more turning up the dorky

OH MY GOD there's a new jane eyre adaptation - and it's a bbc miniseries and it looks like it might be the best one yet!! i found out there's lots of snippets on youtube, if only i had time to watch them all! i shall probably make time.

to begin with, here's summaries of the four episodes:


(doesn't it look awesome, even though mr. rochester is a little on the pretty side?! :) i don't know when it'll become available in the states, but in europe it's supposedly february 2007.) holy shit! for someone who cherishes charlotte bronte's book as much as i've done since early childhood (i probably first read it when i was around 7), this is excitement indeed. then there's this thing on the bbc, all about c.b., j.e., and the current mini-series adaptation. YESSS! so why do i love jane eyre so much? well, i tend to think of it as one of the first (and most) truly feminist books that i ever read (besides fiul risipitor by radu tudoran, which i need to dedicate a separate post to). there are lots of issues, in particular with how bronte portrays the mentally deranged wife in the book (she's a woman who's evil-and-therefore-sexually impure and sexually impure-and-therefore-evil 'cause, you know, women are just so scary, especially when they're "wild" and/or non-white!) and how she sets her up as the antithesis of jane, who's virginal, pure, purely-british, and so on. i find it to be one of the major weaknesses of the book, even though i understand it as a plot device because rochester needs to appreciate all that jane is about, and his bad experience with this "exotic," unbalanced wife helps him see jane's non-exotic common sense in a positive light. and i guess that's a big deal, since jane is strong-minded and strong-willed more than anything else (including any kind of "pure"), and her own traits are basically the opposite of the kind of "femininity" that's specially designed to make people comfortable (and keep the patriarchal order of things intact). bronte uses precisely those idiosincrasies of jane's which in society's eyes are highly inappropriate for a girl or a young woman to have in order to make her into a sympathetic character - which is where the book's genius (and subversiveness) resides, for me. and i suppose it's sad and unbelievable that gender roles have not changed so much in the last 150 years that the subversiveness of jane eyre isn't still obvious, and relevant; but i think it's clear to anybody who reads the book that the combination of "unfeminine" attributes (toughness, self-confidence, rebelliousness, resilience, independence, directness, honesty, making ethical choices) and "feminine" ones that are explicitly praised as human, not female qualities (kindness and passion, mostly) is what's great and admirable about jane eyre. this, though largely unconsciously, is probably what made me enjoy the book so much from the beginning. yes, it's about the rochester-jane relationship of course, but it's about challenging conventions - about class and gender issues - even more. i also remember a time when i was of the opinion that the first volume of the book (as a kid i had the romanian translation in three volumes), the one that covered jane's childhood, was GREAT while the rest was simply "filler." :)

last but not least, i think i'm gonna segue from here into the request made by piulita georgica, that i write her a guest journal entry (about her). hmmm.... here's a warm up: she's an awesome sister, as evidenced by the fact that over the years she's accepted my jane eyre obsession and stoically suffered through its effects such as listening to the romanian audio book on vinyl about 256979 times (hey, she's lucky i didn't make her memorize it like i did with those stela popescu skits :P) and later on watching all the film adaptations i could get my hands on - even though she more or less hates the hell out of jane eyre! (actually, it's possible that my obsession is the very reason for ileana's hatred, but we won't go into that now.) thanks, ilenoza! :) and i'll write that journal entry very soon. xoxoxo