primal or inchoate, as when Jane says “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine; — I am sure he is, — I feel akin to him, — I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely.”

Rochester holds his own, though, as in chapter 23 when he describes their connection as a “string somewhere under my left ribs tightly and inexplicably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame”.

They become beautiful in each other’s eyes, in that mysterious way love makes possible.

5. The Declaration: scene or scenes in which hero declares love for heroine and vice versa.

Chapter 23, baby. Jane says “whereever you are is my home — my only home”, and later Rochester says, “You-you strange-almost unearthly thing!– I love as my own flesh.”

6. Point of Ritual Death: moment when union between hero and heroine seems absolutely impossible.

For Regis, this is the moment when Jane, after feeling Rochester, finds herself on the steps of the cottage at Marsh end and thinks, “I can but die”. I would personally put it at the moment after Jane learns about “Bertha”, and is mechanically taking off her wedding dress and pondering what it all means (“I looked at my love … never more could it turn to him”.) Jane’s taking leave of Rochester might be another.

7. The Recognition: point when author gives new information overcoming barrier.

Jane dream Rochester needs her. She returns to Thornfield to find it burned down, and Rochester’s wife perished.

8. Betrothal: hero asks heroine to marry him and she accepts (or vice versa).

We get two of these.

Regis’s discussion of the novel is brief (as indeed is every discussion in this book. It is quite focused.). She notes that Jane Eyre showcases the flexibility of the form, and incorporates elements from other genres, such as the quest-plot, the northern (England) Gothic, Bildungroman, feminist themes. She notes the overriding theme of freedom — Jane’s — which supports a claim against the supposed natural antipathy between feminism and the romance novel to which she has already devoted a whole chapter. Indeed Brontë “finds the romance novel form a natural medium for this theme” (p. 87).

For Regis, the novel is all about freedom — not only Jane’s, but Rochester’s which is bestowed by Jane herself. Does Jane achieve “real equality”? Critics are split, with some arguing that while there may be a “mythical” equality, when romance triumphs, equality is necessarily sacrificed. Others note that Jane herself earned her triumphs, and was not saved by a prince.  The latter is Regis’s view. As she puts it, Jane “is profoundly bourgeois, but bourgeois values of independence, individualism, and freedom have been the goals of her quest: her marriage to Rochester is simply an extension of these, not a concession to literary form” (p. 91).

[What does "feminist" mean in discussions of Jane Eyre? In Regis, it seems to refer to a popular contemporary conception of feminism. Was Brontë influenced by the feminism of her day?]

A partial list of random things that remind me of contemporary romance novels:

  • Anachronisms (as in the apparent conflict between Jane’s comment that Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion is a new book (published in 1808), but then reading Byron’s The Corsair (1814). (see interesting discussion of chronology here).
  • Rochester’s diminutive pet names for Jane, as when he calls her “my little sceptic.”
  • The heroine as an orphan, as vulnerable, as isolated.
  • The dark, brooding hero who is older, richer, and more powerful (her employer) [Regis at one point claims that "Jane controls the courtship from the platform of her profession". (p. 88) I found that very hard to see.]
  • In general, the power issues between hero and heroine
  • The heroine’s lack of bodily control (control of passions) around Rochester
  • The false courtships
  • Rochester’s guests and the scenes when Jane is forced to sit with them reminded me of Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold.
  • The hero in disguise!

A partial list of things that diverge from contemporary (by which I mean, published today) romance novels:

  • The hero is married
  • The extended courtship of Jane by another man
  • The emphasis on Jane’s journey, including her childhood
  • Jane’s religious identity

A few of many things worth thinking a lot more about:

  • Jane’s art — is it just a plot propeller? Or is it more significant? Does it express her self-image?
  • Christian morality — A contemporary reviewer wrote that “No Christian grace is perceptible upon her.” (more reviews here)
  • Postcolonial readings. How is to to read Jane Eyre after reading Wide Sargasso Sea? Can you root at all for Jane and Rochester the way one is supposed to in a romance?

Finally, did I like it?

I would say I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it. Like any good genre reader, much of my pleasure came from situating the text within the genre. As a moral philosopher, I enjoyed Jane’s struggles with principle and emotions and Christian morality. But as a reader simpliciter (whatever that is)? I wasn’t transported by the prose, although I found the plot gripping (despite knowing how it was all going to unfold). There were stretches of slogging. Glad I read it.

Tell me what you think:

Have you read Jane Eyre? Did you like it?

If you read romance, and this IS a romance, why wouldn’t you consider reading it?

They say this is one of those books that, while being widely assigned by English teachers in the US,  is also pretty popular outside the classroom. Why is that?

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