Plotsville

Linda's reading Jane Eyre! Woo-hoo! And she's SHOCKED. Check it out here: Plotsville.

Of course I have to agree--Helen Burns is NOT Elizabeth Taylor, and I think the novel's the better for it. She's a slovenly little brat, smart but inattentive--and fixated on the life to come, since she knows she's leaving this one. This last troubles me a bit--Linda's more generous than I, when she says "Helen Burns loves life, wants life. She accepts rather than ignores the unbearable injustice of life on earth and takes the sweetness where she finds it."--Well, yes, but I still find her too passive. I find myself with Jane, wanting her to stop turning the other cheek, to fight for herself. But she's already chosen her way, and there's a sort of maturity about that that seems to me heart-breaking. She's old because she's suffered so much, because her life is almost over, and she knows it.

When I think of the death and suffering Charlotte herself had known by this time in her life--two sisters and a mother already dead--I wonder how much of Helen she had in her. Not much, I think. I think she was more Jane, more the fighter, though she loved and admired the Helens in her life (primarily her sister Maria, or so all the footnotes tell us...).