Review: Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ah, Jane Eyre! I feel like I’m years behind friends who’ve read this book (all of them female, which is unusual because I can at least think of male friends who’ve read Austen). Part of me wishes I’d been forced to read this earlier for school or something, as I think I'd actually have liked to study this in an academic context… But this'll have to do.

Jane Eyre is notable in part for being one of the first proto-feminist (as in, before feminism actually became a thing) books… as well as an ancestor of a tradition of novels focusing on the interior/private consciousness, from which came the likes of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and others (and apparently is also Kazuo Ishiguro’s favorite novel, if that means anything to you).

That said, the novel stands alone perfectly well even after having read any of the works it inspired— unlike say, watching an old movie or playing an old video game that clearly hasn’t aged well. I was actually surprised a bit at just how naturally this book reads, considering the time period it's from (1840's). The setting aside, something about the story just felt more familiar or immediately relatable than what I was expecting, unlike say, Hawthorne (beautifully frustrating), or Dickens (quaint, but almost to the point of feeling archaic/old-fashioned), or even later authors like Tolstoy (digresses way too much), or perhaps I'm just too accustomed to books narrated by introverts.

It's hard for me to really pinpoint one good aspect of this work that I like, because there's just too many: the interiority; the rich dialogue (especially between Jane and Rochester); the gothic atmosphere; the strong characterization; the exploration of complex issues such as the role of morality in a Christian context, and the impact of societal gender norms on Jane's self-realization as a person, and so on. I think it speaks to this novel's strengths how much one could possibly unpack from it.

Granted, Jane's behavior and choices might not seem all that revolutionary by our standards today. But, it's not as simple as characterizing Jane herself as an old-fashioned moralist (which you could possibly argue to some extent). The fact of the matter is that Jane is a protagonist who both wrestles with and remains true to her own convictions, in a world that often would praise such consistency as a virtue and yet at the same time attribute to it anything else except herself, because of her gender. By reading into Jane's internal consciousness, you're allowed to see just exactly why she behaves the way she does, without losing any sense of her agency in the process. Bronte basically created an anti-Mary Sue more than a century before the trope even became a thing.

All that to say, I wish I read more books with strong female characters like this one. I'll admit that as a guy, I'm not often really perceptive or understanding enough of the issues that women have to deal with, or the full extent to which they have to deal with them on a constant basis, or the unique inflections those issues can take in different contexts or (in this case) mediums. It's probably not something I could ever really understand on the same level. But a book like this-- it helps. Even if just a little bit.