Relationship Spotlight: Jane Eyre & Helen Burns (Jane Eyre)

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 19^th-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. 

But it’s in support of Helen that her defiant streak is most pronounced.  Other girls avert their eyes when Miss Scatcherd strikes Helen with a switch, but Jane keeps her head erect, with an expression that silently inspires the phrase “gonna cut a bitch” close to two centuries early.  And when Mr. Brocklehurst denounces Helen’s naturally curly hair as a source of vanity and demands it be cut off, Jane first stands up for her friend and then stands by her, having her own hair cut in solidarity.  Not so much with turning the other cheek, but it’s immensely satisfying to see her stare down the man, all the more so when she does it on her friend’s behalf.  Even their last, mournful scene together, in which the girls fall asleep in each other’s arms shortly before Helen’s death, has an “us against the world” feel to it.  I love the shot of them lying side by side with their shorn heads and Helen’s sweet kiss on Jane’s forehead as she says goodbye.  Just lovely, and it really makes you see Helen’s lasting impact on Jane despite the brevity of their friendship.

A few thoughts on Jane Eyre

 

A handful of years ago, I took a class on literature in film, in which we read a number of stories/novels and compared them with their film adaptations.  At the center of the class was Jane Eyre.  After reading the novel, we watched a 2006 miniseries of the novel and, in small groups, watched one of three other adaptations.  I had a number of quibbles about the miniseries, particularly the creative license described below – I got into more than one debate with fellow students on this issue.  (Note:  I’ll be going into some detail of a major plot twist from the book, so anyone wary of Victorian spoilers take heed.)

 

In both works, governess Jane Eyre falls in love with her employer, Edward Rochester, and despite the stringent class divisions of the day, he falls in love with her as well.  She is shocked when he declares his feelings, and as they begin to plan a wedding, she seems to be heading toward an impossible dream life.  Naturally, it isn’t until they reach the altar that she learns of his secret:  he’s already married, to a mad woman living in a locked chamber in his attic.

 

While Jane is obviously horrified and devastated in both versions, this is where things diverge.  In the book, Rochester admits that they can’t legally marry but is desperate for them to go somewhere they can carry on together, spouses in all but name.  In the miniseries, though he still begs her to go away with him, he promises they’ll be as brother and sister to each other.  Novel and adaptation alike show a brokenhearted Jane refusing him, and the next section of the story finds them separated.

 

In class, I spoke with several classmates who preferred the miniseries version.  They felt Rochester comes across as too pathetic in the book, so it’s no big surprise when Jane denies him.  In turn, they found his requests in the miniseries more reasonable, making him come across much better.  To me, though, this change misses the whole point of Jane’s dilemma.

 

Jane loves Rochester heart and soul; her greatest desire is to be with him.  However, she is deeply devoted to her religion and believes it would be against God to stay with him if they couldn’t get married.  So, the book offers her her greatest desire at the price of her integrity.  She has to choose between her happiness (his, too – it kills her to refuse him) and God’s law.  To deny herself of everything she wants in order to abide by her convictions is massive, and it displays tremendous fortitude on her part.  Essentially, she has to cut out her heart so she can remain the person she’s tried to be.

 

By contrast, the miniseries offers her something she doesn’t really want at no compromise to her ideals.  She wants to be with him, yes, but not platonically.  Earlier in the story, when she thinks he’s in love with another woman, she makes plans to find a different situation because she can’t bear to remain in his home and see him married to someone else.  As such, I can’t believe she’d be satisfied with the whole “as brother and sister” arrangement, so even though he’s not asking her to go against her religion in this version, there’s not much reason for her to accept.  The only incentive is her desire to make him happy, and compared to the intense, messy richness of the choice in the novel, that isn’t enough.  (Not to mention, it makes her conflict more about him, and I prefer it when it’s mainly about her desires and beliefs.)  So, although Rochester may seem less whiny/desperate/whatever in the miniseries, I know which version is more rewarding for me.