While I’m
talking about the book here, I’m also definitely talking about the 1996 film
with Charlotte Gainsbourg, pictured above.
It’s not a faultless adaptation, and the section relevant to today’s
post is in fact crawling with dramatic license, but I still love it
unabashedly. Helen isn’t the first
person Jane meets who’s kind to her, but she’s a friend at a crucial time when
Jane desperately needs one. (If you need
a spoiler warning for a 19th-century novel, this is it.)
In one
sense, Helen, Jane’s dearest friend at the austere charity school Lowood, is
largely a plot device. She’s both a
confidante for our young heroine and a moral lesson in human form. At this point, Jane can’t help but rail
against the injustice she sees all around her – the times she’s been punished
for her cousins’ misbehavior, the false accusations made of her, and Miss
Scatcherd’s undue targeting of Helen for scolding/belittling are just a few
examples of the many thorns in Jane’s side.
Her anger bubbles over, spills out, and gets her in trouble time and again. Helen, however, teaches her about returning
good for evil, about forgiving those who wrong her.
It’s a
slightly sketchy Victorian homily, since it dips awfully close to submissiveness
in the face of oppression – being “proper,” an uncomplaining little girl who
takes what she’s given – but Helen comes at it from the right place. Her concern isn’t for appearance or
convention but for Jane’s soul. She
doesn’t want Jane to let her anger consume her, to turn her bitter inside and
make her hate. In this way, it’s for
Jane’s own sake that Helen encourages her not to dwell on the injustices in her
life. She practices what she preaches
with such selflessness, and she and Jane grow so close, that you just know she’s
not long for this world. What is it
about virtue and consumption that they seem to go so well together?
In the
book, after Jane’s indignant outbursts land her in Lowood, she doesn’t do much
direct challenging of authority. Rather,
she bottles up her fury and lets it out in confidence to Helen, holding her
tongue and keeping her head down in the schoolroom. The Gainsbourg film prefers to keep Jane’s
scrappy side at the forefront a while longer, which is a big part of why I love
its school scenes so much. In the film,
when Jane first arrives and Mr. Brocklehurst declares her a liar, forcing her
to stand on a stool in front of her classmates all day, she doesn’t look wretched
or ashamed; she stares straight ahead with her jaw set, as if she’s daring him
to try and make her cry.
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