C-
Genre: Chick Lit, Literary Fiction
Re Jane is supposed to be a modern re-telling of Jane Eyre. It changes the plot considerably, but that’s to be expected. Unfortunately it also loses the entire point of Jane Eyre, which is that the main character is moral and has a sense of self that anchors her. While this retelling at least remembers that Jane’s self-respect is more important than romance, it has an incredibly selfish, self-centered heroine. The story is not a romance although it has some romantic elements. Angry and copious spoilers below.
Jane Re is a Korean American girl who has never met her parents. Her mother was Korean and her father was an American GI. Her father is thought to have abandoned her mother, and her mother died when Jane was a baby. Jane was adopted by her uncle who lives in Flushing, New York, and she works in the family store. She takes a job as a nanny for a white couple who adopted a Chinese girl (they wanted a Chinese nanny but in hiring Jane they got a Korean one instead). Husband Ed is permissive with the daughter, cranky, and anti-social. Wife Beth is working on her dissertation so she spends all her time in her office (yes, of course her office is in the attic) and she has very strict ideas about how the daughter should be raised (no sugar!).
Jane falls in love with Ed. This baffles me, because, like Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, Ed is a terrible person, but unlike Rochester, Ed has no charm or charisma whatsoever. He comes across as cruel, dismissive, passive aggressive, and disrespectful towards his wife and exploitative toward Jane. He’s not funny, he doesn’t have endearing angst, and he’s not good in bed. He’s just sort of there. Jane tends to latch onto anyone she comes into contact with and Ed is no exception. He’s a good cook and woodworker, which are charming skills, but that didn’t make me want to date Ed. It just made me hungry and dissatisfied with my current furniture.
Jane and Ed start an affair but Jane decides that having an affair is wrong (true) and that the solution is to leave the family and fly to Seoul with her own family (the family patriarch died so they are all going back for the funeral) and without telling anyone what she’s doing, let alone why. While Jane Eyre flees Rochester (and abandons Adele) because of survival in Jane Eyre, Jane Re flees Ed and Beth (and abandons the girl she takes care of, Devon) because God forbid she should take responsibility for her actions or experience any consequences, or think for five seconds about the fact that dumping a kid without notice is a shitty thing to do to the kid and to the employers who have to scramble to find a new nanny. She also makes her move on September 11, 2001. In case you are wondering how this affects her emotional development, it doesn’t. She could not give less of a shit about the fact that her city just blew up. She does not check to see if her friends or family are OK, although she does respond to their emails when they check in with her. She doesn’t take any interest in subsequent world events. Basically a terrible tragedy becomes a plot device (it means Jane can’t take a job with a finance company that had offices in the World Trade Center) with no emotional consequences.
While in South Korea, Jane gets a job teaching English, which leads to this line, “Teaching can be a pretty thankless job. You never think to give credit to your teachers until you’ve had to stand in front of a classroom and do it yourself.” This line sums up Jane perfectly. I would hope and presume that a lot of us appreciate teachers, whether we’ve taught or not. But appreciating teachers without teaching requires things like empathy, and paying attention to something OTHER THAN YOURSELF. Never have I encountered a character with her head so very far up her own ass as Jane. How I hoped her students (who are adults) would beat her to death with their textbooks. Instead they befriend her, buy her drinks, and one of them dates her. Sadly, Changhoon is as humorless and stiff as everyone else in the novel. Will Jane stay in South Korea and marry the rich Changhoon, or return to New York and Ed the cheating slimeball?
So obviously, as a Jane Eyre retelling, I hated this book with the heat of a thousands suns, but outside of that, it did do a few things very well. I loved the themes of nunchi and jung. In the book, nunchi is described as knowing how to behave properly, and a lot of Jane’s experiences involve her rebelling against nunchi. Interestingly, on Wikipedia, nunchi is described as knowing how to behave in a hierarchical society, but also it’s described as “the subtle art and ability to listen and gauge others’ moods.” I found that interesting, given that Jane is very sensitive to her place in society but utterly incapable of accurately assessing (or giving a shit about) other people’s feelings.
The book does its best work when it allows Jane to develop more empathy and independence, as well as increased jung for people around her (particularly her friend Nina, her uncle, and Beth). Jane describes jung as deep regard and respect for someone. As she grows in the course of a novel, she is able to stop being so self-centered. She’s able to assert herself with her uncle but also see things from his perspective. She’s able to appreciate Beth and see Nina as a business partner and valued friend instead of someone to use when no one else is around.
On a personal level, I enjoyed reading about Jane’s experiences in Seoul, and my personal connection elevated my opinion of the book overall. I came back from a trip to Seoul recently, and while two weeks in Seoul doesn’t make me an expert, there were a lot of things Jane experienced in Seoul that elicited a giggle of recognition from me. The complicated toilet control panel that stymies her uncle (who left Korea before the family had money and who returns to find a confusing new country) made me laugh. At one point during my trip in Korea I was so stymied by a toilet that I couldn’t even flush it. I had to slink away, in shame. It was in a bank lobby. Here’s what the control panel looked like:
At one point Jane opens a door for someone only to be flooded by an endless stream of people going through the door. While she regards this with some angst I thought it was hysterical. In my experience, residents of Seoul are incredibly helpful, kind, and considerate until it’s time to go through a door at which point suddenly it’s a free-for-all – pushing, shoving, crowding, maybe throwing an elbow from time to time. Then, once safely through the door, everyone instantly returns to their helpful selves. This pissed me off to no end the first twenty times or so before I began to see it as funny. Jane sees it as “soulless”. Oh, Jane, honey. Lighten up a little. And give up on that door thing.
The book also addresses the problems of racism in Korea towards multi-racial children, and how attitudes have shifted over the years. The family I was visiting is a multi-cultural one so from a personal vantage point it was interesting and helpful to read the book with my friends’ experiences in mind. I appreciated all the information on Korean life and culture.
I liked this book for the cultural insights, the fact that Jane does grow up near the end, and the fact that it kept me turning the pages to find out what would happen. I don’t like that Jane was a selfish, self-centered person who was completely callous towards every single person she met. The way she and Ed treated Beth made me ill – not because of their physical affair, but because when Beth isn’t watching, they take Devon out to all the places Beth would disagree with and encourage her to break her mom’s rules. The way Jane treated her “friend” Nina was revolting – on Nina’s first night in Seoul Jane dumps her to go out with her boyfriend. The book is marketed as a retelling of Jane Eyre, but it only resembles the original in plot, not in theme. The one bone I’ll throw toward it is that both versions of the story stress accountability, self-respect, and compassion. Jane Eyre has these qualities all along, but she has to develop the resources to live a happy life in a hostile world. Jane Re lacks these qualities until the very end of the story but thank goodness she gets them eventually.
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Thanks!
Oh sad. I totally loved this – but I do see where you’re coming from. I agree Jane was too self-centered and had a lot of growing up to do, but I guess I was just glad that she did change rather than being angered by it. I really loved the cultural insights as well, she did an excellent job of bringing those through.
I was pretty disappointed by this one at first. Ed was not a good substitute for Mr. Rochester, and the whole affair thing was gross. But you know what? It grew on me. The cultural aspects were so interesting, and Jane grew up a lot in the course of the book. I felt kind of proud of her in the end. It took me somewhere I didn’t expect,and I liked that. And I read it for free on First to Read, so I can’t complain too much!
“He’s a good cook and woodworker, which are charming skills, but that didn’t make me want to date Ed. It just made me hungry and dissatisfied with my current furniture.”
Thank you, I just laughed out loud and startled my daughter. Excellent review of what seems like a rather lackluster book, although props to the author on the diversity, I guess.
I think Jane’s attitude toward teaching English in this novel sounds like a pretty close hat tip to Bronte, who frankly has her Jane Eyre dislike both teaching and Adele. In fact, one of the things that made me intensely dislike Jane Eyre the character is that she’s snide and unsympathetic about Adele (who has essentially as love-starved a childhood as her own, with the added bonus of literally “your mother was a whore”). Jane manages to make Adele like her, but she always looks at this poor little girl with very nasty condescension. I understand that this was Bronte’s own reaction to how much she hated teaching, and her comment on the limited opportunities available to educated women of her time, but as a woman who finds teaching a true intellectual challenge as well as deeply emotionally rewarding, the attitude toward Adele The Plot Moppet makes me grind my teeth. Jane Re sounds like at least she’s showing teachers some belated respect, unlike Jane Eyre. /endrant