Well, I tried squeakin' but I'm still broken
Having spent the last two weeks at my mother's house, coughing deeply and majestically over everything, it seems desperately unfair that, despite making it back to Cornwall a few days ago, I am still ill and sounding increasingly like an tubercular orphan in a Dickens novel. I may even have to go to the doctor's, come Monday, if I keep struggling for breath like this. It'll be a ballache though, as I have an appeals committee meeting in the afternoon and I have two weeks of work to catch up on. Woe, woe and thrice woe, with a wheeze and a splutter and a fol-de-rol-dol-etc.
To console myself, I am drinking whisky and watching Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006) again. Despite my Brusque Colleague's declared love of this adaptation, I still have issues with this serial, partially because Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens are objectively too attractive and charming to really convince as two plain misfits who fall in love despite class differences and the teeny-tiny matter of the previous Mrs Rochester wandering about in the attic, just waiting for Grace Poole to get pie-eyed on gin so she can go for a brisk walk about the house and set her husband on fire. However, it's mostly to do with the fact that, as with every other adaptation of Jane Eyre, it tries to get Jane's years at Lowood School over as quickly as possible. I know it's not the sexiest bit of the novel but it is the foundation for everything that comes after. It sets in stone Jane's occupation as a teacher; her deep-seated Christian morality and faith, learned from Helen Burns and Miss Temple and her own experience with Brocklehurst's cruelties; her sense that the only person to act for her would be herself; her art and her access to the spiritual world: all of which shape her relationship with Rochester. To give it a mere few scenes in favour of focusing on the more romantic bits is to unbalance the whole narrative and strip out the Gothicism and the context, and both of those are integral to the mechanisms at work in Jane Eyre. It is most vexing. I am vexed. I mean, I'll still keep watching, obviously. Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens are, after all, very pretty and I am super shallow and a little drunk.
To console myself, I am drinking whisky and watching Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006) again. Despite my Brusque Colleague's declared love of this adaptation, I still have issues with this serial, partially because Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens are objectively too attractive and charming to really convince as two plain misfits who fall in love despite class differences and the teeny-tiny matter of the previous Mrs Rochester wandering about in the attic, just waiting for Grace Poole to get pie-eyed on gin so she can go for a brisk walk about the house and set her husband on fire. However, it's mostly to do with the fact that, as with every other adaptation of Jane Eyre, it tries to get Jane's years at Lowood School over as quickly as possible. I know it's not the sexiest bit of the novel but it is the foundation for everything that comes after. It sets in stone Jane's occupation as a teacher; her deep-seated Christian morality and faith, learned from Helen Burns and Miss Temple and her own experience with Brocklehurst's cruelties; her sense that the only person to act for her would be herself; her art and her access to the spiritual world: all of which shape her relationship with Rochester. To give it a mere few scenes in favour of focusing on the more romantic bits is to unbalance the whole narrative and strip out the Gothicism and the context, and both of those are integral to the mechanisms at work in Jane Eyre. It is most vexing. I am vexed. I mean, I'll still keep watching, obviously. Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens are, after all, very pretty and I am super shallow and a little drunk.