What do we like about Jane Eyre?

Under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte Brontë published the novel Jane Eyre: an Autobiography in London in 1847.

We are in the rigid and austere Victorian age. The ideal of woman, in England and throughout the world, is that of angel of the hearth, immaculate protector of family ties, deprived of most of the rights reserved instead for men. Woman could not vote, inherit, or own property while congenial to her was procreation, child-rearing and custody of the home. She could study, but only according to her family and social status.

The heroine presented by Charlotte Brontë breaks profoundly with the stereotypes of the time, both in her physical appearance and in her psychological profile.

First, Charlotte Brontë does not endow her heroine with one of the main feminine values of her era, beauty. Contrary to contemporary literary usage, Jane is an ordinary woman not particularly beautiful.

Jane Eyre is also far from being a docile and fragile creature. Strongly passionate, she lives intensely and with transport the experiences of her humble existence, harnessing her great passion under an iron control: that of her will. She is a complex and mature personality, master of herself and her life.

Her strong personality and the author’s breaking will reflected in her shines through very well during the first meeting with Mr. Rochester: she is the one who saves him after falling from his horse and not vice versa as would be convenient to a common Victorian-era romance novel. The typical Byronic hero (Rochester), torn by unmentionable secrets and distressed by unspeakable guilt, is in fact unable to face his drama. It will be she, the upright and outspoken modern heroine, who will enable him to do so.

Jane runs away from all the male figures in the novel who want to dominate her. She stops only when she is sure that she can establish a truly equal relationship with Rochester, both economically and emotionally.

The conclusion of the novel definitely reverses the roles of the protagonists. It will in fact be Jane who saves her beloved, through a trial that in fairy tales is generally faced by the knight and not the lady: she seeks him out and helps him return to life.

The character of Jane Eyre has inspired cinema from the very beginning. There are nearly thirty film versions, including about ten “silent” ones, between 1910 and 1926.

The first sound version is from 1943. In Italian it is La porta proibita, from XXth Century Fox, directed by Robert Stevenson, who almost 20 years later would make Mary Poppins. Among the screenwriters of this formidable early sound version is Aldous Huxley. Jane Eyre is played by Jean Fontaine, Hitchcock’s muse in Hitchcock’s Rebecca the First Wife and The Suspect for which she won an Oscar back in 1941. The great Orson Welles, who by that time had already signed such cult films as Citizen Kane in 1941 and The Pride of the Ambersons in 1942, plays the role of Mr. Rochester. An already famous 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor is Helen Burns, Jane’s sweet best friend who dies in the orphanage.

“The first woman in history (at least in the history of literature) who had the courage to shout in the face of the man she loved that she loved him with all her heart, but that she would never be able to afford him again because she had discovered that he had lied to her. Love without esteem cannot be love; in fact, it is the absolute negation of it!”

Zeffirelli loves Charlotte Brontë’s novel because he sees in it the signs of a changing society and a new female consciousness that will be an inspiration for literature in times to come.

Without much hesitation, Zeffirelli chose the famous William Hurt, then 45, to play Mr. Rochester. True to physiognomy, so much in vogue in the 19th century, he follows Charlotte’s detailed description of the protagonist to the letter. The thick eyelashes and square forehead express his character: a skeptical, disenchanted, choleric, unpredictable man who can switch from kindness to indifference and nastiness.

She, on the other hand, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is 25 years old at the time of filming. She, too, reflects in rich detail the character described in the novel: a rigidity, almost a hardness in appearance, that holds back a very strong passionate charge readable in the window on the world that are her eyes.

The pair is perfect.

A maternal and understated Joan Plowright illuminates the shadows that envelop Thornfield Hall. In the background is the very talented scandalous star of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Maria Schneider, as the madwoman Bertha.

Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie’s daughter, is Miss Scatcherd, the dreadful history teacher at the boarding school where Jane is educated; Fiona Shaw, a great stage actress, is Mrs. Reed, Jane’s hateful aunt.

And finally, little Jane is played by Anna Paquin, a New Zealand actress, naturalized Canadian, who had already had a major role in Jane Campion’s Lessons in the Piano and who, after the success of the X-Men saga in which she plays the mutant heroine Rogue, was recently anointed by Martin Scorsese in The Irishman.