Jane Eyre, Goth-style

In yet another attempt to sex up Jane Eyre, Penguin has released the Illustrated Jane Eyre; the illustrations in question come courtesy of Dame Darcy.  While I've not yet seen this new edition, there's some moderately irate discussion on the VICTORIA list about Ann Hulbert's article at Slate.  Presumably, Hulbert cannot be blamed for the article's subtitle--"A new edition of Jane Eyre reveals its truly subversive message"--which, in the space of a short sentence, manages to claim that a) readers were unable to pick up the "message" on their own before this new marketing coup, b) the message thus kindly "revealed" to us is the true one, and c) the true message in question is somehow "subversive."  (Of what? Has anything been subverted? If so, shouldn't we have noticed by now?) As one VICTORIAnist points out, however, It's a little harder to forgive either Hulbert or, indeed, Viking/Penguin for failing to notice that Dame Darcy misremembered the novel: "Aiming to make the novel look 'really kind of punk rock for the new generation of goth girls,' she picked 'the scene where Jane Eyre is freaking out while the giant mansion is burning behind,' Darcy explained to an interviewer."  And what scene would that be? Perhaps this is what some critics call a  "symptomatic" mistake--rather like confusing Frankenstein and his creature.  In any event, the Jane on the front cover looks like a Goth Little Red Ridinghood (black hood, of course, not red); one wonders just how big Rochester's teeth are. 

Hulbert rightly observes that "Brontë's guiding insight into life and literature, to simplify only somewhat, is that surfaces are suspect: Beware of assuming they are a reliable sign of the real passions within."  And she is also right to observe the strength and verve of Jane's speaking voice.  But her excited rush to claim the novel as a "declaration of feminine independence" leads her to trample that voice's complexity, as well as its moments of self-critique.  In a sense, and probably inadvertently, Hulbert writes in post-Gilbert & Gubar mode, with Jane as the very model of a major proto-feminist speaker.  Perhaps that explains Hulbert's ringing account of the novel's conclusion: "In closing, the former outcast asserts that hers is a voice worthy of being listened to beyond the hearth, a voice that might spur others on to a triumphant path."  Yet the novel quite famously does not conclude with Jane at all, but with St. John Rivers, on his way to an apparently glorious death in the course of his missionary work.  (Another symptomatic mistake?) Jane, meanwhile, happily settles down in ultra-remote Ferndean.  The voice may travel, but down what sort of path?

More problematically, Hulbert gives in to the siren song of biographical interpretation:

Jane isn't just a frail governess who ends up a wife and mother, happily ever after; she is also a published author, both within the "fiction" of the novel (narrated to us) and as a reflection of its real author, Charlotte. Brontë, remember, called the book an "autobiography" as a ploy to push readers closer to her lowly narrator—but also as a gesture toward the truth. Brontë, who at 20 sent poems to the poet laureate and told him she yearned "to be for ever known," channeled her own unbounded literary ambition into Jane, who refuses to be treated as a marginal figure. In turn, the indomitable Jane has a way of enlisting her readers, especially the adolescents among them, in the dream of being recognized as an assertive original.

Now, I don't mean to trample on Dan Green's territory here, but as critical responses to Jane Eyre and Jane Eyre go, this one is reductive--and traditionally so, as Lucasta Miller has shown.  It's fair enough to say that Jane yearns to be "recognized as an assertive original," but problematic to argue that she is a "reflection" of Brontë, let alone of Brontë's "unbounded literary ambition."  (Again, that Brontë had "unbounded literary imagination" is also fair enough--and I suspect that, contra Hulbert, she would be unamused at finding herself displaced by her illustrator.)  And while Jane does indeed need "self-reliance and an inner core of confidence," as Hulbert says elsewhere, there's no mention in the essay of whence it derives: a slightly idiosyncratic and universalist Protestant faith.  Like Gilbert & Gubar, and unlike more recent critics like Maria LaMonaca, Kathryn Sutherland, and Marianne Thormahlen, Hulbert skates over the novel's Christianity--even though Jane's faith is an integral part of her passion.  Whatever else Jane Eyre is, it isn't a secular self-help book for teenagers, Goths or otherwise.  Whether or not it can be read--or illustrated--as one is, of course, a different matter entirely.