This guy again

[smokingboot]

“Adèle showed me some sketches this morning, which she said were yours. I don’t know whether they were entirely of your doing; probably a master aided you?”

“No, indeed!” I interjected.

“Ah! that pricks pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for its contents being original; but don’t pass your word unless you are certain: I can recognise patchwork.”

“Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir.”

I brought the portfolio from the library.

“Approach the table,” said he; and I wheeled it to his couch. Adèle and Mrs. Fairfax drew near to see the pictures.

“No crowding,” said Mr. Rochester: “take the drawings from my hand as I finish with them; but don’t push your faces up to mine.”

He deliberately scrutinised each sketch and painting. Three he laid aside; the others, when he had examined them, he swept from him.

“Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax,” said he, “and look at them with Adèle;—you” (glancing at me) “resume your seat, and answer my questions. I perceive those pictures were done by one hand: was that hand yours?”

“Yes.”

“And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time, and some thought.”

“I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no other occupation.”

“Where did you get your copies?”

“Out of my head.”

“That head I see now on your shoulders?”

No, the one I keep in a jar by the door.

Swear to God Edward Rochester, we all know your wife's mad and we all know why. A couple of years of this and I'd probably swing for you myself.

I don't know why I keep trying with this book, it's like Charlotte Bronte is trolling me from beyond the grave.

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

Ha, ha, ha, ha! 😀

I actually love Mr. Rochester's badinage!

Plus, you know, he gets humbled at the end of the book.

The best parts of the novel for me, though, were always the monstrous Reed family, the horrible school Jane gets sent to (that sepulchral Helen Burns!), and the icy St John Rivers.

Those are the parts that are left out of all the movies!

[smokingboot]

I just want the guy to take a breath sometimes!

I do get why Jane is uncertain. Sometimes, when he speaks, it's at her rather than to her. The person he's actually addressing is some anima figure in his head, some goddess he is forever pursuing. There's something so weird in the way he relishes her aloneness.

Helen Burns always gives me the chills. I am never quite sure she's there you know. I always wonder if she is the ghost of a child who died there long ago. Of course, the teachers notice her so obviously not, but there's something so pale and clammy about her.

St John Rivers is terrible strangled sublimated sex. Sure, he's meant to be a foil to the sensual heat of Rochester, ice to fire, but you just know that when this guy blows it will be a hurricane or so insanely controlled, his face will curdle with sheer concentration. India won't kill Jane Eyre, but trying to please this weirdo might.

[mallorys_camera]

The person he's actually addressing is some anima figure in his head

Ummmmm. That's not my take on it. 😀

Rochester's social persona with everybody is very much the agent provocateur. But he can't get a rise out of Jane no matter how hard he tries. So, he is at first intrigued and then in love because Jane is the one person who sees through him. (Of course, the reader, being inside Jane's head, may have a harder time perceiving that because the reader is privy to the depths of Jane's own feeling.)

Helen Burns is very, very strange. In the 1943 movie, she's played by the teenage Elizabeth Taylor who is actually Not Bad, though, of course, way too pretty.

Helen Burns is the obvious Christ incarnation in the novel. Except that Helen Burns' Christ-like-ness doesn't work out too well for Helen Burns, so the character actually serves like a deterrent to Christ-like behavior. 😀 I've always wondered whether Charlotte Bronte was sophisticated enough to have written it that way deliberately.

You've read Wide Sargasso Sea, right?

I always thought there was another Jane Eyre: The Alternate Universe novel that oculd be written in which Jane Eyre follows St. John Rivers to India, ditches him, and then immediately gets caught up in the fall of that dynasty whose name I can never rememebr. 😀

[smokingboot]

I think your take on it is what CB intended! And I get the sense of it. But for me, after the prodding (and there is much prodding!) it's like he loses himself in some stream of consciousness stuff, especially when he's playing that bizarre gypsy.

There's a powerful sense of Christianity as a power that is inimical to life within matter; Burns is the perfect Christian heroine, too good for the world's appetites, Eliza Reed will lock herself into permanent dessication in a convent to get away from them, and St John will battle them, win, and in winning, destroy his love and his body. I don't know if Charlotte knew what she was creating, but for sure Jane Eyre's last paean to St John Rivers seems a strange place to end the story, a tacking on of Christian morality to a distinctly unchristian tale. Jane Eyre's home is on Earth; the eternal can wait.

[mallorys_camera]

The gypsy stuff was pretty fuckin' weird, I agree. 😀

[bleodswean]

Is it Bronte or the slew of folks attesting to the greatness of this horrid horrid book? I, too, have tried and given up in combinations of rage, repugnance, boredom, frustration. It's so freakin' sludgy, but I feel that way about Dickens, too. Give me the goths for that time period, or go straight to the postmodernists. Women in Love will go a long way acting salve on the JE scratches.

[smokingboot]

I enjoy it in a curiously irritated way. For a long time, I've believed that Charlotte was writing a fairy story, or certainly a novel imbued with old country fairy traditions. Jane Eyre's a changeling; note how funny looking she is, the difficulties with her in her cot as she moans and whimpers and never seems to stop watching, the madness, mutilation and plain old bad luck that surrounds but never quite reaches her. And what's the favourite fairy punishment for mortals who transgress, especially would-be thieves? Blindness.

So yes, it has its fascinations,but on the human level...

You've definitely put me in the mood for Women In Love!

[bleodswean]

I agree with the fairy story assessment. It's just so dull. 2/3rds of it could be edited out and then the fairy story bones would be gleaming white! I do like...that after so many years...it's really become the symbolic measure of so much female writing. That is an accomplishment - whether intended or not!

Lawrence - swoon!

[mallorys_camera]

Oh, E!!!! NO!!! I adore you, but you are just wrong! 😀

Jane Eyre is wonderful, and Dickens (with all his flaws—which come from writing too fast and getting paid by the word, plus the limitless appetite his audiences had for the Victorian equivalent of Hallmark movies) is just fabulous.

The beginning of Great Expectations? Miss Haversham living for decades with that crumbling, decaying wedding cake and grooming Estella to be the ultimate Man Predator??? Fagan's London boy gang in Oliver Twist? Bill Sykes and his dog from Oliver Twist. Very, very, very Gothic!!!!

[smokingboot]

While Dickens is another one I often want to strangle, he gives me a real sense of a living, if slightly insane London, when he's talking about Blackheath Fair. He also created one of the most horrible and excellent villains of all time, Uriah Heep, whom I still consider a prototype for Steerpike.

[mallorys_camera]

Oh, whoa! Did not know you were a Gormenghast fan! I ❤️LUV❤️ Gormenghast.

And, yes, I believe Peake was a huge Dickens fan.

Like I said to bleodswean, I honestly think most of Dickens' flaws as a writer can be traced to the fact that he was being paid by word count.

🎂🎂🎂HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!🎂🎂🎂

[smokingboot]

Thanks again, and thanks for being such an amazing friend!

Yes, I like Gormenghast, though I had to turn away for a while at Fuschia's fate. I identified with her for a little while, and knew what her fate was to be, as surely if I'd written it myself.

[bleodswean]

LOL. Here's the thing, P. And I don't mean this insulting - at all! Just a personal experience! Because I was rigorously taught Dickens and Jane Eyre at such a young age...it really represents an innocence that isn't at all sentimental but more restrictive. Like those sumnmertime smells that put you right back to a long-gone age...I have tried, and cannot, dip a toe back in. When I went from Jane Eyre to On The Road, it was like my ribcage exploded outward and Kerouac reached in and yanked out my heart! I couldn't return to where I had been....

[mallorys_camera]

Oh, if you like Kerouac, then your distaste for 19th-century English fiction is just another manifestation of the differing archetypal pedestals we embody. 😀

'Cause I fuckin' hate Kerouac! With the hatred of a thousand red-hot suns! 😀

But I adore you, so it's All Good.

[bleodswean]

I have noticed these differing archetypal pedestals (love that!)! And I agree that those are things that create vastly opposed POVS. But we still adore one another and I learn from you every single day!

[flemmings]

So glad I read Jane Eyre at so young an age that a) I never registered what a dick Rochester is and b) I've forgotten the whole novel.

I think dickishness must just have washed over my impervious head, because how else could I have read Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses?

[smokingboot]

Pynchon and Joyce?

You are formidable! I hope you didn't have to face these two in the same year.
I seem to have read Ulysses in a complete dream of unawareness, can't recall a thing about it. So no doubt when I try again, the dickishness will smack me hard.

[mallorys_camera]

I loathed Ulysses with the red-hot heat of a thousand exploding stars.

Hate Portrait of an Artist though with fewer exploding stars. 😀

Would never read Finnegan's Wake unless the ghost of James Joyce threatened Sybyl.

I do like some of Joyce's short stories, though.

[bleodswean]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Joyce was once the major god in my minor god pantheon! Because of his short stories! His astonishing use of The Killing Line knocked me out of my orbit for a long time. And then, when I picked up Ulysses??!?!?!?! Forever and ever altered by a man who lived before me but paid it forward with his poetic genius!

[flemmings]

Oh, I didn't read them for courses. Never had anything much worse than Horace who, come to that, was pretty bad. But I hung out with English Lit majors and if you do that, you get up with fleas uhh have to read D H Lawrence.

I should probably just skip the Stephen sections and get on with Bloom which is what I wanted to read anyway.

[mallorys_camera]

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! The umpire must cry FOUL here! 😀

Dickishness is an entirely 21st-century concept! Unfair to apply it to a novel published around 1850! 😀

[flemmings]

No no no. Dickishness is a set of behaviours old as mankind. They just didn't have a word for it, as they didn't have a word for the autism that affected so many of the 'odd' or 'feebleminded', and now we do. So we may use the term where applicable. Rochester is a dick.