The New Lifetime Reading Plan

overwrought prose. Here the style cannot throttle the feeling. Jane Eyre would make a great opera. The book's value is not demeaned by the fact that it is best read at the age of twelve or thirteen, and better by girls than by boys. Teenage romanticism has today been overlaid by our ultrapermissive culture, but it has not been killed or even basically altered. Were this not so, Jane Eyre would long ago have ceased to be read.

Yet Jane Eyre is not so much about love itself as about Jane's need to be loved. Ditto for Rochester. It's curious how many modern novйis, quite unromantic in tone, use this same theme. We can think of it, in modern jargon, as the expression, in a novelized dream, of the repressions Charlotte herself felt when she was approaching thirty.

Think of Jane Eyre also as a development novel: the emer- gence of the Ugly Duckling—a development, on the part of the Brontкs, that took place largely in their imaginations. As Jane walks down the corridor of the third story of Thornfield Hall (before Rochester appears) she has visions of a larger life, of "a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with ali of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence." Surely here Charlotte is talking about herself, and her sisters, too.

So much of this seemingly old-fashioned story seems pecu- liarly modern. For example, though Charlotte Brontк gives us nothing but genteel hints, Mrs. Rochester is a stunning portrait of a nymphomaniac. Similarly, the inexorable St. John Rivers is a study in repression, though Charlotte Brontк would not have put it that way. And Stephen King today attracts the fascinated and terrified reader with the same kind of appeal that Charlotte manipulates with her lunatic in the attic.

One of the strongest reasons for the novePs unkillability is the permanent attraction of the Byronic hero, and in particular the Byronic hero as "older man"—especially if he is in need of reform. The character Rochester is truly complex, a self- mocker and a mocker of others, who lives by and on irony. This creates his own misery, but he wants to conquer the ego that

eats his soul. He might very well have been created by any of the novelists of our Age of Anxiety, Norman Mailer perhaps, or Philip Roth.

Jane Eyre is among the first feminist novйis ever written, in its own indirect way a protest against the nineteenth century idea that women "ought to confine themselves to making pud- dings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags." The book can also be seen as a forerunner of thousands of rebellion-against-authority novйis.

Of the dated style one may say that the story is so gripping that the outworn words are no impediment. We are overcome by Charlotte Bronte's passionate belief in her story—plus her intelligence, which makes us forget the old-fashioned expres- sion and the melodramatic action.

I recently came across this remark from Oscar Wilde: "Owing to their imperfect education, the only works we have had from women are works of genius." There^ something to this. When women have finally won their battle, as they will, they will produce works as mediocre as those of most male writers. Meanwhile, Jane Eyres impassioned cri-du-coeur claims its rightful place in our Lifetime Reading Plan.

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EMILY BRONTИ

1818-1848 Wuthering Heights

Like Jane Austen [66], Emily Brontк was a parson's daughter, but there the resemblance ends. It is unsettling to pass from one to the other. They do not belong to the same world. They do not even seem to belong to the same sex. One is a master of perfectly controlled domestic comedy. The other is a wild demiurge of undomesticated tragedy. One excludes passion, the other is ali passion. Jane Austen knew her limited, highly civilized world thoroughly; her novйis grew out of needle-sharp observation as well as native power of mind. Emily Brontк knew the Yorkshire moors, her own family, and little else, and we can hardly say what her single novel grew out of.

In many respects Wuthering Heights is an absurd book. It retains something of the daydream atmosphere of the Brontк sisters' Yorkshire childhood. But the daydream has become a nightmare. Its plot, turning on the devilish Heathcliff s revenge on ali those who stood in the way of his passion for Catherine Earnshaw, is sheer melodrama. Its story-within-a-story method of narration is confusing. Its characters use a language uncon- nected with normal speech. And these characters, except for Heathcliff and Catherine, are drawn with no special skill.

And yet somehow people have found the book gripping. Not as a work of art, perhaps, but as a dream is gripping. Its primary quality is intensity. Despite ali the old-fashioned machinery of the intrigue, we succumb to this intensity, or at least are made uneasy by it.