#I can't believe I'm sitting here defending Jane Eyre

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

1, 15, 21, 25 for the book ask (though, I really just want to ask you all of them because I love hearing you rant about things you're passionate about)

1. Which book would you consider the best book you’ve ever read and why?

I can’t pick just one. But since I mention it later, The Phantom Tollbooth is an amazing book that I devoured over and over again as a child. My book literally fell apart from how much I read it. It’s a really great book for children and young teens about the value of using your imagination and how knowledge is all well and good but it doesn’t help you any if you don’t have logic and love.

15. Do you agree that Jane Eyre should be considered a feminist novel?

Um. *sigh*

Okay the thing is, what is considered feminist changes over time. What was radical and groundbreaking in its day could be considered sexist or stereotypical by the standards of today. The needs of women change as our society changes and as we make different strides.

For example, there was the whole movement where being feminine was considered... not great. We wanted to see women in fiction who didn’t give a shit about their hair, their clothes, their makeup, women who had muscles, who were stocky, who got their hands dirty and were more traditionally ‘masculine’. Think Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise. Then there was pushback - who says being feminine is wrong? We should be able to be respected while still wearing skirts and heels and pink. Think Clueless or Legally Blonde.

Given its time, I think that Jane Eyre was a step forward in a lot of ways. The story had a romance but it wasn’t about the romance. It was about Jane. There is equal time given to her growing up and her post-Rochester life as there is to her time falling in love with him. Jane’s journey is about learning to seize happiness for herself and to expect nothing less, even in a world that tells her she can never have it. We see this in the third act when Jane refuses to marry a man she doesn’t love. The Jane of earlier in the novel would’ve said yes, because it was the best she could’ve expected. But now she knows better. She says, no, I’m only gonna marry who I want. She finds the man she loves and she says, reader, I married him.

Do I like the novel? Nope. I consider Rochester to be wholly unworthy of Jane, and I think their relationship and his behavior is unhealthy, and overall I’m not a fan of Romantic literature (note the capital ‘R’, dear readers, that indicates a particular period in the history of the European and British novel, that does not mean I am opposed to romance as a genre). I could rant day and night about this damn novel, although not as long as I could rant about Wuthering Heights.

But there’s more than one way to be feminist and more than one way to express a woman’s agency. Jane Eyre is, at its core, a story about a woman realizing she deserves to be happy and deserves to have agency in her life, and whatever else, it doesn’t get more feminist than that.

21. Ideal reading position?

Flopped back in a chair, one leg hooked over a chair arm, because I can’t do anything straight.

25. Do you enjoy concepts in books to be concrete or abstract? 

I prefer books to be concrete, although I love when an author can pull off the abstract very well, like The Phantom Tollbooth. I just feel that too many authors can go too far with it, so I’d rather have a concrete story where the metaphors and such are underlying. I think most writers have a better handle on that and can pull it off successfully.