When Lawrence “returns to tenderness” with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he also turns to Jane Eyre, apparently determined to show that Jane should have been mated to the wrathful Heathcliff rather than buried in Victorian niceness with the safely crippled Rochester. Lawrence’s rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s story reveals that what really disturbed him about Jane Eyre was the taming of Jane through resolution of her rage, not the maiming of Rochester through which her rage was resolved.
The figure who represents Jane’s rage is given an important role in the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, John Thomas and Lady Jane. David Higdon has convincingly demonstrated that Lawrence’s Bertha Coutts, the estranged wife of the gamekeeper, was derived from Bertha Mason. Their lives, habits, and attitudes are remarkably similar, and Bertha Coutts is even described as being “like a mad-woman.” But, while Jane Eyre tells us very little that can excite sympathy for Bertha Mason, Connie blames Parkin’s insufficiencies for driving her rival “evil-mad.” Connie’s musings about the marriage-maddened Bertha recall Cathy Earnshaw, who also “fought against even the love in her own soul”. Lawrence, like Emily Bronte (and Jean Rhys), finds the explanation of the wife’s insanity in her situation as wife—in the situation of any wife—subject through marriage to the demands of a patriarchal order that denies her femaleness. Moreover, Lawrence, like Brontë, keeps this specter of female rage alive.
If Bertha stands in for Cathy’s angry ghost, Connie is no civilized and repressed Catherine Linton. Like Cathy (or Jane in her childhood), the Connie of John Thomas and Lady Jane exults in her own rage. Her anger, again like that of both heroines, arises from her condition as a woman.“She [is] angry, angry at the implied insult to womanhood” not once but often throughout the novel. Like Cathy and Jane, she finds an angry, rebellious lover, but unlike them, she understands that his fury is “part of her own revolt.” The intermingling of angry voices destroys the false “paradise of wealth and well-being” available to Connie at Wragby Hall, but destroys nothing in the two lovers except the artificial genders built up around their true selves by society. Yet the Eden is still contained within the male order; its existence seems to depend on open female revolt against it.
Border Disturbances: DH Lawrence’s Fiction and the Feminism of Wuthering Heights (Carol Siegel)
Lawrence escreveria Jane Eyre com um Foda-se o Rochester, vou me embora com Heathcliff? Hahaha, sensacional. A verdade é que E.M. Forster ou Virginia Woolf fariam melhor, algo como Foda-se o Rochester, vou me embora com a babá francesa! no caso do Forster ou vou me embora com meu bebê, o que Woolf realmente fez em Orlando. Há duas teorias pairando por aí em relação ao Maurice do Forster, uma de que este foi mesmo a grande inspiração para O Amante de Lady Chatterley (meu Lawrence favorito, diga-se), embora aquele só tenha sido publicado postumamente, talvez Lawrence o lera diretamente do Forster e basicamente fez sua própria versão heterossexual. A outra teoria é que Forster com o passar dos anos foi mudando o seu manuscrito de Maurice e basicamente o transformou na versão homossexual de Chatterley, o que pouco importa, pois ambas obras são primas.
Nota: Será que posso pedir para os figurinistas nunca mais colocarem um chapéu verde de leprechaun no Fassbender? Isso faz rir, pô.
Quixotando 