The Jane Eyre Book You Can’t Put Down
A must-read recommended to all women — “Jane Eyre”- Charlotte Bronte.
On December 3, I watched the National Center for the Performing Arts version of the play “Jane Eyre”. After walking out of the theater, my heart couldn’t calm down for a long time, thinking that I should write something.
First up is the show. As the country’s top drama performance group, the actors, sets, lighting, and choreography of this play are impeccable.
In particular, the heroine Yuan Quan completely interprets the inner world of Jane Eyre, a strong, independent woman who dares to love and hate. Her elegant conversational temperament and gentle female beauty are even more deeply portrayed. Coupled with her own Westernized face, her interpretation of Jane Eyre has reached a perfect level.
If there are a thousand Jane Eyres in the hearts of a thousand viewers. I think that the “Jane Eyre” that night will not be even a little inferior to any Jane Eyre in the hearts of more than a thousand viewers.
Secondly, I want to talk about the book itself. “Jane Eyre” is called one of the most beautifully written novels in English literature.
To my limited knowledge, this evaluation is appropriate. Most of the descriptions of the scenery and psychology in the article are beautifully worded and fluently written, as if they were poems. When you read them carefully, you will feel the fragrance lingering in your teeth and cheeks. I won’t list here the familiar fragment, the cry for equal love:
“ — — Do you think that because I am poor, humble, unattractive, and thin, I have no soul and heart?… “, and take the following description as my favorite recommendation:
“I have been married for ten years now. I know what it is like to live with the person I love most in the world and to live for him. It’s true. I consider myself extremely happy, so happy that words cannot describe it because I am as completely my husband’s life as he is mine.
No woman is closer to my husband and is more completely his than I am. the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. I will never grow tired of being with my Edward, just as we each will never grow tired of the beating of our hearts in our own breasts, and so we will always be together.
To us, being together is as free as being alone and as joyful as being among companions. I think we talk all day long, and talking to each other is just more lively, lively, It’s just audible thinking. I gave all my trust to him, and he gave all his trust to me.
Our temperaments were exactly the same, and the result was perfect harmony.” Compared with the beauty of the text, Jane Eyre The spiritual core of this book, which is the promotion and praise of Jane Eyre’s noble personality and the praise of her sincere emotions, is more worthy of recognition.
In order to better understand these, I think it is necessary to remind readers to understand the historical background of this book.
The Victorian era was a glorious era in British history. During this period, the British economy developed rapidly and the social gap between rich and poor widened dramatically. There are clear divisions between various social classes.
The working class, the middle class, the rich, and the aristocratic class have completely different economic backgrounds, resulting in completely different lifestyles. They are full of discrimination and prejudice against each other.
The concept of family status is deeply rooted. On the other hand, women With low status, are positioned as a tool to “take care of their husbands and raise their children”.
They serve their husbands in the family, run the housework themselves or direct maids, and educate their children. It is considered a woman’s natural and only mission.
This actually means that women completely give up their independence and depend on their families and men as a way of survival. The combination of this social background and views on women and marriage deprives women of all rights to choose their destiny.
The only way out for them is to marry a man of the same class and with better economic conditions. Utilitarian marriage has become the mainstream of marriage.
What women can do is try their best to learn the skills to please and attract men so that they can get a good price in the marriage market in the future, or at least find a buyer and sell smoothly.
Women who fail to get married are regarded as “weird” and “superfluous people” and face the tragic situation of having no one to care for them, no one to support them, and no one to understand them.
“The key to a woman’s survival is that men support them and they serve men.” In this context, in order to be more attractive in the marriage market, girls from middle-class families and above learn various female celebrities from an early age and how to run housework. , managing servants (if economic conditions allow), basic scientific common sense, etc., and the learning of this scientific common sense is just a taste, just understand it.
The purpose is to make girls’ minds less empty, to have a certain communication language with their husbands, or to use them as conversation materials in social situations so that they can become better decorations for their husbands.
As later summarized: “Every aspect of the education of Victorian women tends to some useful purpose: either to enhance their own charm, or to cultivate their reserved, cautious, chaste, and frugal qualities so that they can In the future, they can behave modestly in their role as housewives.” Therefore, “elegance” is the ultimate goal of their education.
In addition, “They also need to learn talents such as etiquette, dancing, singing, and painting, as well as foreign languages, history, reading, writing, grammar and other knowledge to increase their self-cultivation and make themselves look more elegant.
They even need to learn how to master The ability to faint is used to increase one’s own charm and attract the attention of men. Of course, boys also need a good education.
The purpose of this education is to train them to enter boarding schools in the future, and eventually become capable of supporting the family’s financial burden and becoming a suitable person. A gentleman of imperial moral standards.
This demand for education gave birth to the profession of governess, usually held by women who were born in the middle class, but were actually in the working class due to the decline of their family, the death of their parents, or other reasons. The borderline with the middle class is just to maintain some respectability.
As Rochester’s governess, Jane Eyre is a representative of the lower middle-class women. Rochester owns a manor and land, belongs to the squire class, and has entered the social circle of the lower aristocracy. It should be said that there is a big difference in the status of men and women and class status between the two.
In name, they have a master-servant relationship. This kind of discrimination and prejudice between classes can be seen everywhere in the book. It is conceivable that the combination of the two is not in line with mainstream values...
In this regard, Jane Eyre showed a clear awareness of equality and expressed a clear resistance to this unfair discrimination. She believed that in the face of love, every soul is equal, regardless of gender, whether rich or poor, regardless of Both beautiful and ugly people have the right to love and be loved.
Love is an equal and beautiful union of two souls, and has nothing to do with property or status. This view was bold and novel at that time, which shocked the readers at the time. Endless.
In today’s society, the idea of equality between men and women is taken for granted. It can be said without exaggeration that the work “Jane Eyre” is one of the reasons why the concept of equality between men and women is widely accepted. I highly recommend it.
In addition to the charm of the book “Jane Eyre” due to its universal value that will not fade with time, there is another important reason. In today’s China, this book is surprising and natural. It has regained contemporary significance.
Inadvertent readers will definitely find that China’s current society is so similar to the Victorian era. They are both periods of rapid development of social material civilization.
The gap between the rich and the poor has expanded sharply, and social classes have been stratified. Not without hostility. In the relationship between the sexes, more economic responsibilities were given to men (in the Victorian period, men were required to support family expenses, support their wives and children, and hire servants.
Now men were responsible for buying a house). The utilitarian factors of marriage are greater than It has been greatly deepened in the past (to be fair, the utilitarian nature of marriage exists universally in any era, but its severity varies).
On the surface, it seems that women in the Victorian era were well-treated, and their husbands were responsible for supporting them. obligations. But remember this sentence: “There is no free lunch in the world.” Women have received economic support, but what they have lost is dignity and equality.
Without economic independence, personality cannot be independent, and there is no way to talk about equality in status. This is confirmed by all history since the beginning of recorded history.
When marriage is filled with utilitarian motives, the process of finding a husband or wife becomes a process of finding suitable buyers and sellers in the market.
And this process has become the center of women’s lives. In Wilde’s work “The Ideal Husband”, Mrs. Cheveley believes that “social activities in London revolve around marriage, and people either look for their husbands or avoid them.” It can be seen that. , looking for a husband was very common at the time, but it was not based on serious consideration of a marriage partner or love. “Victorian women regarded marriage as a goal. For unmarried women, music, painting, embroidery, popular novels, dressing up, and supervising servants filled their daily lives.
Their task was to find a husband, a guarantee of happiness.” For these women, an ideal marriage can change and guarantee their social status. Even if they are not happy, they will at least have a decent social status and comfortable living conditions.
However, there is no love without equality. During the same period, men’s infidelity in marriage was very common. Married men would keep mistresses as long as they had some money, while their wives would turn a deaf ear.
As Lady Windermere said, “I heard that in London it is impossible for a husband not to cheat.” Because of the utilitarian motive of marriage, women pawned away their capital in the pursuit of love.
On the other hand, girls also become victims of the material demands they place on their future husbands. Due to these financial demands, marriage becomes more and more expensive during this period, for a middle-class young man who has just started his career.
It is undoubtedly a heavy burden to marry a woman of the same class and maintain a decent family consistent with her status.
In this case, some men resort to avoidance methods of not getting married, and many more postpone the age of marriage until they can support a family worthy of their status.
In 1861, someone wrote a letter to The Times in which he clearly expressed concerns about the increasingly expensive marriages. “Nowadays, girls are brought up luxuriously and selfishly, and they expect the same luxurious life from their husbands.
Unless the husband has unlimited money, satisfying the requirements of such a modern wife will soon make him Stuck in abject poverty…the price of decency may be too high.” (Note: Trever May, An Economic and Social History of Britain 1760–1970[M], Longman Group UK Limited, 1987.) Excessively high prices lead to shrinking demand, the direct result is the wave of leftover women.
For a period of time, 1/7 of the women aged 45 to 49 in England and Wales were unmarried, and as high as 1/5 in Scotland. The United Kingdom calls this phenomenon the “Surplus women problem”, so some people say: “Britain is the motherland of spinsters” (Note: Rita S. Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration[M], St. Martins Press, 1999. ), these phenomena are so obvious that they have become significant social problems. Most of the “remaining” women spent their lives in loneliness and helplessness.
It is obvious that these problems of the Victorian era are reappearing in China today. As I once said — there is nothing new under the sun, and all history is just a spiral of reincarnation.
For example, many women nowadays (including mothers-in-law and many people in society) need men to provide housing or at least down payments.
This is different in form from the requirement in the Victorian era that men be able to support an entire family including a wife who does not work, but in essence, they are almost the same — both require men to mainly bear the burden of family finances, while women are dependent. status.
The results are exactly what has happened in history: men who lack financial ability postpone their marriage and work hard to obtain a sufficient financial foundation, while men who already have an economic foundation, or have obtained a financial foundation, can be picky. With their taste and vision, they are waiting for women’s flattery and promotion just like selecting goods.
A large number of women are unable to find a suitable marriage partner and become “leftover women”…
Although it was written in the 19th century, “Jane Eyre” is of such reference and warning significance for today’s world!
Only economic independence and equality (equality here does not mean equality or averaging, but means that both parties have joint responsibilities for everything in the family and do not favor one party because of gender) can we exchange for equality of personality. Only personality Only with equality can there be sincere love.
All this has been proven repeatedly by history and has become an unbreakable truth.
Every woman needs such a process to build a strong heart in order to look forward to a true awakening from the heart so that she can face life confidently and independently.
Only in this way can women achieve ultimate perfection and liberation. In this process of self-shaping, “Jane Eyre” will be a very good spiritual guide. This is why I think “Jane Eyre” is a must-read for girls.
Regardless of whether we are men or women, we may or may not be so surprised to find that we search the entire world for the answer to happiness, and it turns out that the key to the answer lies within us.
