Jane Eyre Movie Assessment

Jane Eyre: 1996 Movie Assessments

The novel Jane Eyre ends, not with a reference to the love of Jane and Rochester, but to Jane's cousin St. John River. Jane's distant cousin is a missionary who has exorcized his passion for a worthless woman from his heart and stripped himself clean of all worldly desires in the pursuit of his faith. He dies, a faithful man in a far-off godless land, filled with the knowledge that what he has done is right for his own personal soul and struggle. This last, novelistic reference to St. John, although not nearly as famous as the statement 'reader, I married him,' is just as important when analyzing the differences between the book and movie versions of Charlotte Bronte film. This last reference to St. John, and the intimate reference to the reader of the text stresses the two key elements of distinction between film and book -- the book's greater stress on religion than the later film and of the shift in perspective from the novelistic first to the cinematic third person, which brings the film's emphasis on romance to the tale's forefront, as opposed to Jane herself.

The title character narrates the book Jane Eyre. It is a book that is a struggle of the self more than of romance. In contrast, even though the Zefirelli film does have occasional first person voice-overs, film by necessity cannot give a constant and limited perspective of what is going on in the head of only one of the characters. The book stresses that Jane must make a series of choices -- to give herself over to mad passion and Rochester, and become like his wife Bertha, or to be the wife the restrictive St. John and deny passion altogether. Jane chooses instead to negotiate a middle path between these two potential life paths. The novel's first person perspective shows that by deciding to marry Rochester only after he is free of Bertha Mason, Jane is making a personal choice of autonomy, rather than obeying him unquestioningly for romance's sake. The movie, because it gives a less coherent and complete picture of Jane's internal life, often showing things that Jane cannot know or scenes Jane cannot see, places by default a greater emphasis on the romance and interplay between Rochester and Jane, rather than upon changes in Jane's singular psychological development. The quest for self-fulfillment is the telos of the entire novel, one reason it ends with St. John. In the final estimate, it is shown that this character St. John Rivers, like Jane and Rochester, in their own unique ways, have found a kind of self-fulfillment, the ultimate purpose of life. But St. John's own theological struggle draws less attention of the film's perspective, as the film is not structured on a series of choices made by Jane, but merely upon her passion for Rochester.

Another reason for St. John's lesser influence in the film is the decreased emphasis on religion. One of the first conflicts Jane experiences as a child is between the harsh religion of self-sacrifice presented by her friend at the religious boarding school where she is sent to be under the tutelage by Mr. Brocklehurst, and her own passionate and fiery nature. Jane realizes, given her circumstances that she cannot always give way to unbridled passion, or she will be condemned as a liar and a fraud, and possibly have her hair cut off. But the religious path of self abnegation presented by Helen Burns is equally antithetical to her struggle and self -- however, unlike in the book, Helen is younger, and thus less of a mentoring older sister figure to Jane, and exists not so much as a template and rejected example of selfhood, but as mere evidence of the physical cruelties of the school to the viewer. The two girls seldom debate faith, and have a more traditionally girlish friendship until Helen's untimely demise.