Jane Eyre or the Orphan of Lowood
Dramatizing bestselling novels was brisk business in the nineteenth century, and the German actress/playwright Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer specialized in translating both British and Continental novels to the stage. Die Waise von Lowood (1853), translated into English as Jane Eyre or the Orphan of Lowood, proved to be a smash hit. Patsy Stoneman, who has edited an English translation, notes that although the play was first performed and reviewed in the USA in German, it was playing in "two different English versions" by the early 1870s.1
Birch-Pfeiffer most obviously alters Jane Eyre by compressing it: Jane is an adolescent in the Prologue, not a young girl, and despite the title, we never see her at Lowood; the Reeds replace the Ingrams; and once at Thornfield, Jane never departs (nor does she have to). These alterations obviously originate in part from pragmatic considerations--an older Jane eliminates the need for a child actress, and keeping the Reeds similarly shrinks the cast. By the same token, sticking to Gateshead and Thornfield reduces the number of sets. However, in the novel, every move--Gateshead->Lowood->Thornfield->Gateshead->Thornfield->Moor House->Ferndean--marks a new phase in Jane's subjective development, not to mention her social position. In the play, we do not see how the adult Jane at Thornfield emerges from the angsty adolescent at Gateshead. Moreover, because Birch-Pfeiffer radically edits the bigamy plot, there is no need for Jane to undergo the kind of figurative discipline meted out to her on the moors, nor does Rochester need to recuperate from his Biblical punishment at the less-snazzy Ferndean. The play is not, in fact, about transforming the self--Jane's ongoing struggle for control over her own dangerous desires, Rochester's equally ongoing excuses for his emotional and sexual self-indulgence--but about revelations. It is symptomatic that Jane's secret reading is not Bewick's British Birds, with its haunting illustrations, but "Hume's History of England" (157)! This Jane is "determined to know something in spite of them all" (157), substituting rational self-improvement for the Gothic fantasies of the novel's young Jane. Fearing Georgina Reed's influence on Lord Rowland Rochester (Birch-Pfeiffer promotes him, so to speak...), Jane moans that "all that is hateful and wicked in my nature" threatens to return (180)--but without either Helen Burns or Miss Temple, Jane's mature self-discipline, even under extreme duress, appears entirely sui generis, cut out of the same cloth that drove her to devour Hume. Birch-Pfeiffer thus downgrades the moral process that intrigues Charlotte Bronte, and offers instead the stark contrast between raging young Jane and her disciplined older self.
If Birch-Pfeiffer's Jane has nothing to unlearn (as opposed to Bronte's dangerously idolatrous Jane), her Rochester has nothing for which to atone. Granted, he still plays mind games with his governess, on the grounds that "[i]f it breaks her heart, it will teach her to not be so silent" (190). Nevertheless, the woman in the attic is not Rochester's wife at all, but his brother's, and Adele is not Rochester's daughter, but hers (the result of a liaison with a "young Polish officer"[194]). Birch-Pfeiffer simultaneously erases the bigamy plot and displaces all of Rochester's own youthful misbehavior onto Henrietta (the Bertha figure); as a result, the play insists that Henrietta is really a moral degenerate, eradicating any residual sympathy we might have for poor Bertha, while turning Rochester into someone "noble--magnanimous!" (195) Although the play does not put it in so many words, Rochester's gentle treatment of the woman who jilted him for his brother makes his gruffness veil his essentially Christian character. He is, as Stoneman says elsewhere, "not only blameless but ennobled."2 Unlike the novel's Rochester, this one only has to propose to Jane once, for he is already her spiritual equal. No need for symbolic lightning bolts here.
By turning the Ingrams into rehashed Reeds,the play turns Jane's impending marriage to Rochester into something that is more obviously a class, economic, and erotic triumph. It is not enough here that she succeeds and the Reeds get their divinely-ordained rewards (or lack thereof), but that she successfully competes with them for romance, aristocratic entitlement, and fortune. The now-impoverished Mrs. Reed asks Jane to give Rochester up to Georgina's gentle ministrations, and Jane, wishing to reconcile with her aunt, agrees to do so. Instead of being necessary self-denial, Jane's decision turns out to prefigure Rochester's revelations about his relationship with Henrietta: it is an act of Christian charity and humility, extended to one demonstrably unworthy of it (making the act all the more heroic). But Jane's decision sufficiently announces her moral superiority to gold-digging Georgina, and she therefore gets her romantic reward--presumably leaving the Reeds appropriately penniless.
1 Patsy Stoneman, Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898: An Illustrated Edition of Eight Plays with Contextual Notes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 143.
2 Patsy Stoneman, Bronte Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Prentice Hall, 1996), 34.