B-
Genre: Gothic, Historical: European, LGBTQIA, Romance, Young Adult
Theme: Retelling
Archetype: Diverse Protagonists
Escaping Mr. Rochester is not the book I hoped for but it’s OK. This is a YA retelling of Jane Eyre.
If you’ve been reading SBTB for awhile, you know that Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books. I read it annually, and each year it gives me a new experience, ranging from comforting and empowering to deeply challenging. I liked the basic content of Escaping Mr. Rochester, but wished it delved more deeply into its source material.
In this story, which is narrated in alternating chapters by Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason, Jane is hired to be a governess at Thornfield Hall. She likes her charge, Adele, but is suspicious of her employer, Mr. Edward Rochester. She’s right to be, because, surprise, Edward has a wife named Bertha who he keeps imprisoned in the house. With Jane in line to be his next victim, Jane, Adele, and Bertha team up to escape and bring justice to Mr. Rochester.
In the original, Edward Rochester is one of literature’s first and best broody heroes, and one of the most amazing things about Jane Eyre for me is that his character can legitimately be read in a number of ways – victim, victimizer, romantic hero, abuser. Depending on one’s interpretation of the text he can be kind, responsible, and progressive for his time or sexist, racist, and evil in the extreme. But he’s never not compelling. His magnetism and genuine feelings for Jane are crucial in keeping the mystery and the romance dynamic throughout the story.
However, this book’s version of Rochester is so blatantly villainous from the get go that there’s no mystery. Rochester might as well go around twirling his mustaches or yelling, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your pretty girlfriend, too!” This removes so much potential tension out of the story! There’s no tension about who to trust. Instead, as the title indicates, it’s a pretty straightforward story about Bertha, and eventually Jane, trying to figure out how to escape Mr. Rochester’s clutches.
This book is being marketed as a young adult romance, so let’s talk romance. Jane and Bertha don’t have any form of contact until about halfway through the book. Then they start exchanging secret letters and almost immediately they are signing them “Affectionately.” Because they have very little opportunity to get to know each other, and they are dependent on one another (Bertha is especially dependant on Jane) I didn’t feel that this was a fully developed romance, but I did believe that these characters would form a quick bond and that they might have an HEA once they have time to build a closer and more egalitarian relationship.
I wonder if readers who aren’t obsessed with the source material will get more or less out of this story? There’s no need to be familiar with Jane Eyre to follow Escaping Mr. Rochester and in fact it might be a more satisfying novel when read without comparison. This book deserves to be read on its own terms and I’ll be curious to see what other readers make of it.
There’s no way that I’m going to read a story in which Jane and Berta are Black lesbians who fall in love and burn the house down without a certain amount of glee. Plus, it’s nice to see Adele, Mr. Rochester’s young ward, get some actual appreciation after being patronized a lot in the original. However, I wished this book had gone deeper in terms of character, conflict, and romance development, though certainly my impressions were affected by my very deep affection for the original.
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As I also love Jane Eyre, and have also reread it multiple times, I too have difficulty with these Jane Eyre retellings that flatten Mr. Rochester into a cartoon villain (and also flatten Jane into a victim, but that’s a different essay) (Another essay is WHY we flatten our interpretations of classics into Problematic and Not). I feel like it ignores a lot of the context of both the time period and the novel itself, not to mention the character. Like you said, there are so many possible readings of JE and I’m in no way averse to different interpretations, but I don’t really enjoy the one note ones personally. After being burned many a time, I think I just have to realize that these aren’t for me, and that’s okay.
I wonder how many people read retellings and assume that they’re faithful to the original characters just with different plots.
I enjoyed reading Carrie S’s comments about Jane Eyre. I read it voluntarily during one of my high school year summers. Perhaps I was too young, because my response was What?! and Eh.
There’s a way to write a feminist Jane Eyre but everyone keeps missing the forest for the trees. It’s like everyone’s (truly bad) takes on Hades and Persephone.
The only thing I remembered from reading Jane Eyre (admittedly when I was a lot younger) is that I thought Jane was a very whiny person . And something about her not wanting an expensive veil for her wedding because the plain one was good enough and me rolling my eyes thinking: we get it, you are a plain and sensible girl now please shut up. Not a succes for me in short. And also why I don’t read retelling/variations.
I agree with Asfaroth…that’s the only thing that bothered me about Jane, acting as though she was somehow above wearing nice clothes or colors.
The thing about readings of Jane Eyre that demonize Rochester is that it seems to me these interpretations take Wide Sargasso Sea as if it were meant to be canon all along. By his own lights, Edward was trying to do what was best for Bertha…sold into marriage with a woman whom he had nothing in common with, who turned out to be mentally unstable, but just the same, he couldn’t bring himself to put her in an asylum (understandable, given what those places were like at the time). He figured that it was better to keep her under care at Thornfield, under his own supervision. And to her credit, Jane calls him out on any attempts on his part to bad-mouth her, saying her mental state isn’t her fault.
Edward’s got his faults, sure, but he gets his due for them by the end. And face it…I’d take him ANY day of the week over Heathcliff! (My guess is that anyone who romanticizes Heathcliff is going off the film versions that soften his character. In the original, he’s a monster who doesn’t just neglect Isabella Linton after he marries her…he flat-out ABUSES her, something later film versions have made sure to emphasize. And the irony of it is, Isabella had romanticized him much as these later readers do…and ended up getting as rude an awakening as many women who romanticize “bad boys” do!)
Anyway, I’ve just read a really cool retelling of Jane Eyre called Salt and Broom, by Sharon Lynn Fisher. It’s a sort of alt-universe version in which magic is abundant in the world, and Jane Aire (that’s how it’s spelled in this version) is a benevolent witch, like others in her school at Lowood. It’s very well-done (and Thornfield doesn’t get burnt down in this version!).