Jane Eyre… Oh, my lord… Jane Eyre

School has recently started up again and, as an English minor, that means… Lit classes. Oh, literature… For one of my courses, Introduction to Literary Studies, I was forced to undergo the torture of wading through Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Jane Eyre didn’t immediately strike me as terrible. Jane herself seemed like a genuinely interesting and relatable character, something I never expected to find in a novel written by a Bronte sister after I read Wuthering Heights for my AP English class. It’s a Victorian novel, so it starts off slow and takes purple prose to heights only Victorian Englishmen and women could possibly find entertaining, but for all that, it didn’t start out too bad. It immediately sets up Jane as an orphan dependent on her bitchy aunt and bratty cousins and then shows her snapping and being punished. Sounds good so far! Things happen right away! And then she gets sent school after an ungodly amount of time waiting for her to apparently recover from the exertion of actually opening her mouth to speak up for herself. It’s apparently quite exhausting. At school, we’re treated to a largely irrelevant couple months of Jane learning crap we don’t care about and making one friend who then dies of consumption. Her school sucked. We don’t need a hundred pages describing it sucking, especially since in a few months it changes management and becomes a decent place to live and work.

We jump ahead to Jane at 18. She’s been a student for six years and a teacher for two, but her friend gets married and leaves the school, so she decides she’s bored and gets a job as a governess. This takes way more exposition than you’d think. FINALLY, at about 200 pages in, we get to the real plot of the novel. Jane and Mr. Rochester, the man she works for, fall in love in spite of him being ugly and a bit of a jackass and her being plain and cold towards him. It’s not really believably set up, but whatever. It was the Victorian Era… Not exactly known for it’s romance. She saved his life once, so clearly they’re deeply and meaningfully in love. Okay. They decide to get married. Jane gets all paranoid that Mr. Rochester wants her to put out before the wedding and keeps being all pushy and bitchy towards him, not letting him shower her with gifts and affection. He puts up with it and the day finally arrives. What’s the problem? Turns out, Mr. Rochester has a wife. He got married fifteen years ago. His wife went batshit, violently insane, so he locked her up in a room upstairs with a servant to take care of her and just decided he wasn’t married anymore. His brother-in-law calls him on it at the wedding, so Jane does not become Mrs. Rochester. Poor Jane is so distraught she runs away in the dead of night. Leaves almost everything she has of value and spends all her money on a coach ride as far as she can afford to go. And because she’s a genius, she leaves the little she did remember to bring with her on the coach. Go her; she’s a genius. But hey! We’ve got a plot now! Some action of some sort!

And so begins the biggest ass pull of an ending I have ever read in my life. Jesus Christ, talk about deus ex machina…

So she wanders around the random place the coachman kicks her out at. She almost starves to death and gets taken in by the local clergyman and his two sisters. Apparently, all of her stress has left her very strained and she just lies there in bed for almost a month and they take care of her, in spite of her refusing to tell them her real name or where she came from. I mean, random women just show up out of nowhere, lying about their name and begging to be taken care of all the time, right? Totally makes sense that’d you’d make her one of the family. Riiiight. But his name is St. John, so he’s already a bit unbelievable. Anyway, she gets a job as a schoolmistress for a girl’s school the clergyman has just started up. Everything is going pretty well for her; she’s happy, but she still misses the d-bag (see above). Then St. John randomly sees her name written out on a bit of scratch paper that Jane was using to blot her paints. Turns out, Jane has a long lost uncle who died and left her a fortune. St. John knows all about it because he and his two sisters are actually her cousins! Turns out she had another uncle that died right before she ran away from Mr. Rochester! Isn’t it convenient that she just happened to get let off the coach near them and wander to their house?! And she randomly writes her name on bits of paper that aren’t really being used for anything, even though she’s trying to conceal her identity?! Right. So Jane inherits a fortune, but insists on dividing it equally with her cousins. She redecorates their house, which is another activity that gets WAY more attention than it deserves. Then her cousin, St. John, asks her to marry him, travel the world as a missionary’s wife, doing great works and teaching the poor, underpriviledged children of India, THAT BASTARD! Yes. She hates the idea, in spite of her always wanting to travel and see the world, in spite of her loving to teach and loving children, she simply can’t stand the thought of marrying St. John. You know what, Jane, fuck you. I’ll marry St. John. He has a genuine interest in helping those who can’t help themselves, bring comfort to the poor and doing good works in those places where no one else wants to do them. And did I mention that, in Jane’s own words, he has the body and face of a Greek God? But no. Jane can’t think to marry him because he’s not beside himself in love with her and she’s still hung up on Mr. Jackass Rochester. So what does she do? She runs away again, though with slightly more preparation this time. She goes back to Mr. Rochester, finds out his house had burnt down, conveniently killing his insane wife, but maiming him for life. She declares undying love for him and they get married and supposedly live happily ever after, with her taking care of him.

I hate this book. The Brontes suck ass.