Searching for Utopia in a Dystopian Reality
The two keywords that describe the theme of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre are liberty and love. Fukunaga constructs his original world of Jane Eyre where he uses mise-en-scene to represent Jane’s struggle for liberty and independence in a society where such desire was suppressed in poor, minoritized women. The film also gives emphasis on Jane’s search for love and belonging. However, Fukunaga strategically plots Jane Eyre, as to create a tragic universe where none of the main characters achieve both liberty and love, at least in the physical realm of the living. The freedom to love and be loved, by a heroine who is “without parents, looks, money, and most certainly without a docile temperament” seems impossible since it is considered “worthless to lack these things as a girl” (Nemesvari 20). Like Jane, Fukunaga also endeavors to find a utopian space within his artistic creation where both liberty and love may exist together to create perfect harmony in life.
The film portrays different types of societal yoke that continuously bind Jane via images of containment, as she strives to find a place where she can exert her right to liberty and love. Fukunaga defines religion as one of these yokes, as Jane’s misery in the red room scene is followed by the introduction of Brocklehurst. After Jane collapses in the red room from over-exertion, the fallen body of young Jane is immediately followed by Brocklehurst’s cup full of tea. The scene transition allows the audience to view Jane’s body as if she is slowly drowning and dissipating in the murky liquid stirred and controlled by Brocklehurst. This mise-en-scene of Jane seemingly falling into the cup of tea is closely related to Brocklehurst’s description of “hell… [a] pit full of fire,” which he uses to threaten and frighten young Jane: “should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever?” (40–41). In Griesinger’s research on “the depiction of Christianity in [Brontë’s] writing,” Griesinger questions the “extent [of] Bronte’s own spirituality, her desire to live a godly life… reflected in the development of her… heroine Jane Eyre” (30). The portrayal of Brocklehurst as an antagonist, who attempts to exert his authority over Jane by using (or misusing) biblical words of God (“pit full of fire”), shows how those with religious power enforce their definition of God’s will to dictate the value of others. With Brocklehurst in power, Jane’s freedom to interpret God according to her own will and decide what is right on her own terms is ultimately censored. Jane’s disappearing figure in Brocklehurst’s cup serves as a symbolic image of how the uniqueness of an individual and freedom of expression are eroded due to religious control. Thus, Fukunaga’s cinematic device supports Griesinger’s claim that Brontë’s spirituality aligns with the “belief that individuals have the ability to hear from God directly, to interpret God for themselves” (32). Despite the gloomy future that awaits the heroine in the prison-like Lowood institution, Jane stands up for herself in the face of Brocklehurst’s religious tyranny, which demonstrates Brontë’s desire to be liberated from “possible dangers, abuses, and misappropriation of Christian teachings and doctrines [marked by] extreme Calvinism… practiced by to some extent by Brocklehurst and [even by] St. John Rivers” (Griesinger 46–47).
St. John’s marriage proposal is an example of a marital yoke enforced by religion that threatens to restrain Jane from the freedom to love another, other than what St. John himself loves, which are God and duty. After St. John makes his preposterous offer of marriage for the sake of a missionary’s labor, Jane’s figure slumps against the doorframe, where her body is contained within the rectangular framework. This depiction of physical containment is a visual representation of St. John’s insistence on an oppressive relationship which removes Jane’s freedom to define herself, since St. John defines Jane’s identity and her purpose in life for her, dictating that “God and nature intended [Jane] for a missionary’s wife… formed for labor, not for love” (466). St. John, blinded by his own religious fervor, uses God’s will as an excuse to “claim” Jane, as he declares: “You shall be mine; I claim you — not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service” (466). Here, religious pressure is combined with patriarchal authority via marriage, so there is no promise of liberty or love in St. John’s proposal. Weisser claims that one of the key messages in Jane Eyre is that “human love is vital to life and should not be repressed” (xxxv). In Jane Eyre’s time period, marriage was a religious vow, a social custom that bound two people irreversibly, since back then, divorce was impossible. For a marriage to be understood as a fruit of love rather than a social binding, there must be an element of love, freely chosen by two consenting parties. However, St. John’s offer of marriage lacks and represses “human love [that is] vital to life,” which makes it seem forced and unnatural. When Jane thinks she is now finally free to enjoy the feelings of love and belonging that have come with being accepted as a sister of the Rivers’ family, her dream is obstructed once more by another yoke, in the shape of an undesirable marriage that must be done out of duty for God and to maintain one’s social identity as a ‘good’ Christian.
While religion (and the characters that advocate religion) serve as a symbol of abuse in the case of Jane, on the other hand, religious fervor is what liberates Helen from her worldly yoke of suffering. Helen embraces death as a sign of liberation, since she believes “[b]y dying young [she] shall escape great sufferings” as she does not have “qualities or talents to make [her] way very well in the world” (97). For Helen, the physical world is burdensome, and would much rather escape the harshness of reality by dying and “going to God” (97). Helen is eager to achieve liberty and love through death since she strongly believes that the two values have no space to thrive in the realm of the living — at least for someone in her circumstances. However, Helen’s deathbed scene is far from liberating and cathartic in Fukunaga’s depiction, as he gives emphasis on the long-take of Jane and Helen’s conjoined hands. This physical touch is a painful reminder of what Helen will lose: the loving friendship she shares with Jane in exchange for salvation through death. The film omits any visual embellishment that might indicate or guarantee that Helen’s soul is indeed on its way to heaven and into God’s welcoming arms. Instead, it focuses on the loss of what could have led to liberation in the physical realm, in the form of friendship shared between the two girls, despite the dire circumstances at Lowood. Kaplan’s argument also ties in with Fukunaga’s hopeful message to find liberation through intimacy in human relationships, since she argues how “Jane Eyre is a paradigm of the narrative desire for intimacy and recognition” (6). Jane’s wish to continue her intimate relationship with Helen, which was once denied in her relationship with the Reeds, remains cruelly ungranted. Death is thought to create a space where Helen can truly be accepted without the constant punishment and scrutiny of authorities at Lowood, but the film reaffirms that such a utopian space is also reachable within the physical realm, despite all the cruelty and abuse, as long as we love and cherish one another.
This utopian space where liberty and love may survive without the interference of external factors is marked in the otherworldliness of Jane and Rochester’s romance. This space is neither occupied by society nor death, and its visuals are amplified by the beauty of nature. One of the rawest scenes where Jane proclaims her love for Rochester is staged in the outdoor gardens, in contrast to the interior of Thornfield. Thornfield functions as a representation of Rochester’s identity defined by his social class, marital status, and gender, supported by the fact that it is a structure passed on by his family that he needs to preserve due to the sake of tradition. Within the walls of Thornfield, Jane is also constrained by her status as an employee and therefore, forced into dependence on her employer due to the unequal power dynamic between Rochester and herself. As a result, Thornfield acts not only as a colossal, concrete structure of containment but also acts as a societal structure that reminds Jane and Rochester of their place in society. Its outdoor garden, on the other hand, is a place marked by nature where Rochester is free from his status as Jane’s employer and a husband to Bertha.
Fukunaga captures this juxtaposition in setting via different lighting gradations and use of lines when portraying the indoors and outdoors of Rochester’s manor. The interior of Thornfield is similar to that of a prison, creating a likeness to Lowood. For example, Jane’s first entry to Thornfield is filmed in a similar fashion to when she first enters Lowood. In both scenes, the dark walls of the narrow hallway encase Jane’s figure, as if to engulf her body in its tenebrosity. This cinematic technique of accentuating the dungeon-like quality of Thornfield and Lowood expresses how Jane has moved from one imprisonment to the next. One of Jane Eyre’s most famous quotes that befit this cinematography - “I desired for liberty; for liberty I gasped… Grant me, at least, a new servitude” - conveys how this “liberty” cannot be granted and instead be only substituted by another form of “servitude” due to her financial status (102). The film’s use of physical lineaments that seem to entrap actors’ movements also depicts Thornfield as a structure of confinement. A window, distinguished for its complex framework, appears repetitively throughout Jane’s stay at Thornfield. Before Rochester’s arrival, Jane curiously looks out this window, and the camera focuses on her stature so that she is encased within the window’s borders. This is a scene where Jane converses with Mrs. Fairfax about her employer, and both women act and communicate within the window’s borderlines as if to represent how they are both serving within Rochester’s employment and control - as working women reliant on an aristocrat’s purse for survival. This window appears again when Jane departs from Thornfield, yet this time, it is wide open with the wind billowing at its curtains. This opened window serves as a motif of Jane’s liberty from Thornfield and thus, from Rochester’s patronage and employment.
Jane may have succeeded in liberating herself from employment and blemishing her reputation by marrying a married man, but she does not succeed in freeing herself from Rochester’s love because love is embedded in nature, unrestrained by social constraints. Jane may physically remove herself from Thornfield, yet it is impossible for her to escape from nature. Representation of love by the use of natural settings is affirmed when Jane declares her love to Rochester, “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!” in the outdoor garden area of Thornfield (296). The garden at Thornfield is filmed to resemble a Garden of Eden-like paradise, where all beings are equal “at God’s feet.” Therefore, the otherworldliness of Rochester and Jane’s love, as aforementioned, is accentuated in this scene, as “[t]he imagined world in which she and Rochester can communicate as equals… an other world, beyond life itself” (Kaplan 10). Fukunaga’s mise-en-scene portrays this “other world” with the grandeur of nature, and when Jane is physically apart from her lover, she is still haunted by his voice calling out her name in the air. Rochester’s identity that is recognized in societal terms as an employer, husband to Bertha, and fiancé to Jane, may still be entrapped in the walls of Thornfield, but Rochester, as Jane’s lover, is free from the embodiment of buildings or even from his own physical body, as his soul can reach Jane through natural mediums. This transcendent space of nature is where liberty and love may conjoin in Jane’s life, as she is liberated from the societal yoke of employment and marital ties, yet still able to sense Rochester’s love marked by “[n]ature, emotion, and expression [that] overmaster reason and social convention” (Weisser xxviii). However, similar to Helen’s love for God, Rochester is intangible and only exists in the form of Jane’s hallucination, which questions the validity behind meaningful transcendent connection and an individual’s ability to break their societal yoke.
This motif of otherworldliness, which is used to identify the only space where characters can achieve both freedom and love, continues to act as the film’s thematic device until the end. In contrast to the book, Fukunaga does not clearly conclude his film with a happy ending by presenting a wedding scene. The film culminates in an open ending where Rochester and Jane reunite at the same location where they once proposed their love to each other as the last scene reveals Rochester sitting by the “chestnut-tree… [with a] bench at its old roots” (295). This is odd since this tree is supposed to have been destroyed by a lightning strike shortly after the proposal: “the great horse-chestnut… had been struck by lightning in the night” (300). This otherworldly space where the lovers reunite refuses to adhere to time, almost as if it is a dream-like realm in Rochester’s imagination, distanced from reality. In relation to Jane “becoming a voice which the blind hero can only hear,” Talairach-Vielmas claims that Jane’s invisibility enables her to evade Rochester’s grasp (128). This aspect of intangibility being a requirement to escape societal yoke forces this surreal environment (where the characters are finally free to love each other) to be situated in an odd limbo, between fantasy and reality.
Fukunaga again, deliberately accentuates how such utopian spaces are nonexistent in the physical world. The film’s last lines are as follows:
Rochester: A dream?
Jane: Awaken then.
These lines do not exist in the original novel, and they compliment the dream-like trance that envelops this last scene. Thus, this reunion can also be interpreted as Rochester’s unattainable dream, in which a utopia where such reconciliation “in spite of differences not only of age, class, gender, and station, but in spite of geography, betrayal, and deceit” is possible, yet only in one’s mind (Kaplan 21). Such perfection only exists in one’s imagination, since one must discard their identity marked by “age, class, gender, and station” to attain this perfection, yet without this identity, there is no self. Without this embodiment that is self-grounded within reality, love and liberty can only be actualized within one’s imagination. Both Jane and Rochester strive for this perfect unity without the interference of society, but ironically, their union is only possible because of societal changes (Jane’s inheritance, Rochester being a widower) in the novel. As a result, the film’s last scene unites Jane and Rochester through idealism rather than realism because the novel’s agents that bring the lovers back together (financial wealth and severance of marital ties) come with social responsibilities that create a yoke of their own.
Brontë’s creation of Jane Eyre functions as an abstract realm where the author can escape her reality where she is continuously restricted from declaring her repressed passions. When an individual feels unbearable dissatisfaction with one’s reality, there is a strong tendency to create and escape to another reality where freedom of expression is boundless and unrequited love is consummated. This paper has suggested thus far, how Fukunaga also applies this logic to his film, in describing the characters’ desires for liberty and love. What writing is to Brontë is what Rochester’s love is to Jane. Akin to how artistic expression, such as writing, is a method to construct an alternate utopian dimension, love provides freedom for Jane to transcend her dismal reality.