Jane Eyre, Doubles, And Homosocial Desire

[lilithsaintcrow]

Reading Sedgwick’s Between Men has really opened up some avenues for thought. For example, while she’s talking about the tradition of mirror doubles in Gothic literature, I all of a sudden had this brainwave about Jane Eyre, my favorite book. (Tanith Lee’s my favorite author, Jane Eyre my favorite book. Yeah, I’m strange.)

So I started putting together a list inside my head of doubles in JE.

* Jane/Bertha (the mad wife)
* Rochester/St. John
* Mary and Diana/the Reed sisters
* Mrs. Reed/Helen
* Blanche Ingram/Rosamund Oliver
* Mr. Brocklehurst/Mr. Lloyd

Jane is referred to as “fairy,” “elf,” and “angel”; Bertha is once and very memorably described as “the foul German (apparition), the Vampyre.” Rochester is a warmhearted Vulcan, St. John a very cold and bloodless Apollo–one is harsh on the outside and a marshmallow within, the other is apparently passive to the will of God on the outside but harsh when Jane rejects him, and shown to be inwardly nasty. I’m still mulling over Mrs. Reed/Helen as mother-figures–the bad and abusive mother and the “good” but extraordinarily passive mother? I would have paired Mrs. Reed with Miss Temple, but Miss Temple is just not emotionally important enough to the story when compared to the effect Helen has, and Helen’s death frees her to become rolled up in the visitation by Jane’s dead mother later in the book (”My daughter, flee temptation!”). Then there’s Mrs. Fairfax at Thornfield and Grace Poole versus Bessie the maid at the parsonage, who rolls up both their good and bad aspects. Adele is a cipher for Jane’s own childhood, something I saw most clearly in this movie treatment of Jane Eyre (the one I think is technically the best even though Orson Welles’s Mr. Rochester has my heart.)

I could geek on all day about this, but I suspect I’d bore everyone involved except my own sweet self. I really do love that book, and I’ve often thought of doing a homage to it, though I couldn’t possibly do it justice. I know Sharon Shinn did a retelling–I didn’t like it as much as the first two books in her Samaria series, but I liked it well enough. And of course I’ve seen just about every movie treatment of it ever.

Sedwick’s other assertions about women as markers in the gambling game between men (the full title is Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire) is thought-provoking, especially when she treats Tennyson and Dickens. (Selkie, you should at least read the Dickens parts. Fascinating stuff.) I can’t wait to finish it and go back to The Epistemology of the Closet. Most lit crit is deadly dull, but every once in a while one comes along that knocks it out of the park and really informs the way I look at words on a page. It’s good to occasionally pull back and take a look at the forest instead of building a few trees at a time.

It makes me wonder what doubles I put in my work, though I’m sure my stuff is more hack than Gothic. I do think about themes and basic struggles and motivations–I think every author worth his or her salt does, and that thinking informs a lot of what we do when in the heat of creation. Writing for a living is not just the act of putting words on paper. There’s a great deal of work that goes on when a career writer is not in front of the laptop.

But I could talk about that all day too, and time’s a-wasting. I have to get my heroine in trouble again. I think she’s sprained her wrist and I have to get her physically somewhere else before I can set off the next chain of coincidence and action.

Over and out, dearies.

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