- by Owen Morton
Reading Jane Eyre is at the best of times something very difficult to do. From the initial page, where it states matter-of-factly, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day” to the final sentence, the achingly poignant “ “Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus!” ’”, one is obliged to trawl through a huge mass of ridiculously complex sentences and unreasonably overlong words, in order to reach the conclusion of a story which isn’t actually particularly wonderful in the first place. I was unfortunate enough to have to peruse Jane Eyre for GCSE English, and that was the latest occasion on which I read it. However, I do have a copy of it here at York with me – I have no idea why, since I have no intention of ever reading it: in my estimation, the reason is that I fancy it lends my bookshelf an air of sophistication, Jane Eyre nestling unobtrusively between Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Watership Down (for I do not see the need to arrange the tomes upon my shelf in any order, whether such order be alphabetical, chronological or any other manner of order, the name of which temporarily escapes me).
Be these statements as they may, the fact remains that Jane Eyre is most unquestionably long overdue for closer examination by we here at Heath the Rat’s Silly Page. Or, if we wished to continue using the Microsoft Word thesaurus to find stupidly long versions of words, we here at Moorland the Cockroach’s Impractical Piece of Paper. Actually, I think that’s a fairly catchy title: I might rename the website that. Or I might not.
On a side note, I should like to draw your attention to the fact that Microsoft Word’s thesaurus is not what one might call all that intelligent. Besides the way it might offer something not quite appropriate to what you intend, which is perfectly understandable, since the same word can mean different things depending on context, the thesaurus will offer up words as alternatives which the spell checker will then not recognise as being words. For example, as an alternative to ‘Heath’, you will note that I used ‘Moorland’. This is because the thesaurus recommended it. However, every time I have used the word ‘moorland’ in this article, it has been underlined in red, which – unless things have changed – means that the word in question is thought to be a misspelling. Who designed the thing so it would suggest words that it itself does recognise as being words? Well? And their reason?
Anyway, I’ve now given up my attempt to mimic Victorian authors by using very long words. I think you probably all got bored of it in my first paragraph. If you even noticed it. All that remains for me to do is actually discuss Jane Eyre, something which I’ve proven quite capable of avoiding. I think I’d better start with the plot, so far as I can remember it.
The first few chapters of the book featured the heroine, coincidentally called Jane Eyre, as a child, living in the home of her aunt, Mrs. Reid, and her three somewhat unpleasant cousins, Eliza, someone else (possibly called Margaret, but I can’t remember), and the bane of Jane’s life, John. I also can’t remember why Jane lived with her aunt, but I would imagine that, in the grand tradition of the hero or heroine of so many Victorian novels, she was an orphan who had been ‘kindly’ taken in by relations who were then perfectly beastly to her. At any rate, the only person in this house who is nice to her is the maid, Bessie. The first few chapters detail several exciting but totally irrelevant plot-wise incidents of bullying by John of Jane. Having the book beside me as I write this for reference (as you may have guessed by the use of the two quotes in the first paragraph), I will here quote what John thought consisted of a particularly impressive form of bullying:
“he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots.”
Now, I will be the first to admit that I do not appreciate it when people stick their tongues out at me, but if they do it for three minutes, I do begin to feel that they’re humiliating themselves a little bit more than they are me. Perhaps Victorian society was different, and the longer one could keep one’s tongue out of one’s mouth, the more respected one was. Somehow, though, I doubt it, and I suspect that were such a circumstance to arise in real life, John would have been laughed out of the room.
Anyway, it’s not really for me to comment. After a bit of this tomfoolery, Mrs. Reid decides to send Jane away to a school which is very religious. All the teachers and pupils are nice to her, but the school governor, or whatever he is, is a highly hypocritical man. He fancies himself as a good Christian but he’s not. Well gosh. Six or seven chapters go by with Jane at this school, during which time she grows up a little bit, reaching the grand old age of 18.
Then she becomes a maid in the house of Mr. Rochester, who over the course of about fifteen more chapters, she learns she loves him, which really is a shock revelation and certainly not something anyone could possibly have seen coming. After a brief comic interlude when Jane visits Mrs. Reid at her deathbed, the action moves swiftly to the wedding of Jane and Mr. Rochester. But! something goes wrong.
I’m getting bored here, even just summarising it so succinctly.
It turns out that Mr. Rochester is already married, the bounder, to a completely mad woman who he keeps locked up in his attic. What a right bastard Mr. Rochester is. He was perfectly willing to go through with this wedding and deceive Jane. Oddly enough, however, as far as I remember, the book seemed to be sympathetic to Mr. Rochester. Different value system, evidently, but the Victorians were very up on morality, as far as I recall. So why …? No, I don’t care.
On learning this terrible fact, Jane runs away somewhere and spends pretty much the remainder of the book, which I’d guess is another fifteen or so chapters there, wherever she is. I can’t remember for the life of me what she does in these fifteen chapters. But at any rate, the book ends with her marrying a now blind Mr. Rochester. He was blinded in a fire which killed his wife. Can anyone say “suspicious circumstances”? Jane doesn’t care, though, and the book ends very happily.
And it seems appropriate that the article should end here very happily as well.