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Jane eyre movie reviews11/11/2022 ![]() In the 1980s “Jane Eyre” also became a required text for postcolonial literary theory. Rochester, who had to lose his sight before he could have her - some scholars see this as a symbol of castration. “Jane Eyre” became a treasure map of feminist interpretation, from Jane’s childhood as a rebellious bookworm to her tortuously postponed marriage to Mr. ![]() It remained beloved and tirelessly reprinted from generation to generation, but the book didn’t become fully enshrined in the literary canon until the 1970s, when the women’s movement was reaching its peak. Usually classics are revered in the classroom and mauled by Hollywood: “Jane Eyre” is treated with kid gloves in movies and is under constant critical review by scholars and writers.īrontë’s “poor, obscure, plain and little” heroine became a huge success almost overnight when the novel was published in 1847. The “Jane Eyre” of today takes few liberties with characters, plot or language. As befits a Victorian immorality tale, however, the illicit love affair between the governess and the man she calls “master” is more passionate in word and smoldering glance than in deed. At one point Jane (Ruth Wilson) and Edward Rochester (Toby Stephens) lie on a bed and kiss (they remain dressed), and the mad wife, Bertha (Claudia Coulter), a half-Creole from the West Indies, is shown in a flashback committing strenuous adultery. The newest version is perhaps a little steamier. It’s the kind of hurdle Steve Martin faced when he based his 1987 comedy “Roxanne” on “Cyrano de Bergerac” he solved it by giving his Cyrano an allergy to anesthesia that precluded a nose job.Īnd that constraint is probably one reason there isn’t a huge difference in tone, setting or narrative structure between the 1944 version that starred Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine and the latest “Masterpiece Theater” adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” a two-part series that will be shown this Sunday and next on PBS. Unlike Jane Austen novels, “Jane Eyre” is hard to imagine updated into a “Clueless” or “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” A governess could easily be turned into an au pair or a personal trainer, but a man who hides a mad wife in the attic is harder to transmute in an era of no-fault divorce and Thorazine. ![]() There have been at least 20 movie and television versions of Charlotte Brontë’s gothic love story, even more than of “Emma” or “Pride and Prejudice.”Īnd it’s all the more of a tribute, since “Jane Eyre” is not easily refashioned to fit modern times. “Jane Eyre” may not be the first feminist novel, but it is certainly one of the most enduring. ![]()
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