Holidays
tell us a lot about how our world is changing.
As I
reflect on the meaning of Valentine’s Day (some of you may recall a similar
column from last year), I have been struck by an uncomfortable realization. The
very nature of love and romance is being redefined before our eyes — and how
better to trace this change than through that supreme leader of moral
enlightenment … Hollywood?
This year,
the only newly released movie that can be even marginally connected to
Valentine’s Day is “Fifty Shades Darker” — a movie full of perversions of love
and romance and things I can’t even bring myself to find out about.
It’s even
so pervasive that it is staining stories about good, true and beautiful love
and devotion.
I was
delighted to discover the 2011 “Jane Eyre,” one of my all-time favorite movies
(romantic or otherwise), at Wal-Mart this Sunday. I have loved the book by
Charlotte Bronte since I first encountered it in middle school, and the movie
is a beautifully done adaptation.
However, my
delight at finding “Jane Eyre” was tempered by the realization that the
slipcover was bleached of all color, leaving it in black, white and grey — and
the movie came with an expired coupon for a ticket to “Fifty Shades Darker.”
I am
mortally offended by the implied connection between “Jane Eyre” and “Fifty
Shades.” It’s a gross insult to Bronte’s genius and sensitivity. And what of
this comparison to “Fifty Shades” — that “Twilight” fanfiction that is
disgustingly degrading at best and outright dangerous at worst? From what I’ve
gathered, it is a story of a man abusing a woman in the name of love, and of
her eager submission to it. That’s not love. That’s abuse.
On the
other hand, we have “Jane Eyre,” which does have surface similarities but also
(and this is the important part) profound differences. It is these differences
that “Twilight” and “Fifty Shades” have neglected and lost by.
The hero of
“Jane Eyre” (if you can call him that) is Edward Rochester — powerful, wealthy,
well-educated and well-traveled, violent, rude, passionate, rough, tormented by
his inner demons and by his mad wife in the attic and Jane’s social superior in
every material way.
By
contrast, Jane is “poor, plain and little” by her own admission. She is an
orphan despised and cast off by her aunt and cousins, abused through childhood
and sent to a boarding school where her best friend and many other girls died
of disease and malnutrition. She is a governess, caught between the servants’
class and the middle- and upper-classes. She has no apparent worth in the world
and is alone, unbeautiful and loved — but her saving grace is her faith in God
(found while suffering in boarding school) and in her strong moral principles.
When
comparing Jane Eyre and Mr. Edward Rochester to Bella Swan and Edward Cullen
and to Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, there are a lot of similarities
(much as it almost physically hurts me to admit that). All three heroines are
ordinary, plain, ignored by the world at large and powerless. All three
“heroes” are strong, wealthy, powerful, experienced, worldly and tempted to use
their power to dominate and to hurt those weaker than themselves.
But the
difference, and the reason I love Jane while I always hated Bella and can’t
bear to read a word of “Fifty Shades,” is that Jane is principled and faithful.
She comes to love Mr. Rochester and is loved by him not for her weakness but
for her love, moral fortitude and wisdom. But it is those same things that
leads her to leave him when it is revealed that he is already married, and his
mad wife yet rages in the attic.
And when
Mr. Rochester — Edward — comes back and pleads with Jane to come and be his
mistress, to be together where he will love and cherish her far away from his
violent, mad wife, she is sorely tempted. However, unlike Bella or Anastasia,
Jane resists him and finally left. (Can you imagine Bella saying ‘no’ to
Edward?)
Jane has
nowhere to go — no home, no family, no hometown. She leaves to head into
certain exile and probable death, but goes anyway. Granted, she comes back
after Rochester’s wife dies in a typical Romantic exercise of Deus ex machina,
but it is Jane’s fortitude that has always been a gleaming gold standard of
heroism to me.
In this,
Jane has the power. Her power, though, is not the power of bitter revenge or
cold disdain, nor is it the power of wealth and prestige. Her power is that she
sees clearly that her love for Edward, and his for her, is unlawful and even
harmful while he is still married. His marriage to Bertha Mason is a burden
that cannot simply be discarded. Jane must protect both herself and Edward —
hurting both of them while seeking to cause no harm.
And so she
slips away in the early morning, leaving behind all her beloved’s gifts and
striking out on her own with no money, no home, no family except what she
discovers by happy accident only just before she succumbs to exposure and
starvation. It is dramatic — almost melodramatic — and it is indisputably
a story of the Romantic period, but Jane always seeks not power of her own but
a higher standard of virtue and purity.
It is
because of this core thread of gleaming gold running through “Jane Eyre” that I
am driven this week to question how far we have fallen. The book was first
published in 1847, 170 years ago this October. The book’s similarities to our
modern notions of romantic love should not be taken lightly, yet in 170 years,
that gleaming gold thread of virtue, purity, faith and hope that immortalized
Jane Eyre has been stripped from modern bestselling romances, leaving us with
books of black, red and white or just shades of grey.
If the book
had been written today according to our modern sensibilities, Jane Eyre would
not have had the principles and, yes, true love required to leave him. Instead,
she would have stayed with him, living like a leaf in the wind and driven by
Edward Rochester’s every whim.
But
Charlotte Bronte gave Jane, that “poor, plain and little” woman, a core of fire
that allowed her to serve as a humble servant and to love devotedly and
submissively, but to recognize the difference between right and wrong and to
act on it when the time came.
When did
movies such as “Fifty Shades Darker” define Valentine’s Day? When did darkness,
violence, sadism, masochism and the like become the pinnacle of love and
romance, rather than principle, love, honor and devotion?
And how can
we go back to that old standard, or to an even older and more beautiful
standard?
