Chapter 13: Monsieur Edouard Fairfax de Rochester

First: There's a Jane Eyre readalong going on this month. Check it out at Laura's Review Bookshelf.

Second: The book.

Adele's rendition of Rochester's full name is one of those phrases that stuck with me through many rereadings. The gentleman in question is not French, of course (detour back to AP English and the discussion of Bronte's contrasts between the English and the French...), but he does make an appearance.

Jane's just a touch intimidated when she first goes in to meet her employer:

Unused as I was to strangers, it was rather a trial to appear thus formally summoned in Mr. Rochester’s presence. I let Mrs. Fairfax precede me into the dining-room, and kept in her shade as we crossed that apartment; and, passing the arch, whose curtain was now dropped, entered the elegant recess beyond.

But Rochester does her a favor by being his usual charming self.

A reception of finished politeness would probably have confused me: I could not have returned or repaid it by answering grace and elegance on my part; but harsh caprice laid me under no obligation; on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me the advantage. Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding was piquant: I felt interested to see how he would go on.

See, that whole Byronic moodiness thing does have a purpose.

"I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?"

"For whom, sir?”

"For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?"

I shook my head. "The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. "And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more."

Mrs. Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and, with raised eyebrows, seemed wondering what sort of talk this was.

Our girl can give as good as she gets here, even if Mrs. Fairfax is a little too salt-of-the-earth-stolid to keep up.

But! Mrs. Fairfax is a valuable woman, and she proves her worth here by providing some more foreshadowing, as she recounts the Rochester chronology (present generation).

"Mr. Rowland Rochester was not quite just to Mr. Edward; and perhaps he prejudiced his father against him. The old gentleman was fond of money, and anxious to keep the family estate together. He did not like to diminish the property by division, and yet he was anxious that Mr. Edward should have wealth, too, to keep up the consequence of the name; and, soon after he was of age, some steps were taken that were not quite fair, and made a great deal of mischief. Old Mr. Rochester and Mr. Rowland combined to bring Mr. Edward into what he considered a painful position, for the sake of making his fortune: what the precise nature of that position was I never clearly knew, but his spirit could not brook what he had to suffer in it. He is not very forgiving: he broke with his family, and now for many years he has led an unsettled kind of life."

Unsettled, hmm? We shall see where this leads us.

The Mitali Test

A couple weeks ago, Mitali Perkins suggested applying a version of the Bechdel Test to books, as a way of evaluating their racial and cultural diversity.

In the comments, I threw out the term "Mitali Test," which other commenters seemed to like. (I also demonstrated my inability to spell "knew," but that's another story.)

The Mitali Test asks three questions about a book:

1. Are there two or more people of color with names?
2. Do they have a significant conversation with each other?
3. Do they talk about something other than race?

I decided to apply the Mitali Test to the middle-grade and YA books in my LibraryThing collection. Here's what passed*:

• 47 and Sunrise Over Fallujah, Walter Dean Myers
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
• The Amethyst Road, Louise Spengler (This could go either way, but I say the fictionalized Roma count)
• Any Small Goodness, Tony Johnston
• Ask Me No Questions, Marina Budhos
• Before We Were Free and How Tía Lola Came to Stay, Julia Alvarez
• Bhangra Babes, Bindi Babes, and Bollywood Babes, Narinder Dhami
• Bucking the Sarge, Bud Not Buddy, and The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963, Christopher Paul Curtis
• Candle in the Wind, Maureen Wartski
• A Cap for Mary Ellis, Hope Newell
• Chains and Forge, Laurie Halse Anderson
• Climbing the Stairs, Padma Venkatraman
• Cubanita, Gaby Triana
• Dark Dude, Oscar Hijuelos
• Does My Head Look Big in This? and Ten Things I Hate About Me, Randa Abdel-Fattah
• Echoes of the White Giraffe and Year of Impossible Goodbyes, Sook Nyul Choi
• Esperanza Rising, Pam Muñoz Ryan
• Estrella's Quinceañera, Malín Alegría
• Front Porch Stories at the One-Room School and Celeste's Harlem Renaissance, Eleanora Tate
• Gully's Travels, Tor Seidler
• Habibi, Naomi Shihab Nye
• Honey Blonde Chica, Michele Serros
• If Only You Knew, Denene Millner and Mitzi Miller
• Jason & Kyra, Dana Davidson
• The Kayla Chronicles, Sherri Winston
• Keeping Corner and Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet, Kashmira Sheth
• Kendra, Coe Booth
• Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, Faiza Guene
• Kim/Kimi, Hadley Irwin
• El Lector, William Durbin
• Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork
• My Most Excellent Year, Steve Kluger
• My Sister Sif, Ruth Park
• Nothing But the Truth (And a Few White Lies), Justina Chen Headley
• Red Palms, Cara Haycack
• The Return, Sonia Levitin
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, and The Road to Memphis, Mildred D. Taylor
• Seedfolks, Paul Fleischman (I think)
• Shadow Spinner, Susan Fletcher
• She's So Money, Cherry Cheva
• Skunk Girl, Sheba Karim
• Sweet, Hereafter, Angela Johnson
• Tangled Threads, Pegi Deitz Shea
• Trouble Don't Last, and All of the Above, Shelley Pearsall
• The War Between the Classes, Gloria Miklowitz
• White Hare's Horses, Penina Keen Spinka
• Who's Your Daddy?, Lynda Sandoval
• Why Does the Coquí Sing?, Barbara Garland Polikoff
• A Wish After Midnight, Zetta Elliott
• Wolf by the Ears, Ann Rinaldi (This was, I believe her first book, and loads better than her more recent stuff.)

Is this a comprehensive list? Hardly. But it's a start.

*I was relying on memory when I compiled this list, and it's been a while since I read a few of these. Feel free to correct me on any that don't meet all three criteria.

Chapter 12: Jane returns

Bit of a hiatus there - sorry about that! Let's check in with our heroine.

"The promise of a smooth career" at Thornfield, Jane decides, "was not belied on a longer acquaintance with the place and its inmates." Which is all well and good, but she wants a little more.

"I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line—that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen—that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold."

Goodness? Well, I suppose it depends on your point of view.

When a stranger appears, Jane's first reaction is to think of North Country ghost stories:

"In those days I was young, and all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish; and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give. As this horse approached, and as I watched for it to appear through the dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie's tales, wherein figured a North-of-England spirit called a 'Gytrash,' which, in the form of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now coming upon me."

But even ghost stories, for Jane, have a certain logic:

"The horse followed,—a tall steed, and on its back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once. Nothing ever rode the Gytrash: it was always alone; and goblins, to my notions, though they might tenant the dumb carcasses of beasts, could scarce covet shelter in the commonplace human form. No Gytrash was this,—only a traveller taking the short cut to Millcote."

Anyone want to venture a guess as to who the traveler might be?

(Aside: There's another great instance of sly Bronte humor here, as Charlotte take a little dig at Jane's innocence: "I think he was swearing, but am not certain; however, he was pronouncing some formula which prevented him from replying to me directly.")

As for that innocence - it doesn't necessarily imply humility:

"His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, fur collared and steel clasped; its details were not apparent, but I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness."

When Jane returns to the house, the maid Leah indirectly identifies the man as Mr. Rochester, the long-absent master of Thornfield. But we have to wait for another chapter before we can begin making a sketch of his character.

Betsy-Tacy and doing things to impress boys

I suppose there's a lot for an aspiring writer not to love in the reissuing of out-of-print books - after all, that's one less opening for a new writer in the current market - but a) my WIP is still a long way from being done, so it's really not an issue yet, and b) dude, how did I miss out on the Betsy-Tacy books as a kid?

Thanks to HarperCollins and the inimitable Jennifer Hart - and the guiding influence of Mitali Perkins - I'm making progress on Part B. Harper started reissuing Maud Hart Lovelace's* Betsy-Tacy series and related titles about a year ago. Last month, Jennifer was at the Boston Book Fest with $5 copies of the newest releases, so how could I resist? (Especially with Mitali's event - covered by Dawn at She Is Too Fond of Books - just around the corner.)

So my last two Saturdays have been spent engrossed in the world of Deep Valley (and the world of sailor suits, party caps, taffeta, and pompadours. There's a "fashion in Lovelace" post on the way).

This past weekend, it was Heaven to Betsy/Betsy in Spite of Herself, and Betsy in Spite of Herself left me thinking about the whole "change yourself to impress a boy" thing.

Betsy is clearly being dumb as she drops her friends and engrosses herself in Phil. It's kind of the high school version of something that comes up in both Dear Enemy (Gordon) and The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (Mark). (Have I mentioned that those two books have a lot in common? Yes. Go read them both.)

Doing-dumb-things-to-impress-boys shows up pretty often in YA lit. (Probably adult books, too, but it feels like less of a trope there. Or I just haven't read enough.) And it's one of those things that works in fiction because it's true. It certainly was for me. (I almost tried to dredge up examples. Happily, Open Diary appears to have removed long-neglected accounts of its early users, so I don't have to. Since I definitely wasn't thinking about posterity when I started my first proto-blog there, that's a good thing.)

But I can think of one thing that I did to impress a boy that was a net positive: learning to drive on the highway.

I got my driver's license when I was sixteen years, four months, and four days old - in other words, exactly four days after I met Connecticut's requirements for it. (And if the DMV inspectors hadn't been so overbooked, I would have gotten it on the very day I qualified. I was excited about driving.)

Highway driving had been part of both driver's ed and the practice I got with my parents, but sometime after I got my license I decided that I just couldn't do it. I don't remember why, but it probably had something to do with being an inexperienced driver in rush hour traffic, or something like that. As a result, "Sarah doesn't drive on the highway" was just the way it was during my junior year of high school, and most of my senior year.

Then there was a boy.

He didn't have a driver's license (in fact, he managed to go another year without getting one, despite the fact that we lived in an area with no public transit), which meant that if we were going to start dating, I would be doing all the driving.

And if we wanted to go to the movies, or Borders**, or pretty much anything outside of downtown Ridgefield, I'd have to drive on the highway to get us there.

I decided that it was worth overcoming that particular fear in order to be able to ask the boy out, so one morning I went out rather early, when I-84 wasn't too busy, and I drove. I made a few circuits of the territory between Exit 3 and Exit 9 - it wasn't likely I'd have a reason to go further east, and Exit 9 happened to be an easy one for reversing directions - and tried out the biggest challenge, the left exit I'd have to take to get to Federal Road.

I expect I was grinning a bit when I pulled back into my driveway. After a year and a half of refusing to do it, I'd managed to drive on the highway.

(I'm not sure whether this was the actual timing or whether it just makes a good story, but it may have been that night I asked the boy if he wanted to go see Moulin Rouge with me.)

The boy and I started dating a couple days after we saw Moulin Rouge, in the last few weeks of our senior year in high school. (Speaking of YA tropes, we were sure we'd manage to sustain a relationship even though we were about to leave for colleges 2000 miles apart. We almost did - for the first semester.)

It's been years now since the boy and I broke up. We're still good friends.

And I still drive on the highway - quite a lot. I even took a road trip by myself in the summer of 2009, driving from Connecticut to Florida and back. (No, I don't recommend it.)

I'm not going to say that I never would have reached that point if I hadn't been pushed by wanting to impress the boy. I would have figured it out someday.

But that was one time when a teen-girl crush pushed me in the right direction.

*I have very clear memories of getting a bookmark promoting the Maud Hart Lovelace Awards as a kid visiting the St. Paul Public Library. And yet it wasn't until recently I had any idea she was the author of the Betsy-Tacy books.

**Yeah, I wasn't indie bookstore girl back then. We ended up spending more than a few Friday nights hanging out at Borders. Yes, we're both nerds.

Chapter 11: We arrive

(Fair warning: this is a really long chapter. And more than that, I have a lot to say about it. Proceed.)

Switching tenses is something writers usually avoid (or get dinged for). The exception, I think, is when they can pull it off the way Bronte does, as a way of (quite literally) setting the scene:

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is visible to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours’ exposure to the rawness of an October day: I left Lowton at four o’clock a.m., and the Millcote town clock is now just striking eight.

Jane's got an hour and a half (or perhaps two hours) along a typically bumpy road to ponder just what she's getting herself into - but, as she notes, if it doesn't work, she's free to leave. (Not that she has any idea what she'd do with herself then, but it's always nice to keep that in mind, isn't it?)

"A more reassuring introduction for a new governess could scarcely be conceived" when Jane first crosses the threshold of Thornfield. (I suspect her feelings might have been a tad different if the master had been in residence at the time.) There's some quick sorting-out - Mrs. Fairfax is the housekeeper, not Jane's employer; the charge's name is Adele; Mrs. Fairfax is looking forward to being able to converse with someone of her own class, because

"Leah is a nice girl to be sure, and John and his wife are very decent people; but then you see they are only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality: one must keep them at due distance, for fear of losing one’s authority."

Which puts one in mind of a J.M. Barrie line: "His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall."

And then Jane's whisked off to bed - but not before Bronte takes the opportunity to toss in some foreshadowing:

A very chill and vault-like air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude; and I was glad, when finally ushered into my chamber, to find it of small dimensions, and furnished in ordinary, modern style... the eerie impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious staircase, and that long, cold gallery...

Yeah, that's gonna make another appearance. Let's think back to high school English, shall we? Major feature of Gothic fiction: the house that's almost a character itself.

Welcome to Thornfield.

Traversing the long and matted gallery, I descended the slippery steps of oak; then I gained the hall: I halted there a minute; I looked at some pictures on the walls (one, I remember, represented a grim man in a cuirass, and one a lady with powdered hair and a pearl necklace), at a bronze lamp pendent from the ceiling, at a great clock whose case was of oak curiously carved, and ebon black with time and rubbing. Everything appeared very stately and imposing to me; but then I was so little accustomed to grandeur. The hall-door, which was half of glass, stood open; I stepped over the threshold. It was a fine autumn morning; the early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields; advancing on to the lawn, I looked up and surveyed the front of the mansion. It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable: a gentleman’s manor-house, not a nobleman’s seat: battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing tenants were now on the wing: they flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in a great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion’s designation. Farther off were hills: not so lofty as those round Lowood, nor so craggy, nor so like barriers of separation from the living world; but yet quiet and lonely hills enough, and seeming to embrace Thornfield with a seclusion I had not expected to find existent so near the stirring locality of Millcote. A little hamlet, whose roofs were blent with trees, straggled up the side of one of these hills; the church of the district stood nearer Thornfield: its old tower-top looked over a knoll between the house and gates.

Oh, and did I mention foreshadowing?

some of the third-storey rooms, though dark and low, were interesting from their air of antiquity. The furniture once appropriated to the lower apartments had from time to time been removed here, as fashions changed... All these relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory.

Curious phrase, that.

After Jane finishes her early-morning tour, she learns one other essential detail: the house belongs to Mr. Rochester, who's going to wait a few more pages before making his appearance.

Jane (as the narrator) complains that Mrs. Fairfax doesn't do much to enlighten her about their employer's character, but let's take a look at what Mrs. F. has to say, shall we?

• He has "a gentleman's tastes and habits" (which is why she keeps the house in readiness whether or not he's around)
  
• His family is respected, and they own a lot of land and have for a long time (maybe this is a good time to discuss entailment and primogeniture?)
  
• She doesn't have any reason to dislike him (which is just a rousing endorsement)
• He's done some traveling (like, say, to the West Indies?)
  
• He's "peculiar" (because Mrs. Fairfax can never quite figure out whether or not he's messing with her, but then we're given to understand that Mrs. F. has no more than common abilities, so that's not saying much)

For a guy you haven't met yet, Jane, how much more do you need? There's something about Mr. Rochester.

In the meantime, Jane meets some new characters: Adele (and her nurse Sophie, but she doesn't play much of a role in the story) and Grace Poole.

Worth Watching: 101 Things I Learned in Film School

When I sign up to work Harvard Book Store events, I don't always pick the most fascinating ones. It's a nice plus if it's a cool author (Edwidge Danticat, last night, for example), but as this is my only source of income at the moment, I'll take pretty much anything that fits my schedule. Which is how I ended up working an event for 101 Things I Learned in Film School.

It was fortuitous: Neil Landau based his talk on the story-making side of the film business, which means the techniques he discussed were totally applicable to any other narrative-based enterprise... like, say, writing YA novels. I was mentally revising the WIP the whole time. And thanks to HBS' partnership with WGBH Forum, the talk is available here:

(The video is embedded below, but since I'm using a fairly narrow blog template here - one of those things I've been meaning to work on - you'll probably get a better view on WGBH's site.)

Chapter 10: Jane Gets a Job

"But this is not to be a regular autobiography," Jane informs us at the opening of Chapter 10 - in other words, "the next eight years are kind of boring, so let's skip to the part where I acquire an unattractive and brooding yet enticing employer."

So in a couple of sentences (things get better at Lowood; Jane becomes a teacher there; Miss Temple gets married and Jane decides it's time to move on) Jane goes from child to adult, which means it's time for her to make her way in the world. (Which I believe is the phrase the Three Little Pigs' mother used to send them in pursuit of unfortunate architecture...)

Side note: After indulging in some parentheticals myself in the preceding paragraph, let me take this opportunity to point out that this chapter includes one of my favorites from Charlotte Bronte:

“A new servitude! There is something in that,” I soliloquised (mentally, be it understood; I did not talk aloud)

Okay, as someone currently engaged in a job search, I have to admit that I get just a teensy bit jealous of Jane here: her resume and cover letter are no more than a hundred words, she throws a classified ad out into the wild, and a week later she's got an offer for a job at twice her current salary.

Let's try that, shall we?

"A young lady accustomed to the book business" (had I not been a blogger three years, in addition to a BTW writer/editor, and a bookseller even longer?) "is desirous of meeting with a situation in which she can work from the Boston area (I thought that as I had just moved to the city, it would not do to undertake employment elsewhere - though of course young ladies are always open to telecommuting). She is qualified to sell books, write news and feature articles, work with HTML and various CMS platforms, manage corporate social media efforts, coordinate logistics for large events, and copyedit like a charm" (in these days, reader, this rather varied catalogue of accomplishments, was somewhat less unusual than it might once have been). "Address, S.M.R., GMail, srettger@---."

If this works out as well for me as it did for Jane, I'll eat my hat*.

What? We're supposed to be talking about Jane, not me? Very well.

Jane's reply is from a Mrs. Fairfax, who Jane assumes is a mild, unoffensive old woman, "a model of elderly English respectability." (For the record, Cary Fukanaga has ruined me for all others; Judi Dench is now Mrs. Fairfax.) She goes through all the proper channels, getting references from her current employer and permission (well, a brush-off, but with the same effect) from her legal guardian.

Just before Jane is due to leave Lowood behind, she gets a visitor: Bessie, the Gateshead maid. Thanks to Bessie, we get a quick update on the state of the Reed family: Eliza has thwarted Georgiana's plans to run off with a young lordling, and John is "such a dissipated young man, they will never make much of him."

Oh, and one of Jane's paternal relatives dropped by the house. I do have a feeling we're going to hear more about him.

*By "hat," of course, I mean this kind.

(Post pic: not Thornfield, but a boys' school in Bath, according to the label I gave it nearly a decade ago.)