“Jane Eyre” may not be the first feminist novel, but it is certainly one of the most enduring. There have been at least 20 movie and television versions of Charlotte Brontë’s gothic love story, even more than of “Emma” or “Pride and Prejudice.”
And it’s all the more of a tribute, since “Jane Eyre” is not easily refashioned to fit modern times. Unlike Jane Austen novels, “Jane Eyre” is hard to imagine updated into a “Clueless” or “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” A governess could easily be turned into an au pair or a personal trainer, but a man who hides a mad wife in the attic is harder to transmute in an era of no-fault divorce and Thorazine. It’s the kind of hurdle Steve Martin faced when he based his 1987 comedy “Roxanne” on “Cyrano de Bergerac”; he solved it by giving his Cyrano an allergy to anesthesia that precluded a nose job.
And that constraint is probably one reason there isn’t a huge difference in tone, setting or narrative structure between the 1944 version that starred Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine and the latest “Masterpiece Theater” adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” a two-part series that will be shown this Sunday and next on PBS.
The newest version is perhaps a little steamier. At one point Jane (Ruth Wilson) and Edward Rochester (Toby Stephens) lie on a bed and kiss (they remain dressed), and the mad wife, Bertha (Claudia Coulter), a half-Creole from the West Indies, is shown in a flashback committing strenuous adultery. As befits a Victorian immorality tale, however, the illicit love affair between the governess and the man she calls “master” is more passionate in word and smoldering glance than in deed.
The “Jane Eyre” of today takes few liberties with characters, plot or language. Usually classics are revered in the classroom and mauled by Hollywood: “Jane Eyre” is treated with kid gloves in movies and is under constant critical review by scholars and writers.
Brontë’s “poor, obscure, plain and little” heroine became a huge success almost overnight when the novel was published in 1847. It remained beloved and tirelessly reprinted from generation to generation, but the book didn’t become fully enshrined in the literary canon until the 1970s, when the women’s movement was reaching its peak. “Jane Eyre” became a treasure map of feminist interpretation, from Jane’s childhood as a rebellious bookworm to her tortuously postponed marriage to Mr. Rochester, who had to lose his sight before he could have her — some scholars see this as a symbol of castration.
In the 1980s “Jane Eyre” also became a required text for postcolonial literary theory. The novel was viewed as subliminally imperialist: a European woman’s individuality and emancipation are nurtured at the expense of exploited third world characters, who remain invisible or dehumanized.
And that view was bolstered by the Jean Rhys novel “Wide Sargasso Sea,” which was published in 1966 and serves as a First Wives Club defense of the mad wife.
Ms. Rhys, who was born on the British island of Dominica and was half-Creole, rewrote the story from Bertha Rochester’s point of view. Renamed Antoinette, Ms. Rhys’s heroine is a delicate West Indian free spirit crushed and driven insane by colonial arrogance and paternalism. (The conceit of the governess as sinister interloper has a separate life of its own, from “The Turn of the Screw” to “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”)
Film interpretations of “Jane Eyre” are not nearly as daring: the only aspect of the novel that is mildly reworked in this version is the depiction of Bertha. In the book Brontë describes her as a “clothed hyena,” and the earliest films (there was a silent version as early as 1910) paint her as a wild-eyed nut case. This “Masterpiece Theater” madwoman is beautiful, not beastly, though obviously deranged. She attacks her own brother with a knife, tries to burn Mr. Rochester in his bed and sneaks out of her room at night to tear Jane’s bridal veil to shreds.
The casting of the leads is a bit disappointing. In the past Mr. Rochester has been played by some remarkable actors: Welles in 1944, George C. Scott in 1970 and William Hurt in a 1996 version directed by Franco Zeffirelli. (Then again, the haughty Blanche Ingram was played by the supermodel Elle Macpherson.)
Mr. Stephens is a passionate, tormented Rochester, but not a very imposing one. The actor has chiseled, soap-opera-star features that clash with Brontë’s descriptions. Mr. Rochester glowers a lot and gallops broodingly on horseback, but in the rare moments when the master of Thornfield is in a good mood, he seems a lot like Hugh Grant in “Love Actually.”
No director seems able to choose a genuinely plain actress to play the plain governess; be it Ms. Fontaine, Susannah York in 1970 or Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1996, Jane is portrayed by a pretty actress pretending to be nondescript. Ms. Wilson, who has big blue eyes and a pillowy upper lip, is just as much an impostor, which seems unnecessary in the age of “Ugly Betty.” But she nevertheless does justice to Jane’s pallor and grave, pensive dignity.
And the film, much of which was shot on location in Derbyshire, England, does justice to the novel’s spooky gothic undertones. The childhood Jane (Georgie Henley) is scary-looking, not cute, and her defiance does seem out of place in her aunt’s strict and repressed household. When asked what she should do to avoid being sent to hell, Jane thinks a little and replies, “I must keep in good health and not die.”
That’s the kind of talk that gets Jane sent to Lowood School, a Dickensian orphanage where girls must crack ice in the basin to wash their faces; typhus and other diseases are rampant; and Jane’s first and closest friend, Helen Burns, dies from consumption.
Jane grows up and leaves to work as a governess, but for all its comfort and grandeur, Thornfield is also a frightening place. The manor is vast and empty, and the camera moves up and down dark corridors and desolate staircases as if it were the resort hotel in “The Shining.” Grace Poole (Pam Ferris), a hatchet-faced servant who is allowed inexplicable license around the house, is filmed in a suitably creepy light.
“Jane Eyre” is not an inspired reinterpretation; it’s another respectful, faithful telling of a well-known tale. And that is in itself a tribute to Brontë, who wrote a novel so powerful and absorbing that no filmmaker dares tamper with it.
MASTERPIECE THEATER
Jane Eyre
On most PBS stations on Sunday and Jan. 28 (check local listings).
Directed by Susanna White; Sandy Welch, screenwriter (from a novel by Charlotte Brontë); Phillippa Giles and Laura Mackie, executive producers for BBC; Rebecca Eaton, executive producer for WGBH; Diederick Santer, producer. Produced by BBC and WGBH Boston.
WITH: Ruth Wilson (Jane Eyre), Toby Stephens (Edward Rochester), Claudia Coulter (Bertha), Francesca Annis (Lady Ingram), Christina Cole (Blanche), Tara Fitzgerald (Mrs. Reed), Pam Ferris (Grace Poole), Andrew Buchan (St. John Rivers) and Georgie Henley (Young Jane Eyre).
