Poor, Obscure, Plain, and Little

Last year, I read Jane Eyre for the second time.
My previous foray was in either junior high or high school, and I remember thinking that Rochester was the bees knees and that Jane was a stiff-necked idiot.
Upon re-reading it as an adult, I cried through it.
Then I listened to the audio book.
Cried.
Then I watched the 2011 film.
Cried like a hungry, wet infant.
I am not the most emotional of women, but I do have working tear ducts and, much as I am ashamed to confess it, I can be moved to tears when something is spectacularly awful or spectacularly awesome (emphasis on spectacular… the pedestrian and rudimentary will see no tears from me. I’m looking at YOU, 2013 DOCTOR WHO CHRISTMAS SPECIAL).

“Jane Eyre” is spectacular in all possible senses so, therefore, I reacted both as if glass was being driven into my nail beds and as if someone had proposed to me by quoting the wooing scene from Shakespeare’s “Henry V” word for word, with exquisite diction and crisp pronunciation.
To be quite clear, I love this book with a ferocity that is surprising.

From the moment I cracked the seal on the first chapter, I felt a strange sort of affinity with Jane. No, I am not an orphan, nor was I abused by a psychotic cousin, cast off by a cold and distant aunt, or boarded at a school both owned by and riddled with diseases, but I still connected with her. Perhaps it was the description of her own countenance and demeanor, and how she was considered unlovable because she was too quiet and bookish with a tiny forbidding expression. Her feeling of being utterly unconnected to those around her and her childish flashes of temper resonated with me to the point where I was so angered and upset by her treatment that I had to put the book down for a bit and breathe.

All, right, fine. By “breathe”, I meant “cry.”

Whatever.

Jane just felt so familiar to me… feeling as though one must stand at the back in the shadows, and having the depth of one’s being consistently underestimated because of one’s silence and outward serenity. It wasn’t that she didn’t have thoughts or feelings. They just didn’t live on her top layer of skin. She didn’t feel everything… every discomfort or slight didn’t produce boiling rage, nor was she wildly ecstatic over a nice, balanced breakfast… but what she did feel was felt so deeply that it could have killed her. When she cried, she had such good reasons that I cried with her, and when she was happy, it was at such long last and so well deserved that I still cried, but not in the same way that one would at the end of “The Terminator.”

I’m not kidding, that was so SAD!

I think what I love about Jane is that she was not a saint. Sure, she was young and blushed easily and was a very good sort of person, but not because she couldn’t have been any other way. Jane chose her path deliberately, fully realized and self-aware, and the reader is privy to long passages in which Jane reins herself in.
Jane chose to excel at Lowood. She got angry, but didn’t leap on people the way she had as a child with young idiot Reed. She was discontent, but didn’t sit around bemoaning the fact… she simply acknowledged that she wanted more than she had, and then went back to her work. She chose to forgive her aunt and her living cousins at Gateshead. At no point did Jane follow Blanch Ingram down a dark hallway, knock her the ground, and kick her in the throat. She kept her feelings for Rochester until control, and even when driven to the point of confession, she still kept her own terms. She didn’t cease to want Rochester when she discovered his secret, but when presented with a temptation that I dare say most of us would have seriously considered (I’ll be honest… I at LEAST would have made out a pros and cons list), Jane pulled one of my favorite heroine stunts of all time: she got the heck out of Dodge (I’ve always been partial to runners, myself… there’s great good sense is recognizing that a dash for the hills is in order).
I’ll admit wanting to throw rocks and chew glass when Jane submitted for a time to Saint John Rivers’ peculiar brand of emotional abuse, but even in that case, she only allowed things to go so far, and then she dug in her heels and told him to step off.

Not in those precise words, of course.

Jane had what appeared to be a very clear picture of who she was… specifically, “poor, obscure, plain, and little,” and she didn’t spend any time at all wishing or plotting or trying to be anything else, but she also had a brilliant view of her own self-worth… “I have an inward treasure born with me“. She didn’t pat herself on the back indulgently and tell herself that she was beautiful, she didn’t believe that she was the best and brightest of all things, she even seemed to be a bit suspicious of other people’s compliments, but ultimately Jane knew that whatever she was, that would do quite well.
It seemed that Jane’s own self-respect went farther in securing her own happiness than anything else could, so she guarded that self-respect with quiet tooth and claw. This makes her the most approachable of heroines, the most magnificent of feminists, and the most concise of theologians, because she simply accepted how God had made her and wouldn’t let anyone mangle or redefine her.
And, spoilers… she wins in the end.
You can’t beat that with a stick.

 

Quotes:

“Do you think I am an automaton? A machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!”

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

“I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me – for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”