How Gothic

I took a break from assembling furniture and unpacking this evening to watch the new Jane Eyre movie. I have to admit that I was a bit hesitant to watch it when it first came out, not because I'm a purist when it comes to book to film translations, but for other reasons. Generally I can separate books and films. There are very few times that I feel as if a film is a total travesty and unworthy to bear the same name as the book. In fact, I find it kind of fascinating to see what is done in film translations. The problem, rather, lay with the fact that it was Jane Eyre. See, I like 19th century novels. A lot. The Brontë sisters and I have a bit of a rocky relationship though. I made it about halfway through Wuthering Heights before the combination of being profoundly creeped out and profoundly bored forced me to put it down and move on. I will go back and read it eventually, but it has taken me a while to get enough distance between it and myself for me to want to return. So when I first read Jane Eyre it was with a bit of a bias, even though it's by a different sister. I surprised myself by enjoying it. Then I took a women's lit class. It was an awesome class, one of my favourites actually, but one of the books we had to read was Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. If you haven't read it, here is the ten second explanation: it's basically a feminist re-writing of the back story to Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre. It tells the story of Bertha from childhood through her marriage to Mr. Rochester and up to when they have moved to England. It's a well-written book and accomplishes its purposes effectively. I didn't enjoy it though. At all. Other than Rhys's stunning ability to paint a lush landscape so alive that it is practically a living, breathing character in the book, I really just didn't like it. And a sad side-effect of this class was that I was kind of turned off Jane Eyre itself. I just couldn't discuss or read or think about Jane Eyre without Wide Sargasso Sea floating up in my mind. It was kind of like when you eat something right before you get the stomach flu and then every time you smell, see, or eat that again you get a bit nauseous. So, when this latest movie adaptation of Jane Eyre came out, I was hesitant. I shouldn't have been. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is well-cast (I would disagree with the allegation that Mia Wasikowska is too pretty to play Jane) and visually stunning. Plus, I think that it does a fabulous job of dealing with Bertha in a way that makes neither her nor Rochester look like a monster. Every couple of seconds in the movie though I kept thinking to myself, "How gothic!" It was really rather striking, and part of what make it such a visually lush and pleasing piece to watch.

Perhaps the only gothic convention that the film was missing was an old graveyard, preferably the heroine ought to wander through it as a storm is rolling in and there is lightning on the horizon. The film had the storm, since it's an important element in the book, but lacked a graveyard (as far as I recall the book didn't have one either so this is by no means a reflection on the quality of the movie). Wolfville, though, has a lovely old graveyard. A lot of the headstones are really worn and unreadable, but most of the dates seem to be from about the mid-19th century. It is so cool. I went and sat in it and drank coffee the other afternoon. I might have to wander though it when a good storm is kicking up, just to have a little bit of the gothic in my life.