Jane Eyre E-Book

Charlotte Bronte

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 131

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A bold and theatrically inventive adaptation of the literary classic that puts the interior life of the novel on stage. As a child, the orphaned Jane Eyre is taught by a succession of severe guardians to stifle her natural exuberance. A part of herself is locked away, out of view of polite society... until she arrives at Rochester's house as a governess to his young child. Soon Rochester's passionate nature reawakens Jane's hidden self, but darker secrets are stirring in the attic... Polly Teale's adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was first performed by Shared Experience Theatre Company in 1997.

Leseprobe

JANE EYRE

adapted from Charlotte Brontë’s novel by

POLLY TEALE

for Shared Experience

with Notes by Polly Teale

NICK HERN BOOKS

LONDON

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Brontë on Brontë

On Adapting Jane Eyre, by Polly Teale

Charlotte Brontë: a Passionate Woman, by Stuart Leeks

Dedication

Production Notes

Original Production

Characters

Jane Eyre

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

‘I am afraid of nothing but myself.’

Charlotte Brontë

Brontë on Brontë

‘I am a very coarse, commonplace wretch. I have some qualities which make me very miserable, some feelings . . . that very, very few people in the world can at all understand. I don’t pride myself on these peculiarities, I strive to conceal and suppress them as much as I can, but they burst out sometimes and then those who see the explosion despise me, and I hate myself for days afterwards.’

‘Throughout my early youth . . . I felt myself incapable of feeling and acting as most people felt and acted; . . . unintentionally, I showed everything that passed in my heart and sometimes storms were passing through it. In vain I tried to imitate . . . the serene and even temper of my companions . . . ’

‘I could not restrain the ebb and flow of blood in my arteries and that ebb and flow always showed itself in my face and in my hard and unattractive features. I wept in secret.’

‘The human heart has hidden treasures In secret kept, in silence sealed –’

from Evening Solace, 1846

On Adapting Jane Eyre

Returning to Jane Eyre fifteen years after I read it as a teenager I found, not the horror story I remembered, but a psychological drama of the most powerful kind. Everything and everyone in the story is seen, larger than life, through the magnifying glass of Jane’s psyche. Why though, I asked myself, did she invent a madwoman locked in an attic to torment her heroine? Why is Jane Eyre, a supremely rational young woman, haunted by a vengeful she-devil? Why do these two women exist in the same story?

I had forgotten that the novel began with another image of incarceration: another female locked away for breaking the rules of allowed behaviour. Jane Eyre is shut up in the Red Room when, for the first time in her young life, she allows her temper to erupt, losing control of herself in an attack of rage. Jane is told that God will strike her dead ‘in the midst of one of her tantrums.’ She is so terrified she loses consciousness. The message is clear. For a Victorian woman to express her passionate nature is to invite the severest of punishment. Jane must keep her fiery spirit locked away if she is to survive. Could it be that Jane and the madwoman are not in fact opposites. That like all the most frightening ghosts Bertha Mason exists not in the real world but in Jane’s imagination?

I have come to see the novel as a quest, a passionate enquiry. How is it possible for Jane as a woman to be true to herself in the world in which she lives? Each of the women in the novel suggests a possible role: from the excessive artificiality of Blanche Ingram to the silent stoicism of Helen Burns we see the range of choices available. Jane, like Brontë, is ‘poor, obscure and plain’ and yet hidden inside is a ‘secret self’; the huge imagination glimpsed in Jane’s visionary paintings of foreign lands. Although Brontë spent most of her life in a remote Yorkshire village she had a great longing to overpass the horizon of her restricted existence. It is significant that Bertha is a foreigner. She comes from the land of Brontë’s imagination, from a land of hot rain and hurricanes. She is both dangerous and exciting. She is passionate and sexual. She is angry and violent. She is the embodiment of everything that Jane, a Victorian woman, must never be. She is perhaps everything that Brontë feared in herself and longed to express.

Polly Teale, September 1997

Charlotte Brontë: a Passionate Woman

What kind of person was Charlotte Brontë? Formidably intelligent, impatient, prone to deep depression, but above all passionate. Her passionate spirit is evident in every aspect of her life: in her literary ambition, her anger at perceived injustice, her frustration with the limitations imposed upon one of her sex and social position, and in her quest for love.

Her anger is evident within the first few chapters of Jane Eyre – at the injustice of Jane’s treatment at the hands of the Reed family, and at Jane’s experiences at Lowood School. The Lowood episode is a fictionalised account of Charlotte’s own childhood experience at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. The treatment of Helen Burns and Jane at the hands of Mr Brocklehurst and Miss Scatcherd is portrayed with such raw passion and burning sense of injustice that it’s impossible not to side entirely with the girls, or to have any sympathy with their persecutors. We don’t have to look far to discover the motive for Charlotte’s anger: she lost her two elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth at Cowan Bridge to tuberculosis, and blamed her own stunted growth on the conditions there.

Charlotte felt the loss of Maria and Elizabeth acutely: from being one of the younger sisters she had suddenly become the eldest, and she often felt inadequate to the task. Later in life Charlotte recalled Maria’s mildness, wisdom and fortitude of character, and she was to be the model for Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. Although some readers have felt that the saintliness of her character stretches the bounds of credibility, Charlotte insisted ‘l have exaggerated nothing there: I abstained from recording much that I remember respecting her, lest the narrative should sound incredible.’

After the horrors of Cowan Bridge, Charlotte’s next experience of school was far happier. She attended Roe Head School, about twenty miles from her home at Haworth, between 1831 and 1832. Charlotte met her two greatest friends at Roe Head, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. Mary gives us a glimpse of the fourteen-year-old Charlotte’s arrival at Roe Head: ‘She looked a little old woman, so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something . . . She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent.’ Although Charlotte had a difficult start at Roe Head, with her oddities and appearance a source of amusement to the other pupils, her qualities were quickly recognised. She had an exceptionally powerful intellect and great curiosity. Ellen Nussey recalled ‘she picked up every scrap of information concerning painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc., as if it were gold’.

Her return to Roe Head in 1835 as a teacher was, however, a miserable experience. She had little or no patience with her slower pupils, and although her feelings had, of course, to be masked from public view they are given full vent in her journal:

. . . am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical and asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity?

This went to the heart of Charlotte’s dilemma. Being the daughter of a prominent clergyman conferred her with middle class status, but the family had no money. For a woman of her generation options were severely limited. Marriage was one, but with no fortune, Charlotte had early accepted that there was little or no prospect of that. The other was to work, but there were few careers open to a woman beyond teaching and governessing. What this passage demonstrates is that Charlotte understood that she must quell her raging passions for the sake of social acceptability, but the strain of doing so was, for her, almost intolerable. ‘If you knew my thoughts’ she wrote to Ellen Nussey, ‘the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel society as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise me’.

Charlotte was torn between the demands of duty, and the call of her ‘fiery imagination’. After her spell at Roe Head she took a succession of posts as governess, none of which she had the tenacity to hold down for very long. Eventually imagination gained the upper hand when she gave rein to her literary ambition.

Charlotte’s passionate imagination found its earliest expression in games and stories which were inspired by a box of wooden soldiers given to her brother Branwell by their father when Charlotte was ten. She and Branwell invented the kingdom of Angria, based on accounts of expeditions to Africa which they had read in their father’s journal. Written in tiny handwriting in small books, these stories allowed Charlotte to explore a secret world of exotic lands and titanic characters, but eventually she came to see the fictional limitations of Angria, and in a fragment dating from 1839 known as the ‘Farewell to Angria’ she records how she longs ‘to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long . . . and turn now to a cooler region, where the dawn breaks grey and sober’. But something of that fascination with distant foreign lands survives in Jane Eyre, where within the first couple of pages, Jane’s youthful imagination is caught up in a book which describes ‘the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space’. Later, of course, we will meet Bertha, Rochester’s first wife, who comes from an utterly different place: the West Indies, with its oranges and pineapples, tropical flowers, warm sea, and violent summer storms.

Although Charlotte had no expectation of marriage she did in time receive a proposal – from the Reverend Henry Nussey, Ellen’s brother. Charlotte was not his first choice, but since romantic love seemed not to enter into the equation for him it didn’t much matter who the woman was. Although Charlotte could see clearly the advantages of marriage to Henry she turned him down decisively. ‘I had not, and never could have, that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him – and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband.’ To Henry she wrote ‘As for me you do not know me, I am not the serious, grave cool-headed individual you suppose – you would think me romantic and eccentric – you would say I was satirical and severe’.

It was in Brussels that Charlotte’s passion was to be fully engaged by a man. In 1842 she received a letter from Mary Taylor who was finishing her education there. Mary urged Charlotte to join her. Charlotte’s reaction on reading Mary’s letter was intense: ‘l hardly knew what swelled to my throat as I read her letter – such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work, such a strong wish for wings. . . such an urgent thirst to see – to know to learn – something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute. I was tantalised with the consciousness of faculties unexercised . . . ’

The man who helped her ‘to see to know to learn’ was Monsieur Constantin Heger, professor of rhetoric at the Pensionnat Heger. At last she had found someone who recognised her literary talent and whose opinion carried all the weight of a fine intellect and informed judgement. She had searched before, sending Robert Southey, one of her idols, some of her poems at the end of 1836.

There is a retrospective irony about the reply of the then Poet Laureate, whose work is now mostly unread, to a woman whose novels have achieved enduring fame: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation’.

The passion she felt for M. Heger, a married man, was never to be consummated. There is no doubt that she was attracted to him, but the attraction was as much intellectual as it was emotional or physical. Like Rochester he was not handsome: indeed Charlotte once described him as ‘a little black ugly being’, but ‘his mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss’. Charlotte was distraught when, during her second year at the Pensionnat, Heger increasingly distanced himself from her, probably under the instruction of his wife who had become concerned about the relationship.

Charlotte finally managed to drag herself away from this unhealthy situation at the beginning of 1844. She wrote to Ellen Nussey: ‘I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me’. But in one of her last essays for her master she was able boldly, and rightly, to proclaim: ‘My lord, I believe that I have talent . . . My lord, I believe that I have Genius.’ As Lyndall Gordon has observed, ‘ . . . it was part of the cure of the Angrian drug for Charlotte to . . . experience genuine passion, genuine pain.’ Her time at the Pensionnat Heger may have cost her dear, but what she gained intellectually and emotionally from the experience saved her eventually from the life of stagnation which she feared so much, and freed her to write the passionate, controlled, realistic and fully human novels for which she is famous.

Eventually, Charlotte was to marry – in 1854, to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. The marriage took place in the face of Patrick Brontë’s opposition and her own initial reluctance. But the marriage proved happy, if tragically brief. Charlotte died the following year, aged 39, carrying her unborn child.

Stuart Leeks

I am greatly indebted to Helen Edmundsonfor her inspirational adaptations ofAnna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss and War and Peace,which were the starting point and basis of this work.

Also to Nancy Meckler, Liz Ranken and all ofthe original company whose input was invaluable.

Production Notes

Central to the adaptation is the idea that hidden inside the sensible, frozen Jane exists another self who is passionate and sensual.

Bertha (trapped in the attic) embodies the fire and longing which Jane must lock away in order to survive in Victorian England.