On Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre
by Mark Wallace
Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 version of Jane Eyre is a pretty good adaptation, and Mia Wasikowska’s portrayal of the central character has been generally well-received. One thing that struck me about Wasikowska was her physical resemblance to representations of Charlotte Bronte herself. Wasikowska was wearing a wig for the shooting, one which accentuated the facial similarities.
An attempt is being made here to elide the distance between the author Charlotte Bronte and her heroine Jane Eyre. Why should this be the case? Perhaps because it lends a sense of realism to the plot, implying that Jane Eyre provides an attainable model of romance for its audience. Of course, Charlotte Bronte never had any relationship remotely analogous to Jane’s with Rochester; for Bronte’s biographer Lyndall Gordon:
[Jane Eyre] is a creative truth: not woman as she is, but as she might be. (169)
At this distance in time, however, Bronte can be safely romanticized, and so Jane can become more than “a creative truth”. One is reminded of the film Becoming Jane, which determinedly mythologized Jane Austen’s life till it approximated that of one of her heroines. It’s not enough that Jane Austen created Elizabeth Bennett, the modern audience wants the comfort of knowing that she more or less was Elizabeth Bennett, as well. And Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre works by suggesting that Jane Eyre was Charlotte Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte was Jane Eyre: this could really happen then!
Rather than drawing its intensity from the frustration and isolation of its author, it is more pleasant to believe Jane’s tale had some relation to reality. Just because Bronte could write Jane Eyre, doesn’t mean she could have lived it. Rather the contrary. But it is part of the purpose of wish-fulfilment served in modern culture by stories like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice to believe that they can be read autobiographically.
Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte by George Richmond, 1850.
Lynall Gordon, Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life, London, Virago, 2008.
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Jane Austen probably was a great deal like Elizabeth Bennet, if accounts of her are accurate. But she didn’t make Elizabeth’s choices.
This probably makes me incredibly boring, but I tend to read the Brontes and Austen as less romance and more social commentary. Honestly, the Bronte novels barely work as romance anyway.
I don’t fully agree on Austen. She didn’t make Elizabeth’s choices because she didn’t have Elizabeth’s opportunities, i.e. no rich, handsome and virtuous man fell madly in love with her – probably because she wasn’t as charming and free-spirited as Elizabeth. But readers prefer to read Elizabeth as autobiography as they like to believe life is (or was) really like that.
I prophecy that in 200 years time, people will be reading Twilight in the light of Stephanie Meyer’s biography, and remembering some teenage affair she had with an Edwardish guy, which inspired her great opus.
But like you, I tend to read those novels more for the general how-they-lived-then aspects than for the specific romantic plots.
I should have been clearer–Austen was proposed to by a pretty stable guy, but she turned him down. I guess I meant that she didn’t marry and rely on male support, as opposed to Elizabeth, who did. But yes, now that you mention it, if she’d had the opportunity she might have taken it–but she might have not. For example, I write happy endings for my characters that I wouldn’t want for myself.
Do you think Twilight will be around 200 years later? It’s true that we still remember a lot of novels that were popular in their time–Clarissa, Evelina, Pamela, etc.
I can only imagine a Stephenie Meyer movie. That would be awesome. It almost makes me want to live forever, just to see which books will make it and which ones won’t.
I also tend to wonder which books from now will be canonical fiction in the future (assuming we still read novels). I don’t know why, as I won’t be around to know.
But sometimes books that are popular end up becoming critically respectable. Dickens is an example. He was popular but slightly dismissed by more highbrow critics (G.H. Lewes, Henry James) in his time but now he’s not just a popular writer but a great literary figure. Maybe if a book stays popular for long enough the critics eventually have to accept it and read it more favourably.
It’s hard to see Twilight ever being seen as a great novel in the western tradition by 23nd century Harold Blooms, but at the very least I think it will be part of social history and will be read as a sort of insight into 21st century romantic ideals, gender relations and such like. It’s popularity makes it interesting, aside from its literary merits (or lack thereof).