Ages of Jane Eyre

While reading Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea I immediately noticed all the footnotes on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  I read the children’s version of Jane Eyre during the summer before my eight grade year, so I was able to draw a few parallels from what little I remembered about it.  I also vaguely remembered “The Simpsons” as making some sort of parody of Jane Eyre (which frankly might only be because I know they poke fun at all sorts of widely acclaimed literature, such as The Raven by Poe or A Streetcar Named Desire by Williams).  It turns out I was correct, and in one episode where Marge joins a book club, and the book they are reading is “Jane Eyrehead.”  This revelation prompted me to further research just how prevalent Jane Eyre has stayed over the years since it was written.  Rhys obviously was impacted by it over a century late when she published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, and clearly the writers of “The Simpsons” saw it as pop culturally relevant a few decades after that.  Even now the tale is in our media, with the 1993 film of WSS and a 2011 movie of Jane Eyre.   There are so many different versions of Jane Eyre such as sequels, prequels, and spinoffs in so many different formats, like movies, TV shows, and books.

Jane Eyre Summary and Examples of Versions

As Wide Sargasso Sea is the only work I have read, that is the one I’m going to be focusing on.  I found it really fascinating that a book about the “crazy wife in the attic” had so many similarities to the Jane Eyre I remember reading about half a dozen years ago.  One thinks of them as completely separate people, but Rhys chose to illustrate them as having more similarities than would be comforting had people taken the time to notice them.  (By this I merely mean that nobody wants to be like the crazy lady, that they are supposedly not normal people ever, and no sane person should share any similarities of past or present with them).  Jane Eyre was orphaned at a young age, and Antoinette’s father had died, and her mother was not a supportive force in her life even before she passed.  When Jane has nowhere to live, she goes to a charity school, and when Antoinette has nowhere to stay she goes to a convent school.  “This convent was my refuge, a place of sunshine and of death where very early in the morning the clap of a wooden signal woke the nine of us who slept in the long dormitory” (33).  I found it interesting that Antoinette thought of it as a refuge, and Jane’s school is her refuge from her abusive aunt.  In the schools both Jane and Antoinette knew a Helen/Helene (respectively).  Both ended up as rich women upon the death of their family.  When they reach adulthood Jane and Antoinette (Bertha)’s lives intercross and the similarities of where they live (Thornfield Hall) are inevitable.  It is more interesting to me that their lives have so many similarities in the younger years, in Rhys’ mind at least.