throbbing light machine

I was thinking, this morning, as one does, about romantic teleology and Charlotte Brontë. (which as I'm writing about Love's Labour's Lost this week is actually rather odd, but I habitually think about Charlotte, so.) ( Read more... )

Since Brontës seem to be going around (selenak on Wuthering Heights, katta on Jane Eyre), it seemed to me like it might be time to try expounding on my Grand Unified Theory of Rochester. Which I have never tried to do before, not really, so be gentle!

Like Katta, I love Rochester. I always have, ever since Jane Eyre whirled me away as a sixteen-year-old and made me decide to study Victorian literature for a living. But I've had a really hard time talking about him, to most fans of the book, and certainly I've found that academic analyses of him don't patch with my reading. The current tendency seems to be to read Rochester as similar to Heathcliff, but without the benefit of Emily's sarcastic commentary and relentless anti-Romanticism: a Byronic brooding Bad Boy Woobie who gets himself Redeemed By Lurve. Witness the take Fassbender gave on him in the recent film: his Rochester is all about the lure of the bad boy. Rochester's appeal gets read as symptomatic of women's simultaneous political desire for freedom and sexual desire for submission, as suppressed s&m. All very Twilight, when you come down to it.

( This is not my Rochester. )

We've had absolutely bats weather here - day before yesterday windgusts of 80 mph, huge trees down all over the place, but mercifully no loss of life, and no tornadoes either. The winds aren't turning, just blowing like snot.

Saw Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and just hated it - I can't remember the last time I was so bored. The total lack of narrative structure/plot/characterization is stunning. Was this supposed to be a movie? It felt more like an amusement park ride, the way the first three managed to avoid in the despite of their origin. Johnny Depp v. pretty as always, I suppose, but my irritation with the formlessness of the thing kind of detracted from my ability to appreciate his eyeliner.

BUT. I also finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and wow. It went somewhere MAJOR.

I do think Anne Brontë is, technically speaking, a weaker writer than her sisters. Wildfell Hall suffers from an overabundance of unmemorable, redundant secondary characters, and needs to be about a hundred pages shorter. (I've been wondering if Anne wasn't helped as much as the others were by their family writing collective because her interests turned to different genres/narrative modes/social issues. She wants to write a sober, longform realist novel, and she's stuck working with a bunch of crazy gothicists. But I have no evidence, only speculation.) Almost half of the novel keeps you stuck in the pov of Gilbert Markham, the whinging childish jealous brutish guy who's supposed to be the Good Lover, idek, and his head is a really boring place to be.

But the middle third of the novel, when you're in Helen Huntingdon's diary, is insanely banging. It's relentless, not allowing the reader to avert any of their attention from even the most squalid moments in the disintegration of Helen's marriage. The stuff with her son -! And with her husband's very clear understanding of the liberatory effect Helen's art has on her and his determination to put a stop to it -!

Name me a character from a fandom I have known, and I will tell you:

* How I FEEEEEL about this character
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
* My non-romantic OTP for this character
* My unpopular opinion about this character
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon

So I'd heard about the egregiously Twilight-tastic new cover for Wuthering Heights, but apparently that's only the beginning of it.

( cut for images and ranting )

With the accidental release of the Twilight spin-off Midnight Sun, I've found myself pondering vampires.

I haven't actually read Twilight, save in mockworthy excerpts around internetland. My sister bought all four books, though, and then my mother read them. This kind of weirds me out.

But the thing about Midnight Sun that's been freaking me out is how like some sort of dark mirror of Buffy/Angel it is. I'm embarrassingly otp about B/A, and looking at Edward Cullen is a very interesting exercise in self-examination. Because I think that at the end of the day, Angel and Edward - heck, throw in Rochester for a historical precedent - are cut from pretty much the same mode. Handsome, powerful, has knowledge that the heroine does not, secret darknesses, stalkerishness, possessiveness, that whole fantasy of total all-consuming love that verges on creepy and badwrong.

( Except that they choose very different sorts of girls to be in love with. )

Also, in tangent land, rewatching the end of Buffy 3 made me frustrated with it all over again. Because to me, the breakup never actually reads as final. It reads like the Romanceland trope of the obstacle to love, which is SUPPOSED TO BE OVERCOME BY TRUE LOVE. The breakup feels like the first part of something. I don't ever feel like the writers actually say that it's over. If they would, maybe I could get over it. Right now I'm just having Season Six AU fantasies wherein Angel is the one who catches B at the end of Once More With Feeling, instead of stupid Spike.

I've made my peace with Jane Eyre, really I have. It's very hard for me to dealwith the issues of race and racism that critics tend to raise against it, because I love Rochester and Jane so terribly. I take his character by the fact that it was Jane he wished to have, not some divine beauty. Jane: small, poor, plain, and above all fiercely independent, not content to be less than his equal. I love him for loving her, you see.

And he does treat Bertha well, at least. He doesn't send her off to an asylum, doesn't allow her to die. If her condition seems cruel to us, perhaps it is because of the cultural and intellectual changes in the understanding of mental illness. I'm sure that however bad Thornfield may be, an institution would be infinitely worse. Edward hates her, true enough, but not for her madness. She was cruel to him ere she lost her mind, and it's that that sways him, he says so himself.

(Oh, it feels so strange to be reading with the text and against its interrogators. It's not my usual method at all, and it makes me quite uneasy. But it really is the way I feel.)

But there is one thing that, every time I hear or read of it, puts me entirely on Bertha's side: when Rochester and his company are playing at charades, certain wardrobes and closets on the third story are ransacked for costumes. It's entirely clear to me that these are Bertha's things, being taken without her permission for use in a party game by a spoiled snot. It makes my heart ache. The disregard of her wishes, her very being, that they would so cavalierly carry off her things! it bothers me very much.

Maybe it's because I hated having to give up my own things so much as a girl. My sister is four years younger than me, and she spent most of her childhood wearing my handmedowns. We didn't have a lot of money, and good clothing was good clothing. But I hated it. It already reduced me to tears when I couldn't wear a particularly beloved dress or pair of shoes any more, and to see her going about it them was, in my mind, adding insult to injury. And so the idea of someone taking away my things without my knowledge and for such a silly purpose really rankles with me. It could almost make me dislike Rochester. At least Jane isn't involved--I'd be very sad to dislike her.