We cannot see any reason why Gilbert Markham, though no doubt highly attractive to young ladies of his own calibre,* should excite such passionate love in Helen, with all her bitter experiences of life, her painting, and her poetry, her deep readings and deep thoughts—absolutely no reason at all except for the last one in the world, which either the author or she would have wished, namely, that there was no other man in the way for her to fall in love with.7
The next we hear of Helen, neighborhood gossip Eliza Milford is exultantly telling Gilbert that Helen has returned to her husband. At first Gilbert fears she has been kidnapped, but Lawrence informs him that Helen’s sense of duty compelled her to go to her beastly husband’s side. Though Huntingdon is not immediately near death from his hunting injury, he is delirious and presumably suffering from alcohol withdrawal. He has become raving, swollen, monstrous, and beyond saving in any eyes but Helen’s.
Eric and I weren’t in much better shape—we had been wounded by one disappointment after another, and had transformed into something I didn’t recognize. Were things going to get better, so I could look back at this painful time with a nostalgic twinge? Or was this relationship the worst idea I’d ever had? I found myself behaving a bit like Huntingdon—lashing out at my sponsor, ignoring calls and texts, blowing off my best friend for Eric’s last-minute offers to hang out, even bailing on walks with my beloved Gracie if there was a chance to see him after work instead. Evacuating a sinking ship is harder than it looks, especially when you’re the captain who insisted on boarding the thing in the first place.
Huntingdon and Helen had remained locked in a bizarre battle of wills too. She gives him occasional “death is coming, get your house in order” admonishments, while he wonders frantically if he is actually going to die or can put off reformation a while longer. Huntingdon accuses Helen of only helping him so that she may go to Heaven while he goes to Hell; Helen mildly suggests he might mend his ways and not go to Hell. Huntingdon first rejects the whole idea of Hell, then earnestly implores Helen to save him from it. We’d had some madness and bad blood here and there in the other Brontë works, but mostly, even at their worst, people were just uncouth. I had never seen the late stages of alcoholism so chillingly documented. Was this what would have awaited me? Anne’s literary world was darker than the others because her personal life had become darker. I was accustomed to turning to the Brontës for inspiration and comfort, and here I’d been dragged into the falling house of Usher. It was grim.
My next thought was bewilderment—Why did Helen stay so long with Huntingdon once she knew what he was capable of? Why, having escaped, did she return to supervise the throes of his grisly demise? I think it’s partly because Anne Brontë believed in redemption (as did Charlotte and Jane, and as do I) and wouldn’t give up—not on her brother and not on Huntingdon. Plus, she was still committed to fully illustrating the lack of options available to unhappily married women with no independent means. I didn’t particularly care for Helen’s brand of prim duty, so as I read Huntingdon’s long, drawn-out death scene, I was frustrated—Why doesn’t she just leave? Why is this Helen’s penance? She doesn’t deserve it. I kept demanding answers. What is wrong with you? Why would you put up with this? Is this how you imagined your life? I thought angrily. And then I realized. I didn’t blame Helen—she had to live with herself, and being by Huntingdon’s side was her choice. I wasn’t even talking to her. I was talking to myself.
You can imagine my chagrin. I had developed this habit of mentally reviewing all our good moments in my head—that rooftop kiss, our first walk on the Highline as it snaked through Manhattan, the first “I love you” and the sweetness of seeing his feelings for me dawn on his face. We were coming up on six months of promises that it would get better soon. And it wasn’t.
Unluckily for Eric, when he canceled our plans or refused to make any, staying in and reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall had finally gotten me mad instead of hurt. We came to our second messy end just days after he canceled our Valentine’s Day plans to spend the night at his apartment by texting me that afternoon to tell me he was too anxious that his ex would drop by unannounced. I forced myself to be understanding and drowned my sorrows with Gracie, Kate, and full-price Godiva on the couch. The next day he apologized profusely and reissued his invitation. I made my first trip to Inwood to meet his infamous pug and see the unmistakable evidence of a single man living alone in an apartment—he didn’t even have a flat sheet, just a fitted one, two pillows, and a smaller-than-full-size bed under a duvet sorely in need of washing. We spent an uneasy evening together; he kept taking phone calls and I sat there waiting for him to come back so we could eat the unromantic takeout we’d ordered.
The next weekend I was still lounging in my living room in my shabbiest pajamas, having moved on to the discounted Russell Stover, when he canceled our Sorry-Again-I’ll-Make-It-Up-To-You plans. We were supposed to have a leisurely afternoon and a nice Really, I’m Sorry dinner, but “something came up.” With a pit already in my stomach, I asked him what was going on.
He texted back that he was at Ikea with his ex. The person he was supposed to be establishing appropriate boundaries with. He was helping her pick out and transport furniture to her new apartment. She hadn’t even finished moving out of their old one. I didn’t know I had the power to stop time, but apparently I, in moments of dire need, can force everything to pause so I can be flooded with a Usual Suspects montage of my own. It was a barrage of every single broken date, blown-off plan, failed attempt to stand up for myself, and flaky noncommittal exchange we’d ever had. I folded down the corner of Tenant (if Huntingdon was really dying, I wanted to enjoy it) and used both hands to text him back. Yes, it would have been better to save the confrontation for when we could talk in person, but this felt unpleasantly appropriate. We imploded for the last time as we had exploded in the beginning, in texts of four hundred characters or fewer. I may have wished him a nice life but I probably didn’t mean it.
Immature as it was, it was the closest I’d ever come to getting angry with him, let alone actually standing up to him. It felt both good and horrible. My endless compromises, my tiptoeing around, all of it was over. Later, when he calmed down and called to talk, I was gentler but stayed steely. I refused to feel guilty. Even in the face of his plaintive questions: “So there’s nothing I can do? Nothing I can say?” and his too-little-too-late apologies, I was resolute. My heart and my head were finally in agreement, and there was no way he could overrule both of us. He wrote me a beautiful letter the next day, with every loving apology I could have hoped to hear, as if releasing what had been stored up during weeks of insisting he was doing the best he could and I just needed to expect less. It was a last-ditch effort to avert consequences that had been a long time in coming. I wish I still had it, but my sentimentality had been more or less burned out of me, and I deleted it from my email a few days afterward.
And so, as a Brontë novel had guided me into my first significant relationship in five years, another Brontë novel spat me unceremoniously back out. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s message to young women about not letting their affections be won too easily had finally gotten through. I only wished I’d listened the first time when Helen’s aunt said, “Keep both heart and hand in your own possession, till you see good reason to part with them.… [T]hough in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least, will not be more than you can bear.”8 I took my broken heart to a meeting and threw myself on the mercy of my friends at the diner afterward.
It all works out for Helen Graham née Huntingdon née Lawrence, by the way. After Huntingdon’s painful death (not painful enough, you might argue), Gilbert waits a respectful period of time before writing to Helen. She doesn’t reply, but the neighborhood gossip tells him she’s to be married. Gilbert races to Grassdale to prevent the marriage, only to find that Helen’s brother, his former friend and assault victim, is marrying Esther Hargrave, Helen’s neighbor. Helen is safe at St
aningley with her aunt. At last, since Gilbert’s too intimidated by the fortune that Helen has come into since they last saw one another, Helen actually proposes to him. They are married and live happily ever after.
How much better would Tenant have been if told entirely by Helen herself? It would have helped to explain what on earth made Gilbert lovable. Even entrusted to the hands of a milquetoasty protagonist, Tenant turned out to be the most salacious of the Brontë canon. And it did as much to zap my romantic yearnings as Jane Eyre had ever done to encourage them. Romance is all well and good for some people, I told myself firmly as I rid my apartment of any evidence Eric had ever been there, but I am finished with it. The only creature whose love I could really be sure of was Gracie, whose canine affections never wavered. She sat on my bed and watched as I rode the tidal wave of righteous anger until it ebbed away, leaving me with a garbage bag full of mementos and a laundry bag full of linens that still smelled like Eric’s aftershave. When at last I fell back on my freshly made bed and cried some more, she stretched out along my side like a sixty-pound bolster pillow with a rough warm tongue and sympathetic eyes. Kate treated me to dinner and let me talk through the whole miserable saga again, earning a whole new stack of long-suffering roommate points. For all my maneuvering and all his unreadiness, I’d really believed Eric and I could be together, because why else would we suit one another so well? Nobody else had ever matched wits with me like he had, had interests and experience I valued to recommend him, and still admired me too. Nobody else had ever seen the real me without running for the hills. And none of it had been enough.
BRANWELL Brontë’s last months on Earth were miserable. His last letters to his friend J. B. Leyland in 1848 are about debts and drinking and coughing, “intolerable mental wretchedness and corporeal weakness.”9 His final note to his friend John Brown in late August is pitiful, particularly in contrast to the swaggering, bold writer he’d been in better days.
Dear John,
I shall feel very much obliged to you if [you] can contrive to get me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure
Should it be speedily got I could perhaps take it from you or Billy at the lane it top or, what would be quite as well, sent out for to you.
I anxiously ask the favor because I know the favour good it would do me.
Punctualy at Half past Nine in the morning you will be paid the 5d out of a shilling given me then.*
His life had become so small, and so miserable, like many an alcoholic before and since. I do feel sorry for Branwell, it turns out. Intensely sorry. I think there’s no way he was unaware of his sisters’ publishing; no way at all he remained ignorant of the fact that they excluded him, collaborated, and succeeded where he only failed and failed and failed. I can’t even imagine the shame and guilt of not being able to contribute to the family that had grown up expecting to depend on him—and the self-loathing and resentment that followed. As irritated as I am by Charlotte’s self-deprecation, Branwell’s ego certainly didn’t do him any favors. No matter how fun he was to drink with or how well he got along with the ladies, he never finished a novel (that we know of—and I feel like Charlotte would have made sure we knew). He lived on empty promises and unfulfilled aspirations. And that, along with the drinks he took to soothe the pain, is how he died. His beloved Mrs. Robinson remarried a man with money and property two months later. Upon his death, Charlotte was prostrate for five days, then wrote to W. S. Williams:
The removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement.… It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent; to hope, expect, wait his return to the right path; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled, to experience despair at last; and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career.…
[N]othing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings.10
I’ve read every one of Charlotte Brontë’s published letters. She practically never mentioned his name again.
ORDINARILY at times like this I would have turned to Jane Eyre for comfort, but I was so humiliated I couldn’t even look Charlotte in the face. She would know that I’d reaped exactly what I’d sown. She might punish my heresy somehow, rescind Jane and Rochester’s happy ending maybe, or send her off with St. John, and I couldn’t endure it.
Besides, sometimes in moments of intense sorrow holding up a book and remembering to turn the pages is beyond our capacity as humans. Good books require us to activate our imaginations and transport ourselves somewhere else. When changing clothes or showering seems like too much work, there’s no way we have enough energy to travel through space and time. The best we can do is give our red and weeping eyes something pretty to stare at. That is why Netflix was invented, and with it, the literary miniseries.
Wandering the Moors
A representation of Jane Eyre at a Minor Theater would no doubt be a rather afflicting spectacle to the author of that work. I suppose all would be wofully exaggerated and painfully vulgarized by the actors and actresses on such a stage. What—I cannot help asking myself—would they make of Mr. Rochester? And the picture my fancy conjures up by way of reply is a somewhat humiliating one. What would they make of Jane Eyre? I see something very pert and very affected as an answer to that query.
—Charlotte Brontë (as Currer Bell) to W. S. Williams, February 5, 18481
Just like it had during my isolated, anxious college days, the prospect of holing up with a small screen and a large pair of headphones promised relief and comfort in this time of trial. There are more than thirty TV, film, radio, and stage adaptations (including a seriously misguided Broadway musical) of Jane Eyre, and around a dozen of Wuthering Heights. There’s at least one Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and an Agnes Grey. And I have watched nearly all of them. Nobody has gotten to Shirley or Villette yet—I’m not sure which is more daunting, the enlivening of Caroline Helstone or the defrosting of Lucy Snowe (more on her later). I recently saw a Bristol Old Vic production of Jane Eyre, directed by Sally Cookson, which was filmed on stage and broadcast to movie theaters around the world. It managed to incorporate a variety of contemporary music on a bare bones stage, making no effort to convey the lushness of the book’s setting and intent instead on capturing the story’s energy. Everything about it was lean, though Jane and Rochester had a definite spark, and most of the actors played multiple roles (except for Madeleine Worrall as Jane). It demanded versatility and nuance from the entire cast, and its deconstructed feel was a stark contrast to the approach most stage and film adaptations take.
The first theatrical version of Jane Eyre was staged during Charlotte’s lifetime; W. S. Williams wrote to her to ask if she’d like to come to London for it, and while she admitted she’d like to go, she declined (as much from dread at the prospect of seeing Mr. Rochester brought to life imperfectly as to keep her anonymity intact, since neither Smith nor Williams knew Currer Bell’s true identity at that point). She encouraged Williams to attend so he could report back to her, but confessed her concerns that he would find it terrible: “One can endure being disgusted with one’s own work, but that a friend should share the repugnance is unpleasant.”2 She, like everyone who loves Jane Eyre, doubted that any theater company would be able to do justice to Rochester’s and Jane’s peculiarities. According to Patsy Stoneman, who rounded up reviews and scripts from every known stage production to write Jane Eyre on Stage, this particular version had the following “distinctive features”: Brocklehurst was played as comedic relief, Rochester is portrayed as a philanthropist who takes Jane in when she is thrown out of Lowood, John Reed plots to marry Jane, and it is Jane who insists that Rochester save his wife from the fire and then refuses to marry him “out of respect.”3 Evidently, Charlotte was quite right to stay away from this unrecognizable farce.
Aside from improbable plot revision or the addition of cheesy music, a ham actor is the worst thing that can happen to Edward Fairfax Rochester. H
e needs to be funny but also glowering, tightly wound but also relaxed in his sarcasm, affectionate but clearly emotionally damaged. Striking, but unhandsome at first. One of the earliest versions featured Colin Clive, from the Frankenstein movies, and the fabulously blonde and beautiful Virginia Bruce. It is ludicrous. The Orson Welles version? By the time he finished chewing up the scenery you may have forgotten Jane entirely. Joan Fontaine is amazing at being Joan Fontaine, but when it comes to plain, moral, upright Jane, she’s on the wrong planet.
In the 1970s, the BBC made a version starring George C. Scott and Susannah York. I can’t account for who thought casting General Patton was a good idea, nor for the ridiculous oversized dimensions of Mrs. Fairfax’s bonnet, but they evidently forgot to tell Scott that Rochester was British. He resolutely retains his American accent and is thus impossible to take seriously. York has some of Jane’s solemnity but is also blonde, which is as antithetical to Jane Eyre as the white carriage and purple cushions Rochester attempts to foist upon her.
Do not talk to me about Timothy Dalton. Never speak of Timothy Dalton or the 1983 crime against literature in which he participated. Ever. Mr. Rochester cannot be pretty or delicate or posh. He can’t. Everyone else in every other pre-Victorian screen adaptation can, if you like, but not him. Zelah Clarke, the Jane who suffered his Rochester impersonation, was actually quite good.
I’m told people feel strongly about the Charlotte Gainsbourg version, which came out in 1996. Franco Zeffirelli’s cinematography is beautiful, the adaptation is clean and precise, but Gainsbourg is up against William Hurt’s terrible accent and his inappropriately blond hair. In their proposal scene? He goes in for the pivotal romantic encounter of my young life and winds up planting a kiss somewhere to the left of her actual mouth while she grimaces. He missed her mouth! I want to be transported by an otherworldly passion. Not mired in imprecise face rubbing and uncomfortable close-talking.
A Girl Walks Into a Book Page 16