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PBS supplied another of its Jane Austen series yesterday, and as it was Northanger Abbey, one of Ms A’s early works, I was prepared for the worst.  Twenty years ago or so I’d seen a BBC version with Googy Withers, and afterwards I’d felt as if I’d just been robbed of 90 minutes of perfectly decent living and been handed gloom instead.

Last night’s version was a delight.  There were a few things that bothered me: such as in the book the Abbey turns out to be a neat, relatively modern dwelling, thus undercutting Catherine’s gothic horror fantasies.  The PBS version had a vast gloomy castle.  Oh well.

It was Felicity Jones’ Catherine that won the day for me.  She was surprisingly convincing as the innocent and credulous Catherine.  It’s a massively difficult part to play since people who are naive and open and unsuspecting and good tend to make for rather dull viewing.  What Ms Jones was able to do was allow emotion and surprise to flicker across her features as if she were unaware how much her expressions were signalling.  Most of us learn how to mask ourselves in the schoolroom, from about 7 onwards. Most of us never unlearn it.  To have been able to convey so much artlessness as Ms. Jones did, so convincingly, requires real art.  When Henry Tilney finally proposes and they have their first kiss the fluttering movements of her hands - as if unsure that she’s allowed to touch him at all, were so right for the character and the situation that I wanted to cheer.  One doesn’t see that sort of acting genius often enough. And that’s just one example of many.

Jane Austen never again returned to pinning an entire plot on a single Innocent.  She always had characters who were to some extent more savvy, more edgy, more Orphan-like, who then had to unlearn their bad habits.  It makes for more humor and more readerly fun.  Catherine Morland, in contrast, learns how to cope with a deceptive world but she always remains fully in contact with her Innocent self.  That’s what allows her to see the selfishness at the heart of General Tilney that poisons his entire household.  She knows it - she just isn’t sure where it comes from and theorizes wrongly about it. Similarly she knows Henry is a good and decent person, even though Bath might predispose her to think all men are schemers.

When the story draws to its close we can see that Henry is actually redeemed by her open, Innocent-like honesty.  He cannot be fully human again until he can love the Innocent in her and reject his father’s way of thinking. He becomes a Warrior through honoring his love, and she, after her Pilgrimage, knows where her qualities would be best used - linked to his. She doesn’t hesitate.  In this she contrasts the scheming Isabella Thorpe, who is always playing the angles and never stops calculating.  To be that conniving argues a level of barely-masked fear.

Jane Austen knew that it is when we can allow the Innocent back into our lives that we can save our own souls.  It’s not advice that will make any of us the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.  But it might just be the best spiritual advice any of us could ever receive.

I’ve been sharing some very interesting discussions with Julie Stiles about life paths, life stages and so on, and I’d like to share some of those ideas here.

One of the main things I wrestle with, and which I’ve got a bit more of a handle on now, is that life paths are often rather hard.  “Follow your bliss” may be a good bit of advice from Joseph Campbell but large portions of his life were very hard work, and not blissful at all.  What we have to realize is that the bliss we feel will help to move us through the difficulties, the hardship, the tedium.  We also need to know that the bliss may not even be recognizable as anything much.

In Jane Eyre, Rochester, exercising his rights as aristocrat and employer, opens her drawing album and looks at the strange expressionist pictures Jane has produced.  He’s struck by them, and asks her, twice, whether they are her own work. Then he asks her if she was happy when she drew them.  It’s a loaded question: she could interpret it as, ‘Are you a morbid person who draws?’ or as ‘What was your mood at the time’  Jane’s reply is all but miraculous.  She says that she doesn’t know if she was happy but that she was fully engaged, absorbed, and the time flew by.

It’s not the polite, evasive reply Rochester expected.

She addresses, right away, what it feels like to be in a space of creativity, and she doesn’t make it melodramatic.  She simply acknowledges that when one is fully engaged in a task that is personally creative, then nothing else exists.  Rochester gets this, right away.  He doesn’t question further. And perhaps he envies her this inner calm, since he has so little of that himself, and since he starts to feel drawn to her from that moment on.

Charlotte Bronte knew this same space she attributes to Jane, since she was a writer who entered it on a regular basis. The way of creativity is always a way to the life path.

Which brings us back to life paths. Don Juan suggests that all paths are ultimately the same, since all paths lead nowhere in the end.  What he asks is whether we feel our path has ‘heart’. Heart is not a sociological term or a psychological term - it’s a spiritual term.  Heart is what sends you back to a task because you feel it is vital to you to do it, not because it’s fun, not because it pays well, and not because it’s seen by others as good.  It’s what you do so you can become more of who you are.

Jane Eyre almost loses her way, of course.  St John wants her to marry him and be a missionary.  And this would be conventionally and religiously a ‘good’ life path.  Jane almost agrees.  But her stumbling point is she can’t marry St. John because he doesn’t love her, and doing so would violate her moral code. Notice how she theoretically could ‘do it for God’ but she hesitates to do something that is not true even if it seems to be in a greater service.  But she knows that basic tinkering wit the truth would exhaust her and kill her.  In fact, as she considers this she’s defining her real life path, which truly does have heart, which is why she has to know what has happened to Rochester.  She finds him, and rediscovers where she’s supposed to be in life, rather than where people want her to be. Think about that: looking after a blind and crippled Mr Rochester must have been hard work most of the time.  But because they love each other the bliss outweighs the work.

Finding a life path is steady and prolonged work.  It’s also the Warrior’s work.  And the Warrior has to link to the compassionate self, or to the one who is loved, to achieve the Warrior-Lover balance.

Mary Lou’s comments on her visit to Chawton (Jane Austen’s home later in life) bring to mind the desk at which Austen wrote.  As Mary Lou points out it was a small table, merely, not a desk at all.  It is positioned today exactly where Jane Austen said she had it placed (her letters are clear) so she could be near the fire, catch the light, and be able to see the famous ’squeaky door’ to her room.  That way, when someone came in she would always be aware of it and she could cover her work or letter for privacy.

I mention that because there was no privacy even in that rather pleasant home.  Sometimes when writers in the Nine Month Memoir project or at the Blue Hills writing Institute tell me they have no time and space to write I think of Jane Austen’s table. Jane even shared a bedroom and a bed for much of her life with her sister, who was her one true confidante, it seems.  The need to maintain a public persona and yet to be permitted a private sensibility were in constant conflict with social intrusiveness.

That’s Anne Elliott’s plight.  It’s also Jane Eyre’s plight.  For everyone in that novel wants to reduce Jane to something that is convenient for their sense of who they think she is; and she resists.  She does so with politeness, firmness, good humor, intelligence, and steely courage; for everyone (including little Adele, and Mrs Fairfax) wants her to be the person they need her to be for their own comfort.  This is classic transference, in the psychoanalytic sense.  And Jane Eyre resists it.  Even her sweet cousins, the Rivers girls, want her to marry their brother so he will not go abroad - even though they know how impossible he is, and can imagine what a hard husband he would be. Friends indeed.

When Jane Eyre gives St. John Rivers a grilling for denying his love for Miss Oliver we could say she’s doing the same thing.  Yet look at how different her viewpoint is!  She tells St. John what she knows: that he loves Miss Oliver.  He admits it, yet he will not give in to it since he is so attached to his idea of being a missionary - his need of this public persona is so strong it fights with his personal yearnings. Notice, Jane doesn’t want him to be something different for her own good; she wants him to be alert so that he can be a more compassionate and kindly human being for his own good.  This is the exact reverse, in fact, of the overall trend in the book’s other characters.

Sometimes I think of Jane Eyre as literature’s first modern therapist.

In response to some questions I’ll spell out again the gist of my previous post.  Journaling is a very 20th and 21st Century phenomenon.  In the 19th Century one journaled only in the public sense of writing for someone else to read.  It was therefore very similar to letter writing.

Anyone knows that there are some things one would confide to a journal that one would never utter to even one’s closest friend, no, not even after 4 martinis.

Anne Elliott has no journal because the practise of unburdening oneself in the modern way was just about unthought of at this time, and she has no close friends out at Kellynch Hall, not even Lady Russell who has managed to talk her out of love and refuses to acknowledge that this was a real loss.

Cultural isolation has never seemed more bleak.

Thinking about the PBS Persuasion, which for all its excellences left me unsatisfied, led to the important question - what didn’t they do to capture me?

I think I have a clue.  In this rendition Anne Elliott is pictured writing in her diary.  This is a neat touch and gives us a sense of Anne’s interior life.  It’s a technique Austen used a lot, in a different form; she has her characters write letters to each other and have fun in the process.  The diary’s not in the book, though, and that is important.  Jane Austen’s characters all have an interior life, but they always seem to have it in relation to others.

And that’s important.  Anne Elliott has almost no one she can talk to, no one she can confide in directly, until she meets her old friend Mrs Smith - who really does give her the information she needs to have in order to make important decisions.

The novel is about many things, but it’s certainly concerned with the plight of people on their own who have no one to confide in and help confirm what they see. This is doubly difficult for Anne, who is so much more aware and intelligent than most of the other characters.  For when we are alone, and cannot speak openly to others, how can we test what we think and feel?

For Anne, as a member of an aristocratic household, has to behave a certain way and be a certain sort of person whether or not she feels like it.  Her achievement is that she can be civil and loving to everyone, no matter how unpleasant some of them may be, while holding on to a real sense of descriminating between people. It demands an effort of will, a real determination not to slip into self pity.  In short, it takes courage. 

In case we miss the point, Anne’s odious sister, Mrs Musgrove, is a splendid example of someone who gives in to pettiness and hypochondria as a way to express her unfulfilled life, while the oldest Miss Elliott simply follows her father’s absurdly snobbish attitude to everyone who isn’t her ‘equal’.

Anne’s courage is the courage of never “giving up loving, even when all hope is gone” as she says to Captain Harville.  It’s what takes her to quiet Warrior stage.  That’s what Austen takes pains to show us. Wentworth reawakens the Lover in her, and the Warrior-Lovers emerge.

Ah, those six archetypes….

PBS has promised us a Jane Austen season, each novel shoe-horned into and hour and a half, and mostly new versions, it would seem.  Persuasion was well acted (the British really do understand class tensions better than anyone else), respectful, and pleasing.  It also took huge liberties with the text and the plot, which rather spoiled it for me.

For example, to have oe of the final scenes feature Anne Elliott running all over Bath looking for Captain Wentworth, just as she’d earlier sprinted after him at the assembly rooms, is a mistake.  Ladies did not run, and certainly not Anne Elliott.  Jane Austen in fact has her sitting, waiting, throughout almost the entire book - which is a metaphor for her emotional condition. 

Similarly to have the good Captain present Anne with Kellynch Hall as a wedding present is charming but absolutely wrong.  The whole point is that the Elliotts cannot sell the place: the legal succession that makes their lives so miserable has been set up to make such an event impossible.  That was how inheritance worked in the early Nineteenth Century.  It’s also a major theme for Austen - how to keep up appearances when there’s a huge expectation of certain behaviors but no cash to support them.

Well, enough complaints.

In terms of our six archetypes the novel functions with some delicacy. The young lovers, Anne and the Captain, separate because Lady Russell persuades (the title of the novel makes this clear) Anne that the young man is a poor bet.  And of course he is.  He and his seafaring friends may later go on to make money, but one is crippled from the war, and the other has lost his betrothed to illness.  Lady Russell was right - and also absolutely wrong.  There are times when it’s a wonderful idea to gamble on a long shot.

From the point of view of character development (which is what Jane Austen cared about) what we see is that two Pilgrims in love are forced to give up their Pilgrimage temporarily.  When Wentworth returns he has been a successful Captain and  a Warrior, and he knows he wants to be married.  He nearly is ensnared by the lovely Louisa Musgrove, and is spared only when she is persuaded into loving Capt. Bennick, who himself needs to be persuaded to cheer up and forget his dead fiancee.  Wentworth therefore knows what it is to make a mistake, and while his flirtation has been going on he has a chance to see that Anne is competent, contained, loved by all - in short she’s a Monarch in the domestic sphere, but in suspended animation in her emotional sphere, loving him and unable to say so.

Without spelling out all the stages it’s pretty clear that Jane Austen is giving us two characters both of whom are Monarchs in their professional, public, lives, but both of whom have not achieved that level in terms of their emotions.  Anne has to reject Mr. Elliott, her cousin, and Wentworth has to reject Louisa so that they can see they have both been pining only for each other. They are both, in fact, incomplete versions of the Monarch archetype, and their task is to develop the emotional side that has been neglected.

When they accept each other it’s not just a tale of love lasting a long time - it’s a tale in which they both get to do vital spiritual work so that they can be successfully married.  The novel, after all, has plenty of examples of those who married without doing the work - Anne’s sister is insufferable, and Charles Musgrove is pretty undeveloped, while we can’t imagine what Louisa and Capt. Bennick will turn out to be.

Austen does give us the Crofts, though, who seem to be wiser and happier than the other couples, and who function almost as parents for Wentworth.

Alas, the PBS version seemed to miss many of these points - which is a pity since they are clearly in the novel itself.  As a tale that has relevence today it can hardly be more timely; we have plenty of people loose in the world who are Monarchs in their work and confused Orphans in terms of their emotions.  All those people who ‘put their carreers first’ sentence themselves to that fate; workoholics, obsessives…..  Take a look.  They’re all out there.

They were in Jane Austen’s world too.  Which is why she wrote the novel; to point the way forwards.

Last night the TV brought me the 1996 William Hurt version of Jane Eyre and it was immediately obvious that, to my taste, there was something very much amiss with this production.  It’s a good movie, doesn’t invent or distort too much of the main plot, and is well acted.  But it missed its mark.

One of the joys of reading the book is to note that Jane is, obviously, and Orphan who learns to conform (at her ghastly school, at Mr. Rochester’s) yet she never slips into being a passive Orphan.  She’s an Orphan because that rebellious Pilgrim in her has as yet had no way forward.  Mr. Rochester’s sarcasm allows her to refuse to be categorized as a ‘governess’ because she has to fight back, verbally, to maintain her position.  It gives her a chance to show that she’s fully human. A governess, as Charlotte Bronte knew from first hand experience, had only as much respect and power in a hostile home as she was able to wrest for herself through strength of character. The real struggle for self-respect occurs in the conversations of Jane and Rochester, and it was not presented in this version. Pity.  That’s the heart of the book.

Incidentally, these are the sections that usually get cut from movies.  For example, the way Jane takes Hannah, the servant at the Rivers’ house, to task for daring to look down on her is - to modern tastes - rather harsh, perhaps.  Yet if we see Jane as standing up for her essential human dignity even though she’s destitute and starving, then we’ll see that we have a much more compelling human drama.  She may be forced to flee Thornfield and Mr Rochester, but it’s not about weakness.  If she didn’t love him she wouldn’t have to fight for her right to be regarded as an equal.

What do I mean by this? Well, most movies show Jane leaving Mr Rochester after their thwarted wedding because its’ ‘wrong’ for her to live in sin with a married man. If one reads Charlotte Bronte’s words we discover that Jane leaves because, if she becomes Rochester’s mistress, she will be uniting with him from a place of inferiority.  He’s had mistresses before, we discover, and had grown weary of their dependency.  She needs to be able to be with him as an equal, no compromises, or she knows the union will fail.

What an interesting viewpoint!  What penetration of the subtle balances and imbalances that lead to disrespect between couples, especially those who are at very different social levels (as Jane is from Rochester).  Dignity, respect, personal authenticity - these are things we achieve by insisting on them. We live those values; we demand that others respect them.  And without these love cannot flourish.  Jane is a Warrior-Lover right enough, and risks her life for it.

Of course, when she unites with Rochester we all sigh over the happy ending.  But let us be clear.  Rochester shows self-sacrifice and moral courage in trying to save his mad wife.  He takes responsiblity for the situation (he’s very different from the man who blamed his father and brother for being tricked into marriage).  When Jane seeks him out he meets her as one who needs her physically and spiritually, rather than as one who wants her only to soothe his battered soul.  It’s a Monarch pairing - Jane cajoles and teases him back to life and the ravaged kingdom is made fruitful again by their union - children are born, Rochester’s eyesight improves, and the landed estate with its many tenants and farmers is brought back into productivity.

And that’s the Magician at work.

Now, Hollywood has instead given us a Jane Eyre who is an Orphan and a prude, and she meets a Rochester who is rude and brusque until he loses his eyesight, whereupon he slips back into being a pathetic Orphan, rescued by Jane.  This is a poorer tale.

Life is too short to allow us to accept such a poor version of what is, at its core, a far richer story.

I don’t remember Jane Eyre being this much fun last time I read it, but I can certainly say that I’ve been reluctant to put it down, and even miffed when daily activities have demanded I do so.

One of the things that tends to get lost when people talk about the novel is that Mr. Rochester is placed in deliberate contrast to St. John Rivers, Jane’s clergyman cousin (as it turns out) who is every bit as full of deep passionate desires as any character in the novel.  He is, in fact, far more volcanic than Rochester except that he has set his soul on being a missionary and so he cannot even think about the delectable heiress Miss Oliver, who does all she can to encourage him.  When we see St. John taking an interest in Jane as his fellow missionary to India we can’t help noticing that he insists on her marrying him.  They can’t go just as ‘brother and sister’, he claims.

Those fiery passions are not going to lie dormant, evidently. Given half a chance he’ll engulf her the way a python swallows a lamb whole.

Jane’s wisdom - and it’s a real wisdom - lies in recognizing that even though being a missionary would be ‘good’ in conventional terms, she knows she just isn’t cut out for that. She’s not an idealist, and can’t pretend she is.  For her it has to be Rochester if it is to be real love. The soul connection has to be with him as a person, not with God, not with an ideal of conduct.

Her genius (to hark back to that theme) is to recognize that this is what she needs and that is who she is - and there’s no judgment attached to being authentic.  For if we are truly ourselves, fully, that is where we are supposed to be.

A quotation I once heard says roughly the same thing.  I’ll mangle it here, but it went something along these lines: “When I get to Heaven I suspect that God won’t look at me and tell me he wishes that I’d been more like Him.  He’ll look at me and wish that I’d been more like myself.” 

Ms. Bronte speaks the truth, too.

A lot has happened this week, and one of the things that jumped up demanding to be noticed is what I can only call genius.  The Romans thought a genius was a particular spirit that hung around certain people and made them more effective than others, in very specific ways.  This week I was privileged to notice several examples. 

My friend Kenny came to dinner. He’d spent about 20 years in jail for something he didn’t do.  He was sometimes on the shady side of the law as a kid and got nailed. He’s been out now for eight.  He’s a delightful person who really does have a magnificent genius for being cheerful and productive all the time.  He uses his vast amount of energy in more ways than I can list, and it’s always with the view that we can do things for the betterment of everyone if we think differently.  He was like that behind bars, too.  He set up tutoring classes, study groups, he even did literacy work, all as an inmate with just about no resources - and a ton of opposition from the adminstration.  Whenever I think something’s too hard or too much trouble I only have to think of Kenny to shake myself out of it.

Kenny first recognized his genius for not giving in, for not despairing, and how that could be used productively, when he was in the hellish isolation block.  It was around that time he stopped trying to escape and started freeing his mind.

And here’s the point.  I can’t hope to do as much as Kenny does in a day.  His particular genius is for working with people, being optimistic, and inspiring.  I can admire that.  I don’t have it to anything like the same degree, that’s all.  My friend Maureen has a genius for being calm and supportive.  I’ll never be able to do what she does so naturally.  And it doesn’t matter that I can’t, because it’s their genius, not mine.

We are here to appreciate that there are many types of genius, that gifts are never the same, and so we all have to find out what our own personal genius involves.  Because it will be at the center of who we are, if we take the time to listen for it.

Here’s to Kenny, still inspiring, every day.

I’ve just been re-reading this splendid volume.  Strangely enough it wsn’t readily available at my local library because so many copies were already out.  This I took to be an encouraging sign for the civilized world.  As I browsed the shelves I coudn’t help noticing that both my local libraries were crammed with people.  Every computer was in use - and there were many - and droves of schoolkids seemed to want to get in an hour or two of homework in their favorite nooks….  I felt heartened by all I saw, with the possible exception of the DVD racks which were full of copies of Sex and the City. 

Then I reflected that since the copies were on the racks they couldn’t be that popular, could they?  I don’t wish to single out any bit of popular culture for criticism.  I just don’t think that that particular item belongs in a library when it’s available from video stores, etc.  But then - Jane Eyre was once a runaway best seller that’s still available in paperback, so I shouldn’t point the finger.

And why did I not buy my own copy, you may ask?  No bookshops exist in this town, that’s why.  Amazon would have taken several days to deliver, and a major expedition to a ‘local’ bookstore, plus parking, and a long walk in well sub zero temps….  well, I just wasn’t into suffering that much.

And so I now have the tale of Jane and Mr. Rochester twining itself around my heart.  It reads like a memoir; it has all the attributes of one.  Yet it’s a novel.  The verbal fencing between Jane and Rochester is magnificent, and unlike the cutesy dialogue of the movies we gain a sense of a truly elevated soul (Jane’s) making real contact with a deeply tortured soul.  As it does so, the demons are allowed to the surface so Rochester can deal with them at last.  He thinks he wants one response from Jane, yet she gives him what he needs, and not what he wants.

Freud could have learned from this.

More later.