There is an exchange in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s I find particularly funny. When confronted for an example of something that means something, Holly answers without hesitation, “Wuthering Heights.” The narrator’s indignation at being compared to a genius turns to shameful conceit upon discovering that Holly is in fact, referring to the movie. “Oh, the movie.”
This line ran through my head as the trailer for a newer, more irreverent adaptation rolled in the minutes before my viewing of Send Help.
For the Holly Golightlys of the world, these movies do mean something, and there is a perpetual yearning for new simulacra of these characters hewed out of their literary roots. While the movie I had just finished watching was fun, it provided little for me to reflect on and I found myself afterwards pondering instead what the Victorian novels meant to me.
Wuthering Heights and the sororal novel Jane Eyre are perhaps the two most defining novels of my youth. Because of their reputations as classics, it was at the same time fortunately and unfortunately more acceptable to be engrossed in such novels in my household than other books that were considered less than acceptable forms of art. It may be hard to believe that someone who writes about eroge was once self-conscious about what others thought of the things that they read, but for a young boy growing up in a strict conservative household, freedom from judgment was the ultimate form of accessibility. Out of the classics that lined our shelves, these were the books I loved best, and I read and re-read them a countless number of times.
Jane Eyre in particular is one of a handful of novels that I continued to revisit over the decades that have since passed by. It is an autobiographical account of the eponymous heroine’s youth and adolescence as the ward of her uncle’s widow exiled to a charity school for orphans, and her emerging adulthood as the governess for a rich man on the brink of middle age.
That the novel spans such a large part of the human lifecycle is one of the reasons why it remained such a compelling read as I progressed through those same stages of development. With each read, new personal experiences revealed more angles to engage the text from. While the events of the book happen early in Jane’s life, the account itself is narrated several years after the events of the novel from the perspective of a woman in her mid-twenties. This gives the voice a maturity that especially resonated in my later reads as I came to appreciate the tone with which she reflects on her early traumas and how they developed her into the person she is today.
Besides the access I had in my household to read the novel, there is a second kind of accessibility provided by the text itself that makes Jane Eyre such a compelling read. The imagery used throughout the novel is vivid and original. The characters speak with poetic flair. The entire novel is a masterful exhibition of the English language where metaphors are crafted with intent over the banal. Jane Eyre, like Shakespeare, is one of the most widely taught books in school because its passages are rich in details worth analysing. And unlike Shakespeare, Bronte writes in a modern style of English perfectly comprehensible to the readers of the present. This readability makes Jane Eyre a comfortable pick for one hoping to enjoy the full range of what the English language has to offer but is not in a particularly scholarly mood.
The entire novel is, in fact, a love affair with the art of language. This relationship is subtly established from the very first line, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” Rather than expressing regret, the narrator subverts the reader’s expectations: “I was glad of it.” She was happy, in her way, to retreat to that space between window and curtain, Bewick’s History of British Birds on her knee, to poetic descriptions of shadowy lands across the sea.
Books make a constant appearance in the significant milestones of Jane’s life. Helen Burns is reading Rasselas in their first encounter. Jane teaches her pupil Adele in Rochester’s private library. The Rivers sisters are reading and translating German the night that they rescue her from the elements. St. John’s unusual courtship begins with the gift of a copy of Marmion. In an all too relatable moment, Jane laments the age she was born in, “A poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days – the golden age of modern literature. Alas! The readers of our era are less favored.” There is a romantic yearning for the written word that parallels the personal relationships Jane longs for throughout her life.
Jane’s relationship with Rochester is the culmination of this yearning. Before meeting Rochester, Jane struggled in a world where power was distributed unjustly. The cousin she likens to the slavedrivers and Roman emperors demands that she refers to him as “Master Reed.” The director of Lowood is a parsimonious hypocrite with no qualifications for management besides his wealth. Despite believing herself intellectually just as capable as her peers, if not superior, Jane learns that her status in society as a dependent orphan was even lower than that of the servants, for the servants earn their keep.
It is altogether fitting that the romance with Rochester occurs exclusively through conversation. Nothing in particular happens in the scenes that lead up to Jane’s realisation that she is in love with Rochester, they simply talk to each other (as a side note, adolescent me would come to romanticise just this kind of relationship). Jane’s attraction to Rochester is not rooted in his appearance, wealth, or social status, but rather, in the quality of his words. Because of her own lack of wealth and status, the exchange of words is the only interaction where Jane stands on equal footing with her peers.
Equality is the foundation of Jane’s concept of love. Love is not a longing for something or greater than oneself. St. John Rivers, whom Jane considers fully her superior in mind and spirit is so dominating that she voluntarily ceases to be herself for him. And while she considers St. John a far greater man than Rochester in all aspects, it is only Rochester who is truly her equal:
“Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? – You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are!”
“As we are!” – a line so powerful that Bronte repeats it in Rochester’s voice. With these three words Jane declares her equality to Rochester, and Rochester with the exact three words declares the same to Jane. Ever since I was young, this was the kind of literary moment that would truly grip me. The symmetry of their words in this precise moment embodies just how equal the two truly are.
I went into this reading asking myself what Jane Eyre meant to me. When I look back down the path my life has taken – my obsession with language, my own personal life – it is almost comical just how much of my life is a reflection of the ideals found in this book. I try not to overemphasise personal relatability as a quality of the writing when I read. I would rather the words speak for themselves. But when the writing is also this deliberately beautiful, that has to mean something. It is still – the book I love best.
After thought
I could not help in this most recent reading of Jane Eyre but to be reminded of my investigations of the Japanese language that dominated the last several years of my life. As mentioned in the opening, this reading was prompted by words written by Truman Capote, a writer known for long, flowing sentences and distinctive use of punctuation to connect them. Long sentences are commonplace in Japanese due to the structure of its grammar. I had previously thought that it was rarer in English, and that the Faulkners and Capotes were exceptional in their willingness to navigate long and treacherous routes in the English language, but here was Bronte, the author whose words I had read more than any other individual, displaying that same mastery. It was most likely not that I had forgotten, but rather, her writing was such an ordinary part of my life that I had never realised what was so different about it.
Take for example this passage from one of the great scenes in literature:
When I awoke, it was day: an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody’s arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about: no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns’s shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was – dead.
A contemporary writer would likely have replaced each colon and semicolon with a period, because contemporary readers cannot tolerate long sentences. But here we are reminded that there was a time when colons and semicolons said something substantive about the two clauses they connected, and when readers appreciated the nuance. I had previously compared Japanese grammar to the stream of consciousness style of writing explored by the modernist writers like Faulkner and Woolf, but it may not have been right to compare them to such experimental forms of writing. It is not that sentences like these were completely new uses of the English language but rather, English had already long been written in this fashion, and it is instead a recent development that writers have lost the will and ability to keep the thoughts flowing.