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Review: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (as read by Thandie Newton)

Of course my first book review on this, my book blog, has been inspired by righteous fury, rather than the great delight I’ve received from other books I’ve read so far this year.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (as read by Thandie Newton)

⭐️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️

I want to preface this entire rant by saying that Thandie Newton’s performance was spectacular. She humanized the characters, provided depth to the dialogue and interest to the sometimes cumbersome and tedious descriptions. The reason I finished this book so quickly was because I didn’t want to stop listening to Thandie, and I’m positive I would have given up if I were reading it on my own. Five stars to Thandie, please do more audiobooks!!!!

I understand this book was not written for 2019, but I am baffled that for 182 years, it has been lauded as a great work of feminist literature. It is a racist, classist, ableist, and yes, I’ll say it, sexist piece of trash that I hated beyond all expectation.

At first I loved it. The writing was beautiful, and lush, and descriptive. I was taken in by the complicated sentence structure and delicate prose, I adored how quintessentially gothic the book felt. The misery heaped upon young Jane was so perfect for this genre, which I generally enjoy greatly, I was almost giddy with it. It’s very enthralling and engrossing and I was absolutely in love. Rochester was a tortured, dichotomous douchebag, which i knew going in, and he and Jane had great chemistry.

Honestly I was digging it up until the blackface scene. The one where Rochester dresses up as an old “gypsy” woman, meaning he darkens his face to the point of being gruesome and horrifying, and forces an uneducated accent to harass all the women at his party, and specifically Jane, with “predictions”. There’s a lot of grossness to unpack in this scene (the weird and all-too-familiar pitting of the heroine against her female peers because the only way to be a strong woman is to show how inferior other women are, the super creepy connotations of Rochester conning his way into privacy of various young women, the extreme emotional manipulation of Jane which is unfortunately a recurring theme that I’ll get into later) but the overt racism is what really gave me pause.

Little did I know that scene was just the seedling of racism to come, and would bloom into a terrible, revolting bouquet of gross gross gross illusions to madness as equating to blackness, descriptions of Bertha Mason as grotesque and savage, many comparisons between this human woman and wild animals. The entire novel paints a correlation between darkness and sin, which I guess is a common enough motif in literature but when the central conflict of a novel comes in the form of a mixed-race woman of Creole decent who is described as having “pigmy intellect”, in my eyes that takes it to a different level. Especially considering the emphasis of Jane’s virtue being her primary strength, it’s a very telling choice to make the symbolic depiction of evil be in the form of a woman of color.

(Please read this article which was written by a black woman, because it’s all well and good as a white person to say this thing is racist, the idea of a little black girl feeling ashamed for her race because of this book should make us all furious and want to do better.)

Additionally, I feel that the character of Jane is boring and puritanical and too perfect. She was portrayed as plain and small to show how pious and good she was, but her childlike stature was also shown to be an object of desire for Rochester, which is a just another plop of gross on the seven-layer dip of grossness that is this book.

I hated the way Jane spoke of poverty, and European “urchins” and the uneducated, while still claiming to be a poor, unconnected orphan. I hated that none of Brocklehurst’s, Jane’s, nor StJohn’s religion seemed to have much correlation to actual morality, but was still portrayed as superior to Rochester’s relative agnosticism. I hated that StJohn’s treatment of Jane is not shown to be morally wrong and that he receives no narrative justice for manipulating her constantly, gaslighting her, and emotionally abusing her. I hated that the narrative justice for Rochester is in the form of two disabilities that should not be tokenized and trivialized, and also that his repentance allows him to be partially forgiven and absolved of these punishments. I hated that Jane spent the entire book being harassed, abused, railroaded, and manipulated first by nearly every man in her life, and that nearly all of them receive redemption, if their actions are even considered to be wrong. I hated that Jane’s happy ending is getting to spend her days in domestic and emotional servitude to Rochester, who arguably treats her the best of any of the men, but whose biggest transgressions against her are not given the attention I feel they deserve. Also, he’s a terrible racist monster who keeps his mentally ill wife chained like an animal in an attic and we as the reader are supposed to feel pity for him.

It is beautifully written and beautifully performed (Thandie saved my sanity during this book and I will love her forever. Please narrate more books!!!) but I hated the vast majority of this book. It is irredeemably racist, even for the time period, and far too frustrating besides. Not a feminist work, not worth reading, not deserving of any of the hype.

#jane eyre #charlotte bronte #book review #to-be-formatted

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