Jane Eyre Weekend

The day before we left for Hungary, I panicked and found someone to sell me a used electronic book reader. With space limited, my original plan was to bring only two anthologies I would use to prepare for an Advanced Placement American Literature and Rhetoric course, because I knew I would hardly read non-fiction if given the choice. But in the last hours, I realized I couldn't face the desolation of this mercenary trick: I couldn't live on College Board-approved non-fictive demonstrations of rhetorical strategies, not for a year, not for a life, not for a week. So, after half a year, is the fact that I have not once opened these anthologies an indication that I was right in my first instinct, or my second? I bought a Kindle off a college student near Ravenna Park, and it came loaded with titles suggestive of his personality, indicating namely that he is a Kingdom-Come, Armageddonist sex-addict with low self-esteem.

I was counting on the fact that I could use the Kindle to read free books through such sites as Project Gutenberg. Because I was on a Charles Dickens tear last year, the idea that I'd be limited to books in the public domain seemed like no kind of limitation at all. Victorian Literature -- with its cruel, sensually gluttonous villains and compassionating, big-hearted heroes and lavishly arrogant caricatures and intricate, suspenseful plots where fate punishes the corrupted and deliriously satisfies the vulnerable -- is all, all, absolutely free! So when we ran out of books provided by a good friend here, I have happily turned to the public domain and read more Dickens, Stevensen, Dumas, Moliere.

On Friday I gave Stephanie a list of books I might read next, and she suggested Jane Eyre, a book she'd read in middle school and again when she was pregnant with Sophie. The pregnancy embittered her feelings for Jane, perhaps in the same way that it for years poisoned her taste for spinach and Thai cuisine: she remembered Jane as an enduring do-nothing. But the first pages put me in a different mind straight way.

Jane's cousin pummels her immediately; and she bloodies his nose. Soon, the director of a charity school comes to collect her at the request of Jane's aunt, who tells him "to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit." The director, Mr. Brocklehurst, then says, "Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child; it is akin to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone." Jane turns to her aunt and says, "I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed." She remains a spirited character, and one who is so far from deceitful that the plot's greatest conflict emerges from her fidelity to truth.

I read the first third of the book on Friday, enjoying the book and her pluck (however slow burning), and learning some new old words. On Saturday morning, I invited the kids to watch a segment of the film, the kind of opportunity always welcomed. First we watched a piece of Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre. But I was grateful when the images became too spastic to watch further because William Hurt as the Byronic love interest made me itchy inside my thigh flesh and ribs. I told Stephanie I wouldn't mind seeing John Malkovich and William Hurt go voice to precious voice in a sumptuous inflection contest. We then started over again with BBC's version, and when I arbitrarily and tyrannically turned off the film after reaching the point to which I'd read, Amelia was furious.

Amelia is our deepest TV watcher, by which I mean, she gets absorbed in a program, far, far in there, and will ignore and fight anyone who tries to pull her out. The Dévais have satellite television, and Tibor used programming to educational effect, watching shows and movies in other languages as a way of developing language skills. But we find ourselves at sea. The Hungarian stations dub everything. We yearn for subtitles, by which we might understand more of the Hungarian we'd hear and compare more of the Hungarian we wouldn't. But subtitles are rare and language choices usually only Magyar and Czech. Our children gravitate towards two stations which can reliably be switched to English, though -- the Discovery Channel and the Disney Channel, with programs about solitary men surviving on rotting fish or teenage girls on colorful sets overcoming urges to destroy their well-dressed enemies on Facebook.

This is the point at which I began reading Jane Eyre aloud to Stephanie. I think she asked me to: I don't remember how it started because once it started we didn't stop. We took turns. We read the last 400 pages out loud, reading while the other cooked, reading while cleaning, reading while folding laundry, reading while watching our girls at the playground, and reading while folded up on the couch.

How does this sound to you, readers? Does it sound like pleasure? Or does it sound intellectually ambitious and nerdy? 

Towards the close of evening on Sunday, we watched a little more with the kids, who were of course exasperated when we shut it down after episode two. But this is how use our great stores of technology: narrative anticipation within which desire we give a happy family sigh.