Jane Eyre
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Given the book’s reputation as a protofeminist tale, what most surprised me about Jane Eyre was how preoccupied it is with men. Brontë struck a mighty blow for her gender when she created her title character and narrator, an orphaned girl who matures into a formidably self-possessed young woman; Jane’s moral sensibility is so detailed, so fully realized, that no reader could think her any less a person than the men surrounding her. Yet Jane, a hardheaded pragmatist, knows full well that the world is governed by men, and the narrative centers on her ongoing efforts to make sense of these powerful, often cruel, always mysterious creatures. The most perplexing of all is Edward Fairfax Rochester, the brooding landowner who becomes her boss when she lands a position as governess to his young ward, Adele. Harboring a deep, dark secret from his past, Rochester epitomizes the male animal, which may be the reason so many movie versions of Jane Eyre have stood or fallen on the skill of the actor playing him.
From the novel’s opening pages, Brontë presents men as unknowable at best and stupidly violent at worst. Jane’s father, a poor clergyman, died when she was a toddler, as did her mother, whose wealthy family had disapproved of the marriage. Now ten years old, Jane lives in a fine house with her maternal aunt, who despises her, and suffers the bullying of her vicious cousin, John, who smacks her in the head with a book so hard that he draws blood. After railing at him, Jane is punished for the incident instead of John, locked in the little “red room” where her uncle died years earlier. “If you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney, and fetch you away,” a servant tells her. This awful notion, combined with the eerie aspect of her uncle’s death chamber, so terrifies Jane that eventually she keels over. We’re barely two chapters into the book, and already the only male characters are a little sadist and two ghostly figures.
William Hurt also succumbed to excessive niceness when he played Rochester in the dull 1996 version, directed by the egregiously tasteful Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet). Hurt is a hugely likable actor, but onscreen he often betrays a deep need to be liked, which can be fatal when playing such a prickly character. Opposite a stiff-necked Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane, he’s almost goofily emotive when he should be angrily guarded; he seems desperate to spill his guts to her when the Rochester of the novel is way too proud to reveal what’s eating at him. As Leonard Maltin has pointed out, the two stars lack any sort of romantic chemistry, but that’s partly because Hurt has blunted the very aspect of Rochester’s personality that so attracts Jane: the visible friction between the kind man he’d like to be and the irritable dick he actually is.
