JANE EYRE
It is primarily this factor that makes a modern stage adaptation of Jane Eyre so difficult. Whether inadvertently or not, Calvit’s script glides over the uneasy ramifications of acting upon feelings rather than reason–the cornerstone of Romanticism, open nowadays only to the very rich, the very poor, and the very young–and concentrates on the most durable aspect of Bronte’s novel: the love story between Jane Eyre, an orphan girl and later a governess trapped in a life of genteel poverty and powerlessness, and Edward Rochester, a dissolute second-born son saddled with an insane wife and the bastard child of a youthful indiscretion. Calvit’s mistake is in thinking that the relationship between these two is analogous to, say, a secretary marrying her boss. The societal barriers that separate Jane and Edward, and the willfulness required to surmount these boundaries, have no equivalent in our culture (which is what democracy is all about).
