TY - JOUR
AU - Han, Catherine, Paula
AB - Abstract Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) has been regularly adapted for the screen since the silent era. During the 1990s, a trend emerged in which cinematic and television versions of Brontë’s novel paid increased attention to the protagonists’ identities as amateur artists. To explain this phenomenon, this article examines Jane Eyre (Franco Zeffirelli, 1996), Jane Eyre (ITV/A&E, 1997), Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006), and Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011). It proposes that these productions contribute to the evolution of Brontë’s authorial mythology by heightening their heroines’ similarities with the writer, another amateur artist. In so doing, these adaptations benefit from the reputations of Brontë and her work as rebelliously feminist. Nevertheless, these women artists’ rebellions are distinctly postfeminist. To demonstrate its argument, the article contextualizes contemporary Jane Eyre adaptations within their postfeminist cultural landscape. Postfeminism, however, is a contested term. Hence, this analysis participates in broader debates that interrogate postfeminism as a concept and its persistent fascination with nineteenth-century creative women. Through comparisons of the adaptations, this article will delineate the development of the woman artist trope to reveal how postfeminist conceptualizations of women’s creativity have shifted since the 1990s. In particular, the woman artist displays an increased desire to ‘return home’. Such retreatist narratives exploit but also obscure the fact that Brontë has long signified the perceived tension between traditional, highly domestic female gender roles and women’s creativity. As such, these postfeminist adaptations have a shaping effect on the myths that continue to circulate about Brontë’s feminism and authorship. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, woman author, myth, feminism, postfeminism In 2006, BBC1 broadcast a four-episode serialization of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) that began and ended with two mutually referential tableaux. Early in the first episode, Mrs Reed (Tara Fitzgerald) of Gateshead poses with her son and daughters for a family portrait (Figure 1). When the foregrounded artist (Nicholas Clayton) inquires why the young orphan Jane (Georgie Henley) is not included, he receives the pointed reply that Jane is ‘not part of the family’. Another portrait-painting scene occurs at the end of the fourth and final episode to illustrate that the adult heroine (Ruth Wilson) has overcome her exclusion. In contrast to the earlier vignette, the painter is much less conspicuous and Jane arranges her extended family before taking her place in the middle with Rochester (Toby Stephens) and their children. As the camera pulls out for the final shot, a border of flora and fauna materializes that recalls the subject and style of the sketches and watercolours that Jane has produced throughout the serial. The frame bolsters the impression that Jane has envisioned, created and put the finishing touches on the artwork. Such details constitute a self-consciously feminist denouement in which the obscure and marginalized woman artist claims her rightful place in the picture. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide A point-of-view shot as seen by the excluded Jane, who watches as an artist (Nicholas Clayton) paints Mrs Reed (Tara Fitzgerald) and her cousins. Source: Episode 1. Jane Eyre. Directed by Susannah White, BBC Worldwide, 2007. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide A point-of-view shot as seen by the excluded Jane, who watches as an artist (Nicholas Clayton) paints Mrs Reed (Tara Fitzgerald) and her cousins. Source: Episode 1. Jane Eyre. Directed by Susannah White, BBC Worldwide, 2007. In these two scenes, the 2006 BBC serial offers the clearest example of a notable development in post-1990 film and television versions of Jane Eyre. In comparison to their screen predecessors, these contemporary adaptations give new visual and thematic prominence to the protagonists’ status as talented amateur artists. By mobilizing the novel’s Künstlerroman subplot, these productions further entrench the long-running elision between the fictional Jane and the historical Brontë, another keen sketcher and watercolourist. For insight into this trope, I will examine Jane Eyre (Franco Zeffirelli, 1996), Jane Eyre (ITV/A&E, 1997), Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006), and Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011). As this article will demonstrate, these contemporary adaptations emphasize their heroines’ creativity through allusions to Brontë’s life to signpost their interpretation of the novel as feminist, indeed rebelliously so. The trend can only be fully comprehended if situated within postfeminism’s persistent obsession with female authors ‘in many guises’ (Cobb 15). A phenomenon suffusing a broad range of media texts, postfeminist culture espouses ‘what might be regarded as broadly “feminist” sentiments’ although ‘these sentiments have become severed from their political or philosophical origins’ (Whelehan, “Remaking Feminism” 155). Through my analysis of Jane Eyre adaptations, I seek to participate in a reinvigorated discussion about the meaning and continued usefulness of the concept. Recently, questions have been raised about the applicability of ‘this broad and baggy term’ to a variety of media dating from the 1980s until the present (Brunsdon 388). In my view, the number of commentators asserting that ‘postfeminism has nothing to offer in reading the current moment’ has been somewhat over-exaggerated (Gill, “Post-Postfeminism” 612). Many of the scholars and theorists identified as opposed to postfeminism are calling for more careful usage and historical contextualization. In other words, a clear appetite has arisen for better theorization of the differences between past and present iterations of postfeminism. Periodization is crucial to understanding the evolution of post-1990 adaptations’ engagement with Brontë’s novel. One indicative change is the increasingly concerted efforts to transform Jane Eyre’s artist subplot into a retreatist tale, one of postfeminism’s ‘master narratives’ (Negra 5). In such scenarios, the female protagonist typically ‘displays her “empowerment” and caring nature by withdrawing from the workforce (and symbolically from the public sphere) to devote herself to husband and family’ (Tasker and Negra 108). Of course, similar endings occur in prior screen adaptations and in Brontë’s novel. What distinguishes the post-1990 adaptations is the interweaving of the Künstlerroman elements into the heroines’ retreat, especially after the millennium. The development of the Jane/Brontë artist trope illustrates that postfeminism owes its cultural ‘longevity’ to its ‘malleability’ (Dejmanee 120). My discussion will offer new conclusions that have relevance to adaptation studies and related areas, including Brontë studies. Within the latter, a thriving corpus of research has sprung up delineating the cultural dissemination of the Brontë sisters’ literary works and the family’s mythology.1 Myth, according to Roland Barthes, is a second-order semiotic system that distorts cultural signs and narratives through historical decontextualization. Yet ‘this distortion is not obliteration’ but rather an accretion of new meanings, associations, and simplifications (Barthes 146). As Lucasta Miller has argued in The Brontë Myth (2001), the historical Brontës have been catapulted into the realm of myth by the astonishing number of retellings of their lives. Produced in many forms of media, these retellings include not only Brontë biopics but also the many screen adaptations that emphasize the autobiographical elements of the sisters’ works. The Brontës’ afterlives and the cultural transformations of their works have inspired scholarship but the field has yet to grapple with the emergence of the Jane/Brontë artist trope, particularly in post-1990 adaptations of Jane Eyre. Likewise, adaptation studies have thus far offered only incidental discussion of the same phenomenon. Monika Pietrzak-Franger, for instance, briefly observes that windows in the 2011 film ‘are locations of creativity and reflexivity’ where Jane (Mia Wasikowska) ‘draws, reads and contemplatively looks through them’ (270). Likewise, Sarah E. Fanning argues that the character’s artworks in the 2006 serial help convey the intellectual ‘affinity’ and ‘spiritual equality’ between Jane and Rochester (“A Soul” 77). This particular adaptation, Katie Kapurch suggests, makes the young Jane’s creativity and agency inextricable through its representation of her ‘storytelling and the exercise of her imagination’ (96). More critically, Yvonne Griggs posits that whether the family portrait at the end of the 2006 adaptation ‘is meant as a postfeminist parody or a celebration of romance and domestic harmony remains open to interpretation’ (32). As Griggs’ timid observation epitomizes, existing commentary refrains from interrogating the presentation of the heroines’ creative expression as a symbol of female autonomy and self-empowerment. Similarly, the field has not analysed the biographical aspects of contemporary Jane Eyre adaptations though it recognizes that ‘the imposition of the biopic genre is a defining feature of literary adaptations’ (Cartmell, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 64). One comparable but far more scrutinized author is Jane Austen, who is similarly subject to a ‘stubborn refusal’ to free her ‘from her fiction’ (Cartmell, “Becoming Jane” 151).2 Nevertheless, important differences exist between the cultural afterlives of Austen and Brontë. The contrasts between them shed light on postfeminist culture’s simultaneous fasciation with and anxiety about female creativity. To provide insight into these issues, I will first examine the portrayal of the woman artist in Brontë’s Jane Eyre while explaining the mythicization of Brontë’s authorship since the Victorian period. For her contemporaries, Brontë represented vexed ‘questions about the relationship of the private woman and public author, the domestic and the literary, and the compatibility of the two’ (Peterson 134). Such anxieties are explored in the Künstlerroman subplot of Brontë’s novel, which ‘establishes both a tension and interdependence between the narrative of Jane and Rochester’s evolving romance and the narrative of Jane’s development as an artist’ (Wells 78). Despite that tension, the romance and artist plots appear seamlessly integrated in contemporary screen adaptations. To elucidate this trend, I will discuss Franco Zeffirelli’s film Jane Eyre (1996) and ITV/A&E’s telefilm Jane Eyre (1997). These two adaptations selectively appropriate but also disavow the feminist discourses surrounding Brontë’s novel and, therefore, provide an opportunity to consider the concept of postfeminism and its relationship to feminism. Second-wave feminism, in particular, bears much responsibility for postfeminist culture’s habit of invoking the nineteenth-century woman in ‘contemporary debates on women’s agency and gender roles’ (Primorac 13). One consequence is that the figure of the nineteenth-century woman artist or writer has become a fraught symbol of female autonomy. As the final part of this article suggests, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006) and Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011) not only continue to emphasize their heroines’ artistry but also register shifts in postfeminist culture’s conceptions of female authorship and artistic expression. Although superficially feminist, postfeminist culture is prepared to endorse women’s artistic endeavours only in a manner that mirrors (and even revives) nineteenth-century attitudes towards bourgeois female ‘accomplishments’. For greater insight into nineteenth-century debates about women’s creative expression, I now turn to consider the parallels and discrepancies between Brontë’s life and Jane Eyre’s depiction of female artistry. THE FEMALE ARTIST IN JANE EYRE AND THE BRONTË MYTH Jane Eyre ‘is neither a conventional Künstlerroman nor a straightforward courtship narrative, though Brontë makes use of both subgenres’ (Wells 69). On its first page, the novel establishes that the character ‘sees her world with an artist’s eye’ as the child heroine describes the illustrations in Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (1797, 1804) (Glen 57). Once she reaches adulthood, Jane’s artistic ability is a sign of her fragile middle-class gentility but also a marketable skill mentioned in her advertisement for a governess position. Aside from those utilitarian uses, art provides Jane with solace in periods of loneliness or disempowerment. After Jane learns of Rochester’s supposed affection for Blanche Ingram, for example, she produces a miniature of the unseen other woman with the ‘loveliest face’ that she can imagine (137). Her detailed descriptions of her picture and technique imply her enjoyment of the artistic process and make evident that such expression is one of her few forms of agency (Glen 126–27). These incidents underscore why Brontë’s novel is rich inspiration for contemporary adaptations that seek to foreground their heroines’ creativity. Like the fictional Jane, Brontë was an amateur artist. This knowledge was circulated widely with the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the ‘Urtext’ of the Brontë myth (Miller 141). One of the overarching aims of Gaskell’s biography was to discredit any lingering doubts about Brontë’s femininity and gentility. For as one early reviewer averred, ‘if we ascribe [Jane Eyre] to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex’ (Rigby 111). To rebut such accusations, Gaskell portrayed Brontë as ‘an irreproachable martyr-heroine’ to ‘sanctify the image of the woman writer more generally’ (Miller 57). Famously, Gaskell described her subject’s ‘existence’ as becoming ‘divided into two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman’ (334). On the one hand, Gaskell depicted her semi-fictionalized protagonist as ‘a quiet and trembling creature, reared in total seclusion, a martyr to duty and a model of Victorian femininity’ (Miller 2). On the other, the biography ‘traces a meteoric rise to fame’ in which Brontë ‘succeeds by dint of her determination and literary genius’ (Peterson 149). In this manner, Gaskell mythicized the historical Brontë so that she came to symbolize competing concepts: the famous, highly public female literary genius versus the retiring Angel in the House. Like all myths, however, Gaskell’s Life ‘does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them’ (Barthes 169). In other words, the biography gave ‘a clarity which is not that of explanation but that of a statement of fact’ to the notion that Brontë’s life divided into parallel currents (Barthes 170). Among other revelations, Gaskell’s account hints that Jane Eyre was informed by Brontë’s experiences as an amateur artist. ‘At one time,’ Gaskell relates, ‘Charlotte had the notion of making her living as an artist’ (154). Similarly to Jane, Brontë was educated ‘in a manner suiting her prospects’ as an impoverished middle-class woman destined to earn a living as either a schoolteacher or a governess (C. Brontë 28). To ready her for those professions, Brontë studied the same accomplishments that she would have to teach her students. Typically for a woman of her period, Brontë learnt by laboriously copying pictures from manuals, books, engravings, and other sources in the amateur media of pencil and watercolour. The underlying reason is that men were primarily the ones associated with ‘works of (possible) genius’ while women ‘were generally thought incapable of originality and were relegated to the role of copyists’ (Losano 24). Consequently, a female art pupil might be permitted to draw or paint from life only after years of replicating well-known artworks. Even then, women were prevented from attempting unacceptable subjects like ‘large-scale history paintings, nudes, and imaginative art of any sort’ (Losano 108). Cultural expectations of women’s abilities and faulty training meant that Brontë mostly produced meticulous copies of engravings or ‘tiny portraits, scenes, and flowers for ornamental use’ (Alexander, “The Burning Clime” 299). The same conditions afflict her fictional child heroine, who nevertheless comforts herself against night-time hunger in Lowood School with the ‘spectacle of ideal drawings’, including ‘picturesque rocks and ruins’ and ‘butterflies hovering over unblown roses’ (C. Brontë 63). As Jane’s vocabulary and chosen images illuminate, her visualizations ‘are neither spontaneous nor original’ but ‘copies from prescribed manuals for young ladies’ (Alexander, “Educating” 18). Yet her enthralment underscores that the character shares with Brontë a ‘yearning’ to examine and create such pictures (Gaskell 154). Despite Brontë’s and her literary character’s evident passion for art, only recent screen adaptations have paid much heed to the novel’s Künstlerroman subplot.3 Earlier heroines do perform creative acts and, from the 1970s onwards, productions increasingly acknowledge that the character is an artist.4 In Jane Eyre (1970, Delbert Mann), for instance, the protagonist (Susannah York) often sketches or paints but her artworks are primarily props contributing to the mise-en-scène. A few years later, Jane Eyre (BBC, 1973) and Jane Eyre (BBC, 1983) include scenes in which the artwork of both versions of Jane (Sorcha Cusack and Zelah Clarke, respectively) play a vital role. Nevertheless, these two depictions of the female artist follow the novel closely, a reflection of the fact that BBC serials of those periods were designed to ‘appeal to a conservative, discerning audience seeking the comfort of fidelity driven reproductions of the literary canon’ (Griggs 29). In comparison to those BBC productions, post-1990 adaptations diverge more from the novel in their efforts to characterize their heroines as artists, such as in the closing shot of the family portrait in Jane Eyre (2006). While the foregrounding of Jane’s artistry might be a relatively new phenomenon, there is a long tradition of screen adaptations conflating their heroines with Brontë. The adaptations are never ‘adapting exactly one text apiece’ but rather a multitude of influences that include the Brontë myth (Leitch, ‘Twelve Fallacies’ 164). In addition to Gaskell’s Life, screen versions of Jane Eyre take inspiration from famous imagery of Brontë. Among the most significant is a highly flattering chalk portrait that was drawn from life by George Richmond in 1850 (Barker 760–61). Subsequent visual representations of the writer employ many of the Richmond portrait’s details, particularly the centre-parted chignon and the ribbon fastened at the neck. For instance, John Hunter Thompson duplicated those elements in the posthumous picture (c. 1850s) commissioned by Brontë’s husband (Regis and Wynne, “Introduction” 9). Around a hundred and fifty years later, the costume designer for Jane Eyre (2006), Andrea Galer, sought to ‘bring’ Thompson’s portrayal of Brontë ‘to life’ (Han 215). To achieve this effect, she incorporated Thompson’s reddish tones into Jane’s costume and replicated the ‘tie, which was knotted in an unusual way’ (Han 215, 217). Her comments in interview reveal that she worked on the assumption that Jane is Brontë.5 As this production exemplifies, screen adaptations have consistently employed costume and other period signifiers to emphasize the correspondences between the author and fictional character. Although the novel gives conflicting hints about its temporal setting, the clearest mention of a date occurs when Jane refers to Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808) as ‘a new publication—a poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days—the golden age of modern literature’ (C. Brontë 316). Yet film and television dramatizations eschew the Regency in favour of relocating Jane Eyre to the 1830–40s. The shift in period implies that either the eighteen-year-old heroine was born around the same time as Brontë (in 1816) or that she is living in the era of Jane Eyre’s initial publication (in 1847). That temporal shift supports Sarah Cardwell’s argument that later adaptations of a frequently adapted work ‘can be regarded as points on a continuum, as part of the extended development of a singular, infinite meta-text: a valuable story or myth that is constantly growing or developing, being retold, reinterpreted and reassessed’ (25). In the case of Jane Eyre, the meta-text has come to encompass not just prior adaptations of the novel but also Brontë’s mythology. Drawing from and perpetuating the Brontë myth, these adaptations operate on two levels, referring simultaneously to the fictional character and Brontë. In other words, ‘one of them is not “hidden” behind the other, they are both given here (and not one here and the other there)’ (Barthes 145). Hence, the adaptations function like ‘a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternatively’ the figure of Jane and the figure of Brontë (Barthes 147). To heighten Brontë’s conflation with Jane, contemporary adaptations exploit the author’s fame as a visual artist. Her paintings and drawings have been on public display since 1895 when the Brontë Society opened its first museum.6 Brontë’s pieces might have ‘limited intrinsic value’ from an art historian’s perspective but reproductions are readily available to buy alongside other merchandise in the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s gift shop (Workman 251). Frequently alluding to those images, contemporary cinematic and televisual Jane Eyres often linger on and give a clear view of the main character creating the same kind of small-scale studies of natural subjects and faces that Brontë produced. For instance, one of the earliest scenes in Fukunaga’s 2011 film establishes Jane’s creative disposition by showing her drawing a portrait of her childhood friend Helen Burns during her sojourn with the Rivers family (Figure 2). Her drawings are seized by Mary (Tamzin Merchant), who exclaims ‘see how skilled Jane is’ to Diana (Holliday Grainger) and St John (Jamie Bell). The latter two, furthermore, are seated around a table in an arrangement that echoes the composition of Branwell Brontë’s depiction of himself and his sisters in the Pillar Portrait (c. 1834). The incident calls attention to Jane’s unusual accomplishments while making reference to the Brontë family’s lives and artistic ambitions through the mise-en-scène. As this example demonstrates, awareness of Brontë’s artistic efforts has entered the cultural imaginary and is evoked in recent screen versions of Jane Eyre. The productions make the same assumptions as the many Pride and Prejudice adaptations that are ‘implicitly “reading” the novel as concealed autobiography’ (Cartmell, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 60). Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide In Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011), an early scene presents Jane (Mia Wasikowska) sketching a portrait of her childhood friend when living with the Rivers family. She leans on a folded up writing desk reminiscent of the ones owned by the Brontë sisters and on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Source: Jane Eyre. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. Universal Studios, 2012. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide In Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011), an early scene presents Jane (Mia Wasikowska) sketching a portrait of her childhood friend when living with the Rivers family. She leans on a folded up writing desk reminiscent of the ones owned by the Brontë sisters and on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Source: Jane Eyre. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. Universal Studios, 2012. Though the historical Brontë used her experiences as literary inspiration, Jane Eyre is not an autobiography. Significantly, Brontë possessed ambitions that surpassed but simultaneously did not extend as far as those of the novel’s character. As mentioned, Brontë briefly considered a career as a miniaturist. In 1834, she successfully submitted two illustrations—both copied from other sources—to the summer exhibition for the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (Barker 249). This achievement might have been impressive but her pieces did not sell and she seems to have given up any hope of a professional career around this time (Barker 249). Although Gaskell attributed this decision to Brontë’s poor eyesight, the real reason may have been that Brontë had accepted her lack of talent and the fact that her education would have equipped her merely to be ‘a second-rate miniaturist, a watercolour copyist, or botanical painter’ at best (Alexander, “Educating” 23). Though frustrated, her ambition is noteworthy and indicates that she once possessed remarkable confidence in her abilities. Whereas Brontë only produced orthodox ‘female’ visual art, Jane confounds nineteenth-century expectations of women’s creative expression. Jane’s exceptional abilities become apparent when Rochester examines her watercolour portfolio in their first formal encounter in his drawing room. Presumably, he is assessing her suitability to teach his ward, Adèle, the accomplishments of painting and sketching but his inspection carries further connotations. For middle- and upper-class women, accomplishments were a sign of their gentility that increased their value in the nineteenth-century marriage market. When such women met prospective suitors, they would exhibit their artistic or musical talents in drawing-room ceremonies designed to ‘arouse’ but also disguise male sexual interest as ‘detached aesthetic judgement’ (Bermingham 184). Jane’s portfolio, however, does more than capture Rochester’s erotic attention. As Antonia Losano points out, it destabilizes ‘prevailing aesthetic models for women’ (108). Rather than restricting herself to small studies of appropriately feminine subjects, Jane paints fantastical scenes filled with gigantic objects, such as a shipwreck, an iceberg and ‘a cormorant, dark and large’ (107). Jane’s works recall some of the images in Bewick’s British Birds but her dialogue with Rochester emphasizes the uniqueness of her vision. When he inquires whether she had the assistance of a drawing master or ‘copies’, Jane makes explicit that her pictures came from her ‘head’ and that she first saw them with her ‘spiritual eye’ (C. Brontë, 106, 107). In contrast to Brontë, Jane is not a copyist but takes inspiration from her imagination. Rochester points out her poor technique but he also betrays fascination with what she has envisioned, recognizing that she encroaches on the province of male genius: originality. Within a nineteenth-century context, the fictional Jane and the historical Brontë disrupted culturally entrenched views of women’s creative abilities but for very different reasons. Unlike her heroine, Brontë was a mediocre artist but she aspired to professional status and later achieved exceptional success in another creative field. Yet her novels and public triumph did compromise her femininity and her gentility. The situation led Gaskell to try to salvage Brontë’s reputation by divorcing ‘the woman from the author’ and by distinguishing ‘the private domestic self from the public persona and the literary creator’ (Peterson 7). In contradistinction to Brontë, Jane produces creative works that subvert nineteenth-century expectations of women’s creative capabilities but she is content to remain an accomplished woman in the private sphere. She does so even though her abilities hint at other hypothetical futures, including the possibility of an artistic profession. Instead, she withdraws into marriage after which references to her painting or drawing evaporate. The Künstlerroman elements in Jane Eyre might impede the main courtship yet receive significant attention in contemporary adaptations. Though the artist plot has the potential to interrupt the central romance, these screen versions risk incorporating this disruptive narrative because it helps to construe Jane Eyre as a ‘concealed autobiography’ (Cartmell, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 60). To an extent, these adaptations are merely responding to the contemporary popularity of female-centred biopics, a genre that portrays ‘women in a variety of professions but mainly in creative roles (including painter, writer, singer, musician and actress)’ (Polaschek 1). In common with such filmic and televisual portraits, the adaptations imply that Brontë’s literary and artistic work was ‘directly autobiographical’ (Polaschek 65). Those assumptions are hardly new but have had a deleterious influence on Brontë's critical reputation.7 As I will now suggest, the rise of the Jane/Brontë artist trope reflects that the nineteenth-century woman—especially if she is a writer or artist—functions as an especially potent figure within the contemporary cultural imaginary. ‘[W]ith her corseted body epitomising her repressed sexuality, limited social roles, career and life choices’, she has become ‘the pivotal image through which contemporary ideas about the period are dramatically tested’ (Primorac 4). Such conceptualizations of femininity and female creativity owe much to second-wave feminism. The movement’s influence is apparent in Jane Eyre (1996) and Jane Eyre (1997), both of which demonstrate how nineteenth-century women’s creativity came to signify female agency, desire and empowerment in the postfeminist 1990s. ‘REBELLIOUS’ FEMINISM: JANE EYRE ADAPTATIONS IN THE 1990s Of all the contemporary adaptations, the ITV/A&E telefilm Jane Eyre (1997) is the least concerned with representing Jane (Samantha Morton) as an artist. Nevertheless, the production features a revealing incident where Jane supervises Adèle’s (Timia Bartomé) watercolour lesson. The camera shows neither the teacher nor the student’s canvas but concentrates upon their facial expressions. As Adèle huffs in exasperation, Jane remains composed but her voice-over relates that ‘life at Thornfield was tranquil, too tranquil’. Here, the adaptation paraphrases the literary heroine’s critique of oppressive nineteenth-century gender roles that demanded women ‘be satisfied with tranquillity’ and ‘confine’ their energies to domestic tasks and cultivating their accomplishments (C. Brontë 93). To reinforce the power of Jane’s revolt, the scene ends with an extreme close-up of Jane rinsing her paintbrush aggressively in a bottle of water. Her action introduces suppressed turbulence, dynamism and even violence into the moment. The hidden tumult points towards the influence of second-wave literary criticism and its conceptualization of women’s creativity on the adaptation’s interpretation of the novel. Although Brontë was an established feminist icon, she and her literary achievements acquired new significance in the wake of second-wave feminism. Feminism has existed as an organized movement since the mid-nineteenth century but underwent significant reinvigoration in the late-1960s. This revival was heavily inspired by the successes of the New Left and civil rights movement. Nevertheless, many of the women involved resisted aligning themselves with their contemporaries in favour of invoking the legacy of nineteenth-century feminism. One consequence is that feminist literary critics of the period ‘returned emphatically’ to nineteenth-century women writers and their texts, including Brontë and Jane Eyre (Whelehan, “New Angels” 73). These twentieth-century women’s sense of affiliation with their nineteenth-century forbearers ‘created a generational structure between the two eras, classifying them as two moments in the same movement: the first and second waves’ (Henry 53). Throughout its history, feminism has comprised ‘diversity, fragmentation and a series of contestations’ that manifests as and overlaps within political/social activism, academic theory and popular culture (Budgeon 280). Plurality might be one of feminism’s defining characteristics but many of its strands agree that the movement pertains to more than women’s ‘individual identity and lifestyle’ (hooks 28). Ideally (though not always in practice), feminism aims to be inclusive and not ‘benefit solely any specific group of women’ (hooks 26). In other words, feminism aims to dismantle the structural disadvantages experienced by all women living in patriarchal societies. As will be explored in greater detail, feminism can be distinguished from postfeminism by its emphasis on systemic changes on behalf of all women. Additionally, most feminisms share the conviction that ‘gender is an effect of culture rather than a condition for its current configuration’ (Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought 205). As a consequence, feminists have devoted much attention to deconstructing ‘dominant ideological representations of femininity’ (Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought 5). For many feminists (including myself), challenging gender essentialism is extricable from feminism’s larger project to galvanize structural improvements in women’s lives within legal, social, cultural and intimate spheres. Consequently, second-wave feminism critiqued and sought to limit the power of many feminine stereotypes. One of the most powerful was the Victorian Angel in the House. Second wavers’ distaste for this particular figure echoed that of earlier feminists such as Virginia Woolf, who famously declared that ‘[h]ad I not killed [the Angel in the House] she would have killed me’ (141). But as Woolf also noted, the Angel’s survival depends on her fictitiousness as it ‘is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality’ (142). This spectre’s vitality meant she continued to haunt second-wave feminists. According to Imelda Whelehan, the ‘central problem’ for this generation of feminists was the ‘unassailable fact that while women could now to some extent refine their social identity by pursuing a career, they could not shake off that timeless and naturalized association of women with the home’ (Modern Feminist Thought 9). Many second-wave feminists responded by delving into female histories to locate alternative narratives that could counter patriarchal stereotypes. Iconic writers like Brontë, for instance, could be used to discredit the belief that ‘artistic creativity’ was ‘a fundamentally male quality’ (Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 56). This focus on women writers is understandable. Creative authorship often functions as a ‘metaphor for agency’ while the ‘struggle for female agency’ is invariably equated with ‘the struggle to authorize oneself while being a woman’ (Cobb 15). Spurred on by those assumptions, second-wave literary gynocritics were inspired to identify a ‘hidden’ tradition of female creativity. Among the most influential were Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). Their reading of Jane Eyre was an effort to release Brontë from the incarceration of Gaskell’s image of her as a ‘dainty’ housekeeper, one whose literary vocation never interfered with ‘the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual’ (Gaskell 306, 334). Disputing Gaskell’s portrait, Gilbert, Gubar and other second-wave critics were intent on revealing an alternative paradigm in which nineteenth-century women writers were surreptitiously breaking out of domestic confinement. According to Gilbert and Gubar, women authors used their writing to deconstruct invidious gender roles and connect with a larger collective of women. Madwoman’s underlying premise is that women writers ‘channeled their female concerns into secret or at least obscure corners’ so that their submerged meanings remained ‘hidden within or behind the more accessible or public content of their works’ (72). This covert tradition relied on symbols and dramatizations of ‘imprisonment and escape’ that communicated women’s secret ‘raging desire to escape male houses and texts’ (85). Central to Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis was Jane Eyre, a novel that they claimed was an outlet for Brontë’s ‘rebellious feminism’ (338). For them, Bertha Mason was the emblematic example of how nineteenth-century women writers used the figure of the ‘mad double’ to express theirs and their characters’ concealed fury at their enforced domesticity. ‘In retrospect’, Kaplan notes, ‘we can see feminist criticism in this period developing a feminist aesthetics of anger, for which the Victorian period serves as a literary and social origin’ (24). Madwoman is controversial. Although widely lauded, the study is also ‘repudiated as retrograde, biologically reductive, and exclusionary’ (Federico 9). As many of their critics pointed out, Gilbert and Gubar failed to perceive that their ideas are frequently contingent on patriarchal logic and values (e.g., Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 56–68). Identifying a female literary tradition, for example, was ‘hardly an argument with canonicity per se nor was it an attempt to look beyond the strictly literary at various women’s popular genres’ (Fraiman 28). Another issue is that Madwoman’s focus on ‘women authors’ appears naïve in the wake of poststructuralism and gender studies. The rise of such theories meant that interest in women writers appeared to be a feminist repackaging of ‘traditional, liberal humanism’ while making it ‘difficult to speak of “women” except in inverted commas’ (Moi, “I am not a Woman Writer,” 261, 263). Another important source of critique was postcolonial theory; in an influential article, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revealed the lack of intersectionality in Madwoman’s reading of Jane Eyre and its feminism more generally. Most crucially for my argument, Gilbert and Gubar wanted to deconstruct patriarchal gender constructions but they also reinscribed or created new versions of existing myths about women writers. As their reading of the mad double in Jane Eyre illustrates, there is the ‘unstated complicity with the autobiographical “phallacy”’ in Madwoman that presumes that ‘the female text is the author, or at any rate a dramatic extension of her unconscious’ (Jacobus 520). Those beliefs have meant that critics have failed to regard the Brontës and many other female authors as ‘knowing and ambitious writers who produced consciously constructed novels’ (Miller 24). On one level, Gilbert and Gubar did demonstrate the sophistication and individuality of nineteenth-century women’s literature. But despite emphasizing these writers’ desire to escape domesticity and patriarchal control, Madwoman re-imprisoned them in an alternative and essentialist paradigm of female authorship. Subsequent literary scholarship has accused second-wave critics of ‘excavating little-known writers who complied with their expectations and critical needs’ while ignoring female authors ‘less compatible with the dominant model of the resisting heroine that such criticism had established as a norm’ (Whelehan, “New Angels” 74). Gilbert and Gubar might have rejected Gaskell’s notion of ‘parallel currents’ but they also proposed a new myth in which Brontë’s authorship was not separate but instead inextricable from her gender (334). Gilbert, Gubar and other gynocritics created a version of Brontë’s myth that made female creativity synonymous with concealed feminist rebellion. The two are now difficult to disentangle because the ‘very principle of myth’ is that ‘it transforms history into nature’ (Barthes 154). Whatever its faults, Madwoman has shaped how contemporary culture comprehends nineteenth-century women’s creativity. Gilbert and Gubar’s paradigm has been further de-historicized and naturalized within postfeminist culture. Thanks to them and other gynocritics, mythicized representations of the nineteenth-century woman author and artist carry many layers of meaning. These figures are ‘laden with cultural connotations of autonomy, independence, and self-determination’, qualities now automatically equated with ‘unruly feminist subjectivity’ (Thouaille 90). This effect can be seen in the two 1990s adaptations of Jane Eyre. In contrast to earlier screen versions,8 neither interprets Jane/Brontë as an Angel in the House and both portray her as the type of rebellious femininity theorized in Madwoman. Jane Eyre (1997), for instance, draws attention to its spirited protagonist’s passionate sexuality and her battle for equality with Rochester (Ciarán Hinds) (Brosh 131–34). Even more pertinently, Zeffirelli’s adaptation signposts its engagement with feminist themes by associating the protagonist’s visual art with her authorship of her life. The opening shot is a sketch of Gateshead and its final shot is another drawing of Jane (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Rochester (William Hurt) embracing. The two images are implied to be Jane’s creations through her voice-over. This ending explicitly suggests that Jane continues to be an artist even after her marriage (in contrast to the literary character). Through these devices, the film seeks to recreate the novel’s first-person narration to emphasize that the heroine ‘tells’ her story through her artwork. Such manoeuvres further blend Jane the artist with Brontë the author. Although Jane Eyre (1997) differs substantially from Jane Eyre (1996), both reveal their debt to Madwoman by linking their heroines’ artistry with female anger and resistance to patriarchal gender constructions. As mentioned, Jane Eyre (1997) portrays the outwardly placid Jane vigorously washing her paintbrush in a bottle, the swirling water hinting at her submerged rage. Here, the telefilm recalls Madwoman’s secret female tradition by intimating a silent but simmering fury beneath the female painter’s decorous exterior. Zeffirelli’s production follows Gilbert and Gubar even further in conceiving of female creativity as inseparable from subversive female anger. This assumption is clear in the childhood scenes where the young Jane (Anna Paquin) uses her art to defy masculine authority. In an incident that occurs very differently in the novel, Jane cajoles her schoolmate Helen Burns (Leanne Rowe) into removing her bonnet so that she can draw her friend’s portrait. Jane’s sketching is interrupted by the entry of Mr Brocklehurst (John Wood) who instructs a teacher to cut off Helen’s pre-Raphaelite tresses, a detail inspired by Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1944).9 In a further invention, Jane steps forward to have her hair also scissored away in a gesture of solidarity. Sparked off by Jane’s wish to draw, the fracas connects her impetus for creativity with her desire to escape from patriarchal domination. Thus, Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre reiterates Madwoman’s conjecture that all nineteenth-century women’s creative acts were covertly rebellious. Gilbert and Gubar’s influence on Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, however, comes via the work of contemporaneous feminist filmmakers. During the 1990s, a ‘short-lived spell of feminist experimentation’ within cinema achieved an unprecedented amount of critical and popular success (Vidal 128). Among the earliest films were Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993). Later examples include The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1998) and Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999). In addition to other similarities, many of these films were set in the nineteenth century and centred on protofeminist female protagonists rebelling against social convention, usually in an entwined search for creative and sexual satisfaction. The fulfilment of those desires was inextricable from the characters’ overarching quests for female authority and agency. For Belén Vidal, these works constitute a ‘renewed engagement with the formative narratives of feminism—the struggle for women’s self-expression, the identification between women artists now and then—while filtering them through the politics of romance’ (128). As these productions illustrate, the nineteenth-century woman has come to be a crucial reference point in contemporary discussions about women’s autonomy and agency, especially if she is a creative author. Much of her status derives from the myths postulated by second-wave criticism and elaborated upon by 1990s feminist filmmakers. Released in the middle of this cycle, Zeffirelli’s adaptation attempts to capitalize on the popularity of filmic narratives about subversive, artistic women set in the nineteenth century. As in contemporaneous screen texts, the heroine’s artistic temperament is a sign of her spirited personality and desire to escape patriarchal constraints. To make its engagement with such themes more prominent, the 1996 film features Anna Paquin as the young Jane in a reprisal of her role as another imaginative, insubordinate girl in The Piano. Similarly influenced, Jane Eyre (1997)’s feisty heroine is not especially artistic but is presented as ‘empowered because she can reform a masterful man and make him into a satisfying and unthreatening erotic object’ (Brosh 133). In these ways, the two productions make explicit their exploration of the newly voguish feminist subjects of female agency and desire. Yet the two adaptations develop these themes in a characteristically postfeminist manner. In its most general sense, the term ‘postfeminism’ has been ‘used to mark historical periods when feminism or women’s movements have been in abeyance’ and often infers the failure or ‘rejection of feminism’ (Henry 19). Alternative definitions have interpreted postfeminism as an epistemological break (aligned with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism) that interrogates the many contradictions and inconsistencies within the history of feminist thought (e.g., Brooks). However, most theorists conceive of postfeminism as a cultural phenomenon that draws on feminist ideas but in ways that constitute the ‘undoing’ of feminism (Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?” 613). Importantly for my argument, the feature that differentiates postfeminism from pre-feminism or antifeminism is its ‘suture between feminist and antifeminist ideas’ (Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture” 162). This suture is apparent in Jane Eyre (1996) and Jane Eyre (1997). As the depictions of the heroines’ creative agency and empowerment demonstrate, postfeminist culture often appears to endorse female ‘choice’ or ‘empowerment’ but only in situations where women’s agency is limited. In the ITV/A&E Jane Eyre (1997), a match cut transforms the shot of Jane angrily rinsing her paintbrush in a bottle of water into a shot of a suggestively churning river by which she will have her first fateful meeting with Rochester. The transition implies that Jane will be freed from the inertia of domesticity through Rochester, thereby foregrounding the significance of her desires and will to escape. Such editing, however, illustrates how postfeminism discourages the ‘contemplation of structural inequities’ and ignores the collectivism that is central to feminism as a movement (Negra 5). Whereas feminism attempts to challenge systemic gender oppression, postfeminist culture generally suggests that women can achieve equality and fulfilment through ‘projects of individualized self-definition and privatized self-expression exemplified in the celebration of lifestyle and consumption choices’ (Budgeon 281). Such privatized self-expression includes the artistic activities of the heroines of Jane Eyre (1996) and Jane Eyre (1997). Even more problematically, the ITV/A&E Jane Eyre decreases the feminist potential of Jane’s art by implying that she paints only to sublimate her sexual desires. Her artistry does not even carry its usual associations of a quest for female authority or autonomy. Instead, this televisual Jane’s search for erotic satisfaction serves as substitute for the literary Jane’s systemic critique that women ‘need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts’ (C. Brontë 93). As this interpretation of Brontë’s novel reveals, postfeminism generally represents women exercising their agency but only in scenarios where their agency is ‘without any serious repercussion or political effect’ (Ascheid). To that end, postfeminism fetishizes the nineteenth-century women whose ‘individual gestures toward female independence’ were ‘potentially more radical’ (Cobb 124). In comparison to them, contemporary women seem to be fully liberated and, thus, feminism appears redundant in the current moment. Here, Jane Eyre (1997) provides an apposite example of how postfeminism often selectively deprives protofeminist works of their feminist potential both in relation to their own period but also the present. Likewise, Zeffirelli’s film demonstrates how postfeminism entangles anti-feminism with feminism in its development of the Künstlerroman subplot. Jane Eyre (1996) might borrow Madwoman’s recognition of female anger but fails to engage with Gilbert and Gubar’s more substantial argument that ‘patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women’ (13). Within the film, female fury and rebellion are present in the child artist but those emotions are too disruptive to be permitted in the rather docile adult protagonist. This issue is apparent in another scene not based on the novel where Adèle (Joséphine Serre) asks Jane to draw a portrait of Rochester. Approaching them, the affable Rochester requests to see Jane’s work. Various other critics have noted that the adaptation’s efforts to incorporate feminism result in a ‘kinder, gentler Rochester’ (Chitwood 520). Yet Rochester’s response to Jane’s work underscores the shallowness of the film’s conceptualization of its feminist themes. Upon seeing his portrait, his mood changes and he mutters ‘you have me utterly’ before storming away. At first glance, Jane seems to have upended the power dynamics between herself and Rochester in a manner akin to Brontë’s text. Yet the scene reinforces her subordinate status through its diegetic and non-diegetic elements. Though Jane submits Rochester to her gaze, swelling music plays as she sketches to suggest her admiring and romantic feelings towards him, not her penetrating insight or rebellion against gender inequality. Even more significantly, Rochester the scene’s focalizer. His glimpse of the drawing precipitates a tonal shift accentuated by sinister music and his adverse reaction dominates the rest of their exchange. Strikingly, the adaptation foregrounds his—not her—rage. Jane might have produced the picture but it is Rochester who displays interpretative authority over her work. As this incident encapsulates, Zeffirelli’s presentation of female creativity affirms the patriarchal gender hierarchies and constructions that Brontë, second-wave feminists and feminist filmmakers previously challenged. The film’s modish feminist Künstlerroman is a decorative veneer barely covering its out-dated, anti-feminist gender essentialism. Jane Eyre (1996) and Jane Eyre (1997) exemplify how postfeminist culture has appropriated and depoliticized feminists’ attempts to theorize nineteenth-century women’s creativity. As mentioned, this creativity had paramount importance for second-wave gynocritics who reconfigured Gaskell’s version of Brontë’s myth to assert the existence of a secret nineteenth-century tradition of women’s rebellious anger. Yet Brontë’s significance has morphed within a postfeminist context. On a mythical plane where ‘things appear to mean something by themselves’, the nineteenth-century creative woman has been further de-historicized to represent female agency and feminist subversion with an ‘evident’ and ‘blissful clarity’ (Barthes 170). That process obscures a central aspect of Madwoman’s argument. As well as pointing out female anger, Gilbert and Gubar conceived of a female literary tradition that helped women writers to rediscover ‘lost foremothers who could help them find their distinctive female power’ (59). In their view, Brontë and her contemporaries wrote to enable themselves and other women to escape their domestic and patriarchal confines. Although postfeminist culture embraces the figure of the rebellious female artist, it erases her solidarity with other women and ignores the matter of structural change. Typifying this trend, Jane Eyre (1996) and Jane Eyre (1997) construe their protagonists’ creative work as privatized self-expression that signifies their dissatisfaction with patriarchal entrapment but does not empower them to transcend their confines or connect with other women. Hence, their artwork never allows the characters to evade domesticity or subvert either nineteenth-century or contemporary constructions of femininity. The two adaptations reflect how postfeminist culture conceives of women’s empowerment and agency more broadly. In Antonija Primorac’s analysis, contemporary adaptations of Victorian texts often take the approach of ‘sexing up of the proverbially prudish Victorians’ (Primorac 32). Such manoeuvres mask ‘the blatant and much overlooked loss’ of the female characters’ agency when compared with their literary counterparts (Primorac 32). As the 1990s screen versions of Jane Eyre reveal, another strategy to disguise the heroines’ passivity and lack of autonomy is to emphasize their creativity. Such depictions of female artists and writers repeatedly occlude the proto-feminism of the adaptations’ source material. As Jane Eyre (1996) and Jane Eyre (1997) illustrate, postfeminist culture often envisions nineteenth-century women’s creativity as a form of ‘safe rebellion’ that fails to ‘challenge the contemporary status quo’ (Ascheid). In the next section, I argue that the postfeminist entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist discourses is even more pronounced in postmillennial adaptations of Brontë’s novel. More specifically, Jane Eyre (2006) and Jane Eyre (2011) exemplify how the trope of the woman artist has responded to developments in postfeminist culture, an evolving phenomenon that ‘increasingly operates through emotions and subjectivity’ (Gill, “Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life” 609). TURNING INWARDS: JANE EYRE ADAPTATIONS IN THE 2000s Jane Eyre (2006) and Jane Eyre (2011) continue to accentuate the main characters’ artistry to heighten their resemblance to Brontë. These heroines not only draw and paint but also look at imagery in an active fashion that recalls Brontë’s passionate engagements with visual culture.10 Fukunaga’s 2011 film, for instance, includes a shot of an engraving of a bird in a book from the child Jane’s (Amelia Clarkson) point of view.11 The picture not only recalls Bewick’s British Birds but connotes imaginative flight. Similarly, the 2006 BBC serial transforms the literary Jane’s fascination with Bewick’s book into an elaborate opening sequence in which the child heroine wanders through an unknown desert wrapped in flowing, Orientalized red drapery. The imagery references the novelistic character’s description of herself as sitting ‘cross-legged like a Turk’ behind a ‘red moreen curtain’ as she looks at Bewick’s illustrations (C. Brontë 5). After a montage of shots of Jane walking through the sand, the landscape dissolves into a close-up of the young Jane’s eyes. The camera pulls out to show her leafing through a volume entitled Voyages and Travels Illustrated. To make even clearer that the previous scenes were Jane’s fantasies, the book’s images are shown via close-up shots from canted angles that match the direction of her gaze. As she turns and rotates each page, the audio track aurally conjures the depicted locations to underscore the vividness of her imaginative response. Beyond emphasizing the heroines’ parallels with Brontë, these moments suggest that women’s gazing constitutes a creative act and a form of agency. These efforts to acknowledge the protagonists’ interior lives reveal how the myth of the woman artist has followed the currents of postmillennial postfeminist culture. Over the last few years, the concept of postfeminism has come under greater scrutiny and its utility questioned. The most obvious objection is that popular culture no longer automatically repudiates feminism and even embraces it as ‘stylish, successful, and youthfully hip’ (Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?” 610). Yet feminism’s rebranding remains consumerist, individualist and contradictorily espoused by celebrities (Hamad and Negra). Such incoherencies underscore that postfeminism still sutures feminist and anti-feminist ideas together, albeit in novel ways. Meanwhile, Whelehan has expressed ‘boredom’ with the term and the ‘tiresome role of reinventing the same feminist critique of numerous texts’ (“Remaking Feminism” 168–69). Despite her ennui, she goes on to suggest that the ‘postfeminist script’ now in its ‘maturing second or third decade’ might ‘be framed as an infinitely adaptable text’ (162). What is clear is that postfeminism has not gone away but its tenor differs. Rather than declaring the term to be now useless, a more productive response has been to recognize the need for ‘historically informed analysis’ that interrogates ‘constructions of postfeminism as an all-encompassing and more or less permanent state of affairs’ (Keller and Ryan 5). From my perspective, periodization is a sensible approach that can shed light on the ‘continuity and change’ (as in the original) of postfeminist culture (Gill, “Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life” 611). Postfeminism’s evolution manifests in various ways in Jane Eyre (2006) and Jane Eyre (2011). As always, the courtship plot takes precedence but the 1990s trend for emphasizing the Künstlerroman elements persists. What distinguishes the two most recent adaptations is how both transform the novel’s artist subplot into an explicitly retreatist narrative. Historically, postfeminist culture has produced an abundance of ‘migratory, transplanted and/or urban’ heroines who return home—either one from childhood or one newly adopted—and renew their commitments to domesticity and/or family (Negra 18). Such trajectories are presented as ‘a reconnection with essential femininity that is deemed to only be possible in a domestic setting’ (Negra 72). In addition to reiterating this familiar script, the two postmillennial adaptations illustrate how retreatism has reconfigured itself in line with postfeminist culture’s ‘turn to interiority’. This turn, Tisha Dejmanee posits, is ‘characterised by a concern with interior spaces’ and ‘the quest for self-actualisation’ (119, 120). Admittedly, postfeminism has long dangled the promise of “a more authentic, intact, and achieved self’ but its recommendations for achieving that self have changed (Negra 5). Whereas postfeminist heroines used to derive so-called empowerment from material consumption, their more recent counterparts actualize their selfhood via ‘expressions’ of their inner lives (Dejmanee 122). In many cases, these expressions involve creative activities or labour closely bound up with the construction of a home space. This shift is apparent in Jane Eyre (2006) and Jane Eyre (2011), both of which emphasize the heroines’ perspective and imagination to portray female creativity more abstractly than previous Jane Eyre adaptations. Fukunaga’s adaptation, for example, restructures Brontë’s plot so that the heroine follows a quasi-retreatist trajectory. To that end, the film adopts a chronology in which Jane leaves and returns to Thornfield twice on a non-diegetic level, establishing this setting as her emotional ‘home’. The film begins in media res with a bedraggled Jane fleeing from Thornfield and wandering through the moors in the aftermath of her aborted wedding to Rochester (Michael Fassbender). Eventually, she is found collapsed on the doorstep of the Rivers family who bring her inside to recuperate. Her recovery with them is crosscut with moments from her childhood in Gateshead and Lowood School; such editing makes her desire for family and shelter explicit on both planes of action. The film employs a more straightforward chronology once Jane arrives in Thornfield, an initially gothic setting that becomes increasingly domestic as Jane falls in love with Rochester. In fact, Jane’s sense of home depends on Rochester, not a physical building. Reinforcing this impression is the ending, which jettisons the novel’s location of Ferndean and has its main characters reunite in Thornfield (in a direct homage to Stevenson’s 1944 adaptation). In the burnt ruins of Thornfield, Jane discovers her doll before she encounters Mrs Fairfax (Judi Dench), a concerned and motherly presence throughout the adaptation. Visually, Jane appears to have come back to her childhood home. Thereafter, she discovers Rochester under a tree where they have met on previous occasions in a denouement that reinforces the sense that Thornfield/Rochester is Jane’s point of origin and eventual return. Affective rather literal, Jane’s retreat home exemplifies the increased emphasis on interiority in postfeminist culture. Notably, this Jane’s retreat depends on her artwork far more than in prior screen adaptations. Earlier versions have generally minimized the role that the literary Jane’s art plays in the revelation of her true identity and her reuniting with Rochester. In Brontë’s novel, Jane disguises herself as ‘Jane Elliott’ during her stay at Marsh End with the Rivers family. Yet the truth emerges when St John finds a piece of paper that she uses ‘to prevent the cardboard from being sullied’ while painting (C. Brontë 320). On this scrap, she has absentmindedly scribbled her real name. His discovery enables Jane to claim her inheritance and return to Rochester as a wealthy heiress. This sequence of events is either excluded or occurs in a different manner in: Jane Eyre (1934); Jane Eyre (1944); Jane Eyre (1949); Jane Eyre (1956); Jane Eyre (1957); Jane Eyre (1970); Jane Eyre (1996); Jane Eyre (1997); and Jane Eyre (2006). Exceptions are the BBC serials Jane Eyre (1973) and Jane Eyre (1983). Yet these two earlier adaptations present this scene cursorily and do not suggest any particular effort to foreground the artistic talent of either heroine. Rather, these versions appear to be trying to fulfil the generic expectations of the BBC as a ‘faithful’ adaptor by following the novel’s plot closely. Contrastingly, Fukunaga’s 2011 film presents Jane’s art as vital to her return to Rochester while emphasizing that she is an artist. When St John visits Jane in her village school, he glimpses and then pilfers a portrait that Jane has signed. The sketch is shown clearly in shot before reappearing in the next scene while St John relates what he has learnt about ‘Jane Elliott’. During his narration, a tilted shot slowly moves down the side of the page to show ‘Jane Eyre’ inscribed multiple times on the corner (Figure 3). In this shot, Jane’s artwork makes her selfhood now legible. Firstly, the painted subject—Adèle—hints at her past. Even more importantly, her name confers a new social identity on her as the niece of John Eyre and inheritor of his fortune. She is suddenly a rich and independent woman. The fact that the name is on an artwork—rather than the ‘blank paper’ in Brontë’s novel (320)—promotes Jane’s forgetful doodle to the status of authorial signature. The elaborate reveal of her name codes the moment as the rediscovery of a woman artist, one whose works are either lost or who has hidden behind a pseudonym. Famously, Brontë did the latter. The production appears to be undertaking a similar cultural recovery project to second-wave feminism or 1990s films like The Piano or The Governess. In those films, however, the cinematic heroines struggled to reconcile their creative and sexual desires. Yet Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre reins in those tensions even as it seeks to resemble such works of feminist filmmaking. Once Jane’s art has revealed her ‘true’ self, her main struggle is her wait until she can return to Rochester/Thornfield. In the interim, she busies herself making an ersatz home with the Rivers family. In narrative terms, Jane’s art mainly functions to advance the courtship plot and insist on the primacy of the personal and the domestic to women’s lives. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide As St John (Jamie Bell) reveals how he ascertained Jane’s true identity, the camera lingers on her authorial signature written on the corner of her artwork. Source: Jane Eyre. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. Universal Studios, 2012. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide As St John (Jamie Bell) reveals how he ascertained Jane’s true identity, the camera lingers on her authorial signature written on the corner of her artwork. Source: Jane Eyre. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. Universal Studios, 2012. In the 2006 BBC version, there is not only a similar entwinement between Jane’s pursuit for romance and domesticity but those desires are overtly bound up with the most conspicuous Künstlerroman subplot in screen versions of Jane Eyre. Over the four episodes, Jane’s creative potential is unleashed during her ‘makeover’ from homeless orphan into wife and mother. Indeed, Jane’s artwork mirrors the effects of her move from Lowood, where her femininity is punished, to Thornfield, which nurtures her ‘female qualities’. In the first episode, the child Jane is in Lowood when she creates her first work of art, a charcoal sketch of freshly dug graves in the churchyard where Helen Burns (Hester Odgers) has just been buried (Figure 4). At this point, she turns the page and a match cut shows the adult Jane’s hand using a paintbrush to produce fluid green lines that take the form of a plant. The camera pulls out to reveal that Jane remains in the graveyard but is instructing Lowood pupils to paint a vase of flowers. Unlike her previous tortured piece, the adult Jane’s watercolour features vivid colours that suggest the momentary release of her vibrant femininity. The process continues in Thornfield as Jane finds new sources of inspiration in Rochester’s natural history books and the specimens in his study. Throughout the adaptation, she cultivates her artistic and scientific interests by examining his samples and volumes. These leitmotifs recur in Jane’s own art to establish their romantic compatibility and Thornfield’s salubrious influence on her, fully subsuming her creative desires within the courtship plot. In this respect, the adaptation illustrates how postfeminist empowerment increasingly presents the private domestic sphere as ‘the site of self-sufficiency and the scene of the individual’s creative potential’ (Dejmanee 130). The ‘natural’ imagery, moreover, reveals an essentialist conception of femininity that contrasts with the depiction of the woman artist in Brontë’s novel. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The effects of Lowood on the child Jane (Georgie Henley) can be seen in the dark style and subject matter of her art, both of which suggest her repressed femininity. Source: Episode 1. Jane Eyre. Directed by Susannah White, BBC Worldwide, 2007. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide The effects of Lowood on the child Jane (Georgie Henley) can be seen in the dark style and subject matter of her art, both of which suggest her repressed femininity. Source: Episode 1. Jane Eyre. Directed by Susannah White, BBC Worldwide, 2007. Although the adaptations recognize that the literary Jane’s artworks are an expression of self, none acknowledge that her pieces challenge essentialist conceptions of women’s art. This fact is apparent in the scene where Rochester examines Jane’s portfolio and perceives the distinctiveness of her artistic vision. Desirous to know more about her interiority, he asks whether she was ‘happy’ when creating the images (107). To this question, Jane explains that to ‘paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known’ and ‘I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation, and I sat at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night’ (108). Most adaptations interpret her answer as indicative of loneliness but her words actually confirm the extraordinariness of her method. Jane’s pieces ‘because they do not derive from copies or nature, require brooding upon the self’ (Losano 110). During periods of underemployment, Jane’s creativity enables her to escape into what Rochester describes as ‘a kind of artist’s dreamland’, a place that tantalizes because he can gain only partial glimpses through her art (108). Jane’s inner world is a territory that Rochester cannot colonize. Her feminine ‘accomplishments’, therefore, subvert nineteenth-century expectations of female art by hinting at her originality and her potential—albeit never realized—genius. Adaptations’ approaches to this scene reveal much about their interpretation of the novel’s Künstlerroman subplot in relation to its gender politics.12 On the surface, the 2006 BBC serial seems to emphasize Jane’s empowerment through her art. Yet in actuality, the production undermines her ability as a woman artist to disrupt patriarchal constructions and hierarchies. During the portfolio scene, Rochester is dismissive until he comes to Jane’s more bizarre creations, asking: ‘these are interesting . . . the ideas all yours?’ and ‘were you happy when you painted these?’ As Fanning correctly observes, such moments draw attention to the characters’ ‘emotional and sexual attraction’ and render Rochester more sympathetic by foregrounding his ‘interiority’ to ‘provide insight into his complicated psyche’ (“A Soul” 77). What Fanning does not consider is that the main function of Jane’s art is to add weight to Rochester’s characterization. Tellingly, Jane responds to Rochester with the reply: ‘I was fully occupied. I was not unhappy’. This response pathologizes Jane’s fantastical paintings, which become symptomatic of a depressed, perhaps disturbed, mind prior to Rochester. In comparison to the novel’s character, this televisual Jane does not enjoy the contemplation of her own genius or the pleasure of an independent interior life. By depriving her of this outlet, the adaptation exposes the shortcomings of its portrayal of female creativity and exemplifies postfeminist culture’s ambivalence towards female autonomy. Like the 1990s screen versions, Jane Eyre (2006) exemplifies how postfeminism often interprets nineteenth-century women’s writing or creativity in a manner that obscures any potential protofeminism. The silencing of nineteenth-century protofeminism occurs most obviously in the adaptation’s fourth and final episode. The closing shot of Jane’s family portrait ignores the ambivalence of the ending in Brontë’s novel to clarify the production’s retrogressive conceptualization of the woman artist (Figure 5). Jane’s picture resembles 1990s feminist filmmakers’ efforts to reconstruct the ‘lost’ histories of women’s creative achievements. Yet those films and the second-wave gynocriticism that inspired them took ‘the limits and paradoxes of female expression in a patriarchal culture’ as central themes (Brosh 147). Gilbert and Gubar, for example, identified subtextual dissatisfaction within Brontë’s seemingly happy ending (369). For instance, they drew attention to how Jane and Rochester retire to Ferndean, a place that Jane describes as ‘deep buried in a wood’ and ‘insalubrious’ (C. Brontë 366). Rochester, meanwhile, once explained that he could have cloistered Bertha in Ferndean ‘had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation’ prevented him (256). Unlike the literary characters, the 2006 versions of Jane and Rochester eventually reside in a cheerful house without negative connotations. To enhance her triumph, the border of Jane’s family portrait incorporates the natural imagery that has consistently symbolized Jane’s femininity and desire for romance. Both are now rendered fully achieved through her domestic bliss. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide The production’s final image demonstrates the triumph of Jane’s artistic empowerment and her domestic fulfilment. Source: Episode 4. Jane Eyre. Directed by Susannah White, BBC Worldwide, 2007. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide The production’s final image demonstrates the triumph of Jane’s artistic empowerment and her domestic fulfilment. Source: Episode 4. Jane Eyre. Directed by Susannah White, BBC Worldwide, 2007. Even more significantly, the portrait’s frame construes Jane’s creativity as existing seamlessly in relation to her highly domestic femininity. To that end, the tableau includes Jane’s cousins Diana (Annabel Scholey) and Mary (Emma Lowndes) to emphasize that she has reformed her original family while heightening the serial’s parallels with a retreatist narrative. The effect is heightened by the absent St John’s (Andrew Buchan) inclusion into the flowery border. This St John’s depiction curtails the subtextual discontent symbolized by his literary counterpart, who offers Jane the chance to accompany him to India as his wife and fellow missionary. Though she rejects him, his vision captivates her. When justifying her decision, she remains entranced by the idea of a life in which her ‘work, which had appeared so vague, so hopelessly diffuse’ takes ‘a definite form under his shaping hand’ (C. Brontë 344). Her fascination persists into her epilogue, which concludes with a description of the unmarried St John fulfilled with the ‘toil’ of his religious vocation and anticipating a glorious death (385). In Brontë’s novel, Jane’s preoccupation with St John’s fate and her artwork insinuate a suppressed desire to escape conventional gender roles and the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, these aspects of the novel are interpreted by the 2006 adaptation to obscure any indication of the character’s dissatisfaction with her retreat into domesticity. The television makers’ choices uphold the essentialist gender constructions subverted in the literary Jane Eyre’s epilogue. As their different versions of Jane retreat home, the 2006 and 2011 adaptations illustrate key shifts in the female postfeminist subject and the connotations of her creativity. Like the versions released in the 1990s, these postmillennial productions rely on the figure of the nineteenth-century creative woman to present their heroines as self-determined and autonomous. At the same time, the latest screen Jane Eyres deliberately domesticate the novel’s Künstlerroman subplot by obfuscating any conflict between a female author/artist’s creativity and traditional home-bound female gender roles. This denial contrasts with most previous texts, which acknowledged the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’s creativity. In Brontë’s novel, for instance, Jane’s artistic talent raises the possibility of the character pursuing pathways other than marriage to Rochester. A few years later, Gaskell recognized even as she sought to defuse the worrying implications arising from the seeming incompatibility between Brontë’s public and private lives. In the twentieth century, Gilbert and Gubar theorized that women writers produced literary works as a means of covertly critiquing their incarceration within ‘male houses and texts’ (85). Their work inspired a plethora of feminist filmmakers to explore the contentious relationship between women’s aspirations for creative fulfilment and heterosexual romance (which inevitably returned them to domesticity). Even in the 1990s adaptations of Jane Eyre, the heroines’ art briefly symbolizes their anger and potential opposition to patriarchal domination. In contrast to these earlier screen versions, Jane Eyre (2006) and Jane Eyre (2011) do not associate the woman artist with rebellion or rage. The characters’ artworks no longer function as an outlet for female anger at domestic imprisonment or confining gender roles, but rather as a means for the heroines to realize their entwined desires for domesticity and courtship. Jane Eyre (2006) and Jane Eyre (2011) foreground that postfeminist culture draws on a rich range of associations to equate women’s creativity with female empowerment and autonomy. Yet the heroines’ artistic agency has gradually become less unruly and been reconfigured to exist in harmony with domesticity and highly traditional constructions of femininity. These two most recent adaptations exemplify how postfeminist culture continually finds new ways to enmesh feminist and anti-feminist discourses together. CONCLUSION Contemporary Jane Eyre adaptations illustrate postfeminism’s changing attitudes towards nineteenth-century women’s creativity. During postfeminism’s long cultural reign, there has been an abundance of creative female characters—particularly authors—signifying ‘forms of female unruliness associated with various feminist theories’ (Thouaille 95). Unsurprisingly then, post-1990 Jane Eyre adaptations have emphasized the parallels between the mythical Brontë and their fictional heroines, seemingly embracing women’s desire for artistic expression. Nevertheless, the productions feature women artists whose rebellion and anger keep diminishing. Those qualities, however, were central to the second-wave theories that consolidated Brontë’s status as a subversive feminist icon in the 1960s and 1970s. By depriving the woman artist of her anger, these adaptations portray their versions of Jane/Brontë in a fashion that accords with how postfeminism conceives of women’s creativity and their creative labour. These portrayals usually feed on ‘often contradictory cultural readings of female autonomy, as [the female author’s] quest for self-definition is predominately set against the background of romance and the love interest tends to overshadow all other concerns’ (Haiduc 52). Of course, contemporary adaptations are following the example of the nineteenth-century novel when prioritizing the courtship plot. At the same time, postfeminist culture is newly willing to embrace the figure of the amateur female water-colourist and sketcher. The ascendance of the Jane/Brontë artist trope underscores that postfeminist culture tends to endorse creative work for women only when their labour is de-professionalized. To that end, postfeminist female creative labourers—especially authors—are frequently imagined as working within the home, a space that not only functions as a symbolic ‘site of retreat’ but has become one ‘to be mined for profit in the new economy’ (Dejmanee 127).13 Writing, for instance, has become ‘a sanctioned form of [women’s] work because it aids the self-making considered crucial for the appropriately feminized postfeminist female worker’ (Thoma 124). Like other forms of tolerated women’s labour, creative employment has been recoded as ‘nurturing and symbolically [as well as sometimes literarily] domestic’ to be ‘expressive of women’s essential femininity’ (Negra 86, 87). These trends are evident in the postmillennial adaptations of Jane Eyre in which the characters create art depicting their ‘natural’ femininities, particularly their inclination towards home and family. In this respect, postfeminist culture revives aspects of the Victorian iterations of the Brontë myth that celebrated the eldest Brontë sister as an Angel in the House. Those elements come to the fore in contemporary screen adaptations of Jane Eyre—especially the 2006 version—that insist on confining Jane/Brontë and her creativity within the boundaries of romance and an idealized home. As discussed, these interpretations of the novel constrain female agency even more than protofeminist nineteenth-century writings, which could acknowledge the tensions between women’s creative desires and domestic duties. This domestication of Jane/Brontë is not just typically postfeminist. These interpretations of Brontë’s novel represent a particularly worrying development because these adaptations are also quasi-biopics. I am sympathetic to Bronwyn Polaschek’s argument that postfeminist biopics have the potential to challenge ‘second-wave feminist narratives’ constructed around certain iconic women and, in some cases, do ‘evoke the tension between women’s desire for educational and career achievement and traditional notions of femininity’ (57).14 Nevertheless, these adaptations make extensive allusions to Brontë’s life to reveal postfeminist culture’s ‘difficulty with the very issue of women in the public sphere’ (Bingham 23). These productions lend evidence to Dennis Bingham’s contention that female-centred biopics predominantly present ‘marriage, not public or artistic accomplishment as a woman’s ultimate fulfilment’ (Bingham 222). Tellingly, these reimaginings of Brontë’s biography deny the existence of her creative ambition, one of the most unruly aspects of her authorial mythology. From Gaskell onwards, one consistent response to Brontë’s problematic desire for fame has been to transform her into an Angel of the House. Yet even in Gaskell’s Life, Brontë often ‘seems to be trying to break out of her saintly straitjacket’ and her ‘ambitious, self-assertive’ side emerges (Miller 75). But such qualities dissipate when Brontë is patterned on her most famous fictional character. To an extent, these screen versions merely reflect that Brontë could not conceive of the same type of creative ambition for her heroine that she could envision for herself. This limitation, however, is not Brontë’s alone. While contemporary productions often diverge considerably from Brontë’s novel to foreground the heroines’ artistic abilities, all fail to be radical enough to explore the possibility of these characters pursuing their creativity in any professional sense. These representations of Jane/Brontë indicate how postfeminist culture struggles to recognize women’s creative endeavours aside from when their artistry resembles nineteenth-century feminine accomplishments. The erasure of Brontë/Jane’s ambitions is not inevitable. Like Brontë, Austen is elided with her heroines in screen versions of her novels and the romance plots always take precedence. Yet Austen is treated differently in one small but crucial respect. In many instances, Austen adaptations use a range of techniques to construe their heroines as writers in some capacity and/or to position them as possessing a narratorial or authorial voice (Cartmell, “Becoming Jane” 152–53). Such approaches are used not only in Rozema’s Mansfield Park but also in less self-consciously radical reinterpretations of Austen’s novels. Far more reticent in comparison, Jane Eyre adaptations refrain from alluding to Brontë’s literary career and mainly choose to recognize the author’s creativity in the form of amateur watercolours and sketches. As Deborah Cartmell notes, in Austen adaptations ‘it is often the case that, rather than the author becoming her heroine (as in Jane Eyre), the heroine becomes the author, a version of Jane Austen, the writer’ (‘Becoming Jane” 161). Rozema’s Mansfield Park transforms Fanny (Frances O’Connor) into Austen in highly questionable ways. Nevertheless, this conflation between the writer’s life and art is a reminder and celebration of Austen’s literary success. Brontë’s transformation into Jane is far more concerning. Jane Eyre adaptations deny Brontë’s ambitions to write and obscure her desire to be a professional miniaturist. Consequently, the adaptations erase not only her literary achievements but also any trace of her creative ambitions. Cartmell observes that the ‘imposition of the biopic’ concurrently ‘centralises and decentralises the author’ in adaptations of Austen’s novels (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 64). In Brontë’s case, adaptations confuse her life and literary works in order to centralize the amateur woman artist while decentralizing the professional author. Brontë’s private accomplishments are made to overshadow her public achievements. These adaptations adumbrate how postfeminist culture continues to recalibrate its fascination with ‘female power and desire while consistently placing these within firm limits’ (Negra 4). On one level, contemporary film and television versions of Jane Eyre are keen to celebrate female creativity because it is a symbol of ‘safe rebellion’ that signposts an awareness of feminist discourses (Ascheid). Even so, these productions contain the woman writer and artist so that her work remains solely an expression of individual autonomy within private domesticity. In particular, the postmillennial versions offer a distinct contrast with Brontë’s novel and Gaskell’s biography, both of which expressed conflicted views about creative women’s entry into public life. In comparison to those Victorian works, the contemporary adaptations increasingly aim to neutralize any ambivalence, clarifying the highly adaptable nature of postfeminism’s contradictory fascination with and hostility towards female creativity. Suturing feminist and anti-feminist ideas together, these adaptations exemplify how postfeminist culture is simultaneously indebted to but also seeks the ‘undoing’ of feminism (Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?” 613). This ‘undoing’ takes many forms, not least a return to gender essentialism. This phenomenon can be witnessed in postfeminism’s resurrection of myths or ‘“truths” about femininity that circulated in earlier [pre-feminist] eras—women are bitches, golddiggers, “dumb blondes,” spinsters, shrews, and sluts’ (Negra 10). As the postmillennial adaptations of Jane Eyre demonstrate, postfeminism is also enthusiastically reviving the myths of the amateur female artist and the Angel in the House. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have re-written and revised this article many times. I am indebted to the friends who helped me refine my argument or sent me the books, articles, chapters, and other materials that were otherwise inaccessible, particularly after my exit from academia. Thank you: Emily Cock, Paloma Jeria Domínguez, Marine Furet, Hannah Hammad, Siriol McAvoy, Helen McKenzie, Alida Payson, Antonija Primorac, and Marie-Alix Thouaille. Lastly, I am especially grateful to Ann Heilmann for supervising the doctoral thesis chapter on which this article is based and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my PhD research. Footnotes 1 Influential research that focuses on the cultural afterlives of the Brontës’ works and the family’s myth includes: Kaplan, Miller, Pyrhönen, Qi and Padgett, Regis and Wynne Charlotte Brontë, Rubik and Mettinger-Schartmann, Shachar, Stoneman. Work that specifically examines film and television versions of Jane Eyre includes: Chitwood, Cox, Ellis and Kaplan, Fanning “A Soul”, Fanning “Many Faces”, Griggs, Holmes, Hopkins, Ingham, Jordan, Kapurch, Mann, Parkinson, Sconce, White, Winnifrith, Wootton “Picturing”. 2 Scholarship on Austen on screen includes: Brosh, Cartmell “Becoming Jane”, Cartmell Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Haiduc, North, Wootton “Revisiting”. 3 Although Brontë’s novel was regularly adapted for the screen in the silent era and in many national contexts, this article focuses on English language versions from the sound era onwards. Of those productions, I have been unable to view: Jane Eyre (NBC, 1939); Jane Eyre (CBS, 1952); and Jane Eyre (CBS, 1961). For the most recent list of Jane Eyre screen adaptations, see Kimberley Braxton’s appendix in Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (2017). 4 Jane Eyre (Christy Cabanne, 1934)’s Jane (Virginia Bruce) keeps a diary and puts on musical performances for Rochester (Colin Clive). In Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1944) and Jane Eyre (CBS, 1949), the heroines (Joan Fontaine and Mary Sinclair) occasionally tinkle on the piano but never produce visual art. A few years later, the heroine (Daphne Slater) in Jane Eyre (BBC, 1956) has a sketchbook in which she draws many depictions of Thornfield Hall. Yet Jane (Joan Elan) seeks no creative expression whatsoever in Jane Eyre (NBC, 1957). 5 For detailed discussion of Galer’s process, see Han’s interview. 6 Photographs of the ‘Penny Bank Museum’ in the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s library show that the Brontë siblings’ art was on display in 1895. Brontë and her siblings’ artworks can still be seen in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. 7 In particular, ad feminam attacks have tended to denigrate the author by attributing her literary inspiration and achievements to romantic or sexual frustration On reading Villette (1853), for instance, William Makepeace Thackeray claimed: ‘I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with’ (297). 8 As Liora Brosh has discussed, for example, the highly influential 1944 adaptation reinscribes the ‘novel within a maternally centred domestic ideology, an ideology the novel goes out of its way to resist’ (60). 9 In Brontë’s novel, Brocklehurst demands that another pupil be shorn but the 1944 film has him (Henry Daniell) publicly hack away Helen’s (Elizabeth Taylor) hair. 10 According to one of her schoolmates: ‘[w]henever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, [Brontë] went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her “what she saw in it.” She could always see plenty, and explained it very well’ (Gaskell 130–31). 11 A similar shot does occur in Jane Eyre (1973). Nevertheless, this adaptation does not develop the theme of Jane’s development as an artist to the same extent as post-1990 productions. 12 The ITV/A&E telefilm Jane Eyre omits Jane’s watercolours from her first meeting with Rochester, a decision that reflects its lack of interest in her artistic identity. In Zeffirelli’s 1996 film, most of Brontë’s dialogue is retained and Jane offers several spirited rejoinders to Rochester. Nevertheless, Jane never mentions the rewards of painting but expresses mostly frustration with her technical limitations before—as in other scenes—Rochester gives a final and authoritative judgment of her work. 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TI - Picturing Charlotte Brontë’s Artistic Rebellion? Myths of the Woman Artist in Postfeminist Jane Eyre Screen Adaptations
JF - Adaptation
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apz034
DA - 2020-07-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/picturing-charlotte-bront-s-artistic-rebellion-myths-of-the-woman-tzMN5EHF74
SP - 240
EP - 269
VL - 13
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -