I wish I were smarter on the genre conventions in mid-19th century English novels, which is to say, I wish I had a little more context in which to situate some of the "plotty" elements of the book. Like, was the reader supposed to know that they were her cousins almost immediately? I feel like it was very obvious very immediately. And it’s a little bit over-determined by the whole "coincidence" of all of it, sure, but still. As soon as there was the mention of an uncle, an inheritance…

The same could certainly be said with regard to Helen Burns (which: what a name) and her fixation on paradise in the next life; as soon as there’s the typhus outbreak, you kind of know…

I’ll have more to say about the religiosity, the divine interventions, below, but — honestly perhaps because they came outside of that — I thought the handling of Grace Poole as a subterfuge was brilliant; it was just unclear enough to actually arouse suspicion while not actually spoiling anything (even though, you know, it was spoiled for me already based on being a 21st century kind of person).

This is all to say that I’m really interested in how Jane Eyre engages with genre plot(s), but that I don’t really have anything smart to say about it.

Even outside of poor Bertha, there is the characterization of the cousins on her mother’s side that caught me:

Mrs. Reed, villainized of course, also is referred to at times with racialized language as very "dark" and so on, and there’s a reading here where she’s so protective of her children in favor over Jane because of that; like I say, I know that there are much smarter people than me on this, and even books — exhibits! — about race in the work of the Brontës (I mean: the whole controversy about the new "Wuthering Heights" movie casting and so on), but even to this somewhat naive reader, it was quite present, and apparent, throughout.

Again, I’m missing context. Could I have read the introduction after I finished the book? Yes, I should have. But I had so many other books overdue at the library and (see further excuses). But I was a little surprised that the book ends with St John, and how much Rochester’s disfigurement is cast as a kind of moral just dessert. Pairing that then with the Helen Burns thing — well. It’s quite a religious novel, isn’t it? (And here I’ll pass over the various slur(s) at non-Christians she includes at points later on in the novel.)

I think, as a non-Christian who’s always been frankly perplexed by the "suffering in this world is OK because there’s paradise in the next" argument or mode of thinking, that aspect of the book was probably inevitably going to fall a bit flat for me. There’s a quote that I probably should have actually written down on the back of the edition I read — one of the Modern Library ones — about how the novel is in part "wish fulfillment," and I sort of get that, but it returns to the plotting question I had above: how much of it is meeting convention, and how much of it is some kind of argument about the goodness/justness of God? Is the argument of the novel really so simple?

And yes, see "not being any fun" above: there’s no fucking reason that the novel has to have an argument. I agree! I really enjoyed it as a pleasurable work of fiction to read!

But, you know, given that it’s also "literature" (another problematic label, I know, I know, this is why I am not a literature scholar), I suppose I found myself reading it very much with all of these things in mind. It’s a little problematic for me! Of course, this is why you get so excited for the Jean Rhys…