Ladyporn and 19th century domination

This looks like the ladyporn of all time. The fact of having a film version of Jane Eyre is always a minor event in Dread Pirate Jessica world, because of the importance that book has assumed for me (and my vocabulary) over the years - me and millions of others, which is why, I suppose, they always make new versions of it. I can practically recite the bloody thing backward so I get a pseudo-academic kick of seeing how film versions of it depart from my own internal vision of it.

I never expect to enjoy them as films or as a vision of the book. The book's unfilmable. Or rather it could be filmable as a 10-hour miniseries directed by David Lynch and starring ugly people, but you know who the audience for that would be? Me. I think the Charlotte Bronte and the David Lynch fans would be almost equally turned off. Which is one of the reasons I suppose it's never been done yet. Still, if I was a billionaire, I'd try really hard to persuade David Lynch to do it. I don't know another director who could communicate Jane's emotional life as it's communicated in the book.

Because the book is about Jane, of course. It's only about the romance and the melodrama as showcases for Jane's fucked-up brain, a brain that's only going to be able to really embrace the romance once Rochester's wings are viciously and painfully snipped; a Jane who only evinces signs of getting turned on when she's at least getting the illusion of control and equality - or domination - over her partner. Rochester's big sexy manliness, which has been much commented on, is I believe in part made so awfully big and so awfully sexy to show us the depths of Jane's happiness when she manages to fasten it to herself with a watch-chain, which by-the-by is a reversing motif Charlotte Bronte used to express possession between Jane and Rochester - I could cite pages but this is a blog and no-one is giving me credits.

Rochester didn't have to lose an eye and an arm in the fire when his wife offed herself to open the way for a legal and sexy reunion with Jane. Charlotte Bronte chose that for a reason, and for a very good one - because after so many hundreds of pages with Jane and her hallucinatory but strong internal monologues, the reader would understand almost as well as the writer that the only way someone like Jane was going to be happy with Rochester was with a tamed, dependent Rochester. It's actually all pretty psycho, when you think about it. Fuck, it's a good book. I really, really wish David Lynch would turn it into a miniseries.

Anyways, I don't expect the movie to be terrific, but it'll have Michael Fassbender emoting out Rochester's big sexy scenes, so it's gonna be hot. He's not ugly enough for me to think he'd do it in my David-Lynch-directed-miniseries-fantasy way, or indeed for me to imagine him acting out the Rochester who has become part of my brain from so many years - how many, nearly 20 now, of loving that book? - but that's not what ladyporn is about.

Ladyporn is about the odd times when it makes sense somehow that Mr. Darcy goes swimming in the middle of Pride and Prejudice so Elizabeth gets to see he's packing some heat under all those clothes, or when the director of the Great Escape chooses Charles Bronson to be having a shower during the inspection scene and not one of his skinny-ass little co-stars, or the scenes in the Nolan Batman movies where he's toplessly getting out of bed after a long night's fighting. Ladyporn is gratuitous. Usually it either comes in dribs and drabs or it's so poorly done I feel condescended to. But casting a man who looks like a Daniel Day Lewis who's got beat with the pretty stick, and who is actually, you know, good at acting - casting him as one of the most romantic Romantic heroes of all time, who's walking around with the biggest boner in 19th century literature - now, that is Ladyporn.

Drown and toss

So, Villette. Charlotte Bronte was a romantic and the voice of the passions, lady-passions especially, and Villette is a very passionate book. The book's narrator Lucy Snowe is the most trippy, passionate (in the sense of emotionally present) and poetic narrator I think I've ever been narrated to by. As much as I enjoyed the first-person narrative voice of The True History of the Kelly Gang, Lucy Snowe makes that Ned Kelly look like a cardboard cutout with an Irish accent - a cheap trick. She makes Pip in Great Expectations look like an uncommunicative emotional retard. And she makes Jane Eyre look - well - stupid is the wrong word. She makes Jane Eyre look like Jane is fooling herself.

Lucy would have asked Jane why, if her marriage to Rochester is so great, the last words of her memoir are about the guy she turned down. Lucy would have asked Jane what she meant by telling Diana that she could imagine one day developing a 'torturing' kind of love for St. John. If Lucy had been in the room, that would never have stayed that one little sentence out of a million in Jane Eyre; and Lucy would have pulled out an explanation for why Jane nearly agreed to marry St. John when he stroked her hair, and why a fucking miracle was necessary to prevent her from doing so.

Far more than any other Bronte heroine, or any literary character who springs to mind at the moment, Lucy is emotionally merciless in her appraisal of the people around her, and most of all of herself - and yet that doesn't mean she's honest - not at all. She's a strikingly, gratuituosly dishonest narrator who conceals things or omits things for the sake of concealing them or omitting them. She reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's dishonest narrators, but all of Kazuo Ishiguro's books and the graceful slow reveals of his narrator's realities - and please bear in mind that every book I've compared in this post with Villette so far are books that I fucking love - look totally gimmicky relative to Villette.

The thing with Lucy Snowe is that she's a depressive, a complete fucking clinical depressive, with all of a depressive's cynical certainties, despair, cold eye for even the people she loves and dry little games of hide-and-seek with the truth. She has all of a depressive's passionate sense of the unfairness of the human condition; a sense which isn't just observational, but deeply experiential and personal - the sort of sense of the unfairness of the human condition that makes poets instead of Marxists. It's the thing that makes depressives hard to spend time with, and that makes depressives think that they're even harder to spend time with than they actually are.

Lucy as a narrator isn't hard to spend time with though, or at least not for a patient reader, because Charlotte Bronte was a poet, and all of these cynical certainties, etc., are delivered to us in her astonishing language. I'm always wary of attempts to link a book to a writer's personal life. But I can't help but think of Villette as a cri-de-coeur from Charlotte Bronte after the death of all her siblings, and after her emotionally humiliating relationship with her professor in Brussels; a shatteringly accurate and painfully extended poem exploring the mind of a depressive, and finally the grand and brutal gesture of drowning it like an unwanted kitten and tossing it, almost contemptuously, into the lap of the reader.

I believe in that sort of therapy for depressives and I've never seen a more perfect example of it than Villette, if that's what Villette indeed is. After all, they say that despite the utter shittitude of her family's fate - and it's hard to imagine that Lucy Snowe's family's fate, one of the things that she purposefully hides from us, is much worse - Charlotte Bronte was quite happy in the final years of her life.

Brussels, Brontefied

Holy fucking fuck me. Have just finished reading Villette and feeling absolutely drop-kicked by it. It's really good. You do get a sense from Jane Eyre that Charlotte Bronte wasn't the most psychologically rock-solid creature in creation, an apparent fact that is probably underappreciated due to her sister Emily writing so well about completely, demonstratively nutso people in Wuthering Heights. But with Villette the exploration of the brain of a totally fucking depressed narrator is so intense, so well-done, and so very fucking Charlotte Bronte that I feel awful for her that there was no Jungian analysis back then . . .

It's a really good book. You need a bit of a suspension of disbelief with Jane Eyre - well, a fuckload of suspension of disbelief - that you don't need with Villette. There are some pretty zany coincidences but they are quite believable ones, on the basis that they don't drive the plot - no I'm-telling-my-uncle-I'm-getting-married-he's-dying-sends-R's-wife's-brother-to-stop-the-wedding-in-nick-of-time-blundering-around-the-moors-meeting-my-cousins sort of thing. Just the sort of coincidences that happen. And the sort of unlikely events manufactured by a depressive personality. And yet it's not a tighter book than Jane Eyre - it's almost more of a breakdown than a novel.

My god. Lucy Snowe. Jesus. That's the most powerful narrative voice I can think of at the moment. Also she takes opiates and trips out on the streets of Brussels. That's right. Anyways it needs a few days to settle in before I can write coherently about it.