The triumph of Charlotte Brontë is that she manages to convince many, probably most, readers that the Rochester we see at the end of the book really will be one with which Jane can have a happy life. Rochester has to change, and so does Jane, but once that happens, he can truly be her life’s companion.
7. Jane Eyre is a gothic story. It’s not as gothic as Wuthering Heights, which out-gothics everything pretty much ever, but Jane is pretty darn gothic. Jane spends a lot of time wandering around creepy halls with a candle. She shares these creepy halls with a mysterious being who cackles evilly and bites people, and who turns out to be an insane woman who is locked in the attic and likes to escape and set fire to people’s beds. Jane is dependent in every possible way on a mysterious and domineering (and sexually attractive) employer. She is so isolated that an escape attempt from the bizarre estate of Thornfield almost causes her to die of starvation as she wanders the blustery moors. No matter how sun-drenched an adaptation of Jane Eyre may be, it should strive to convey that sense of menace, mystery, melodrama and isolation.
Anyone who wishes to adapt the novel has two major challenges. One is that although the novel is not unusually long, there’s an awful lot in it, and some of the stuff that is the least cinematic (long conversations) is the most thematically important. The other is that Jane narrates the novel. Although she speaks fairly little, we hear her thoughts constantly. This is an obvious challenge to a scriptwriter, who has to communicate all Jane’s thoughts to the audience without turning her into a chatterbox.
So, let’s see how well these adaptations do with conveying the central themes of this complex book.
The Adaptations
The Classic Movie Adaptations
Movie adaptations of Jane Eyre, both classic and modern, usually benefit from generous budgets and good production values but struggle with length. Because they have to tell the whole story in approximately two hours, they tend to leave out anything that doesn’t involve the love story. This works up to a point, but it’s unsatisfying when you get to the end of the movie and realize that Jane has basically the same relationship dynamic with Rochester that she had during their first engagement.
Jane Eyre, 1934—The One With Colin Clive and Virginia Bruce (½)
This movie doesn’t have much in common with Jane Eyre, but it’s wonderfully entertaining in its unabashed cheesiness. This is the first movie adaptation of Jane Eyre with sound, and you can tell they were excited about it, because not only does Jane play the piano, but she also sings a song, and poor crazy Bertha screams her head off all the time.
They didn’t mess around in the 1930s, so we get to zip right through this story, leaving crucial plotlines in the dust. Jane is a sassy kid who becomes a sassy adult. She’s blonde and beautiful and has ringlets and giant ruffles on her dresses. Rochester is nice from the start—at least until he makes Jane try on earrings. He makes Jane pick out the furnishings for his soon-to-be-wife’s room, and jewelry for his soon-to-be-wife, all the while claiming that the soon-to-be wife is Blanche until suddenly he’s telling Jane that actually he’s going to marry her now. Jerk.
Jane has a small inheritance and Rochester is eagerly awaiting an annulment from poor Bertha, which really removes all the actual conflicts, doesn’t it? I mean, except for the lying, but then you have to wonder why on earth the lying would even come up. Why wouldn’t Rochester just say, “Hey Jane, would you marry me as soon as my annulment arrives in the mail? Also, have some jewelry!” Rochester is already polite and Jane is already a confident and outgoing independent person, so that removes all the actual character growth. This is possibly the most pointless adaptation of all time, although it must be admitted that the stars are very pretty to look at in that 1930s-movie-star way.
I’m listing these adaptations in chronological order, but this was actually one of the last ones I had actually watched. So by the time I watched this, I had seen a lot of Jane Eyre. This adaptation is a mess, but it includes a grown-up Jane calling Mr. Brocklehurst a crocodile, and it’s only an hour long. An hour! I know somewhere out there some English Literature majors are toiling through their Jane Eyre thesis. This movie was made for you, and only for you. Gather your fellow students together, make lots of popcorn, and throw it at the screen every time Jane seems inappropriately cheerful. Everyone else, stay away!
Jane Eyre, 1943—The One with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine (★★★)
The great thing about this adaptation is that someone finally noticed that Jane Eyre is a really creepy story. A defenseless, penniless, naive young woman is essentially trapped in a totally isolated house, with no cell phone or electric lighting, and someone keeps trying to get into her room at night and starting fires and chewing on people. This is scary stuff, and the movie goes all-out with the gothic. The moors have never been so misty nor Thornfield so ominous.
Obviously no force on Earth can make Joan Fontaine look “plain and little,” and they don’t even try—she even sleeps in full makeup and perfect hair. But she’s very expressive, which is the most important element an actress can bring to Jane, since Jane doesn’t often speak her mind. Meanwhile, Orson Welles is a force of nature as Rochester. He’s rude, he stalks around wearing a billowing cape, he’s not particularly good-looking (as suits the part), but he’s charismatic as all get-out. He spends a great deal of time delivering dialogue while looking straight into Jane’s eyes, and let me tell you, when Orson Welles looks at you intently, by golly, it makes an impression. He’s beyond intimidating—he’s scary. Yet he’s also a tragic, magnificent, sinisterly sexy character. He keeps the story eerie while also making it plausible that Jane is drawn to him.
The supporting cast (Agnes Moorehead as Aunt Reed! Elizabeth Taylor as Helen!) is wonderful, as is the cinematography and the music by Bernard Herrmann (who also wrote an opera based on Wuthering Heights). Many of these people worked with Alfred Hitchcock, most notably Joan Fontaine, who starred in Rebecca and Suspicion, and Bernard Herrmann, who composed the score for Psycho. The whole movie has a Hitchcock feel to it. The only problem is that it doesn’t feel like Jane Eyre, and that’s because so many plotlines are cut that the message of the movie become this: be a moral person and everything will work out. Not a bad message, and certainly one Jane would approve of, but all that great stuff about self-respect and autonomy is lost. At the end, Jane finds Rochester where he is living in the burned ruins of Thornfield (as one does), and instead of the banter that establishes her as his intellectual and financial equal, she tearfully begs him to let her stay. Jane is still his “little friend.” The only things that have changed are that the house has been forcibly redecorated and Rochester is now single.
Jane Eyre, 1970—The One with George C. Scott and Susannah York (★★)
You can tell that this movie was made in the 1970s, because while every adaptation seems driven to cast a gorgeous actress as “plain” Jane, at least they usually have the sense to wash off the actress’s makeup (Joan Fontaine, from the above-mentioned 1943 version, aside). Not so here: Susannah York plays Jane as a tall, statuesque, glamorous woman, with red hair in a fancy hairdo and full makeup. Meanwhile, George C. Scott doesn’t even attempt a British accent. So, although they both act up a storm, their efforts are unintentionally and consistently hilarious. I actually liked both performances—if I thought of them as completely different characters. George C. Scott is quite funny, and Susannah York exudes sheer class, so it’s an enjoyable movie to watch once you release any memory of the book.
There is one thing that this movie gets just right. I think that filmmakers have a hard time showing the audience why Jane shouldn’t stay with Rochester after she discovers that he has a secret wife. In this version, Jane lays it all out in a wonderful speech.