{"id":4851,"date":"2026-10-14T06:06:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T14:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4851"},"modified":"2026-10-13T16:18:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T00:18:27","slug":"considering-mr-rochester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2026\/10\/14\/considering-mr-rochester\/","title":{"rendered":"Considering Mr. Rochester"},"content":{"rendered":"

I may have too much time on my hands. In the last week or so I have watched seven different filmed versions of Jane Eyre<\/em>, trying to see how each of them handled the question of Mr. Rochester.<\/p>\n

If you’re paying any attention at all, Edward Fairfax Rochester is a problem. He hides his wife in the attic for fifteen years. \u00a0His pleasure-seeking lifestyle on the continent does not command admiration. He is sarcastic–even snarky–to the people around him. And, of course, he attempts to trick his governess into marrying him bigamously. He is not a good guy.<\/p>\n

And yet, when the book is done and Jane admits, “Reader, I married him,” I am happy for them both.<\/p>\n

Why is Rochester a bad guy? Let’s assume that Charlotte Bront\u00e9’s version of the story is made of truth all the way through (Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em> not withstanding). \u00a0If you work the text backward, Rochester is 21 when he is sent, by his father and older brother, to marry Bertha Mason in Jamaica. It’s a purely mercenary action on the parts of Rochester pere<\/em> and older fils<\/em>: they need the significant money that marriage will provide and they don’t care who he’s marrying to get it. Young Edward is a sacrifice on the altar of Mammon. And the Masons (according to the text) have their own reason to hurry the marriage forward–Bertha’s Creole mother is mad, and they suspect some tendencies in that direction in bride. So this 21-year-old kid is sent, under orders, to marry a woman who is a stranger to him. She’s beautiful, and he’s naive enough to think he’s lucked out.
\nThe text doesn’t tell us how long after the marriage Bertha’s madness really begins to show–or when Edward’s father and brother die, leaving him providentially in charge of the money and property Let’s assume he’s around 25. He has lived with his wife in Jamaica for four years; perhaps there was some real affection and tenderness. When he becomes the master of Thornfield he returns to England and brings Bertha with him. If (again, as the text suggests) she is by this time displaying signs of instability, why wouldn’t he leave her in Jamaica? Maybe her illness has not yet become too florid, or maybe the move to England has exacerbated it. \u00a0But back in England she is unstable, and he cannot divorce her–the only circumstance under which madness was a cause for divorce (which required an Act of Parliament) was if the wife had been demonstrably mad before the wedding. So he’s stuck with a wife who is deteriorating, and a powerful feeling that everyone–his father and brother, Bertha’s family, the law, everyone has stacked the deck against him.<\/p>\n

Here’s the first place where “Edward Fairfax Rochester is a villain” breaks down. He could easily have gone for a “madhouse divorce”–that is, locked his wife up in a madhouse, where she would be at the mercy of the keepers. Under the legal principle of couverture<\/em>, once a woman was married she lost all legal rights to her property, and her husband could consign her to a madhouse, walk away whistling, and do anything except marry again. The fact that Rochester goes to the trouble of keeping Bertha in his own house and hiring a minder for her (Grace Poole may be given to drink and not exactly a charmer, but she is familiar and, in her way, kind to her patient) speaks in his favor; she could have easily been consigned to a snake-pit and become part of the asylum’s one-shilling tour of the crazy people.<\/p>\n

Once he has Bertha installed upstairs he goes off to the continent, soothing his bitter heart with a succession of expensive opera dancers are returning to England only when Thornfield needs attention. But he adopts Adele Varens, the daughter of a dancer he had an affair with; he provides for her, even brings her lavish gifts when he visits. He’s not a guy who neglects his responsibilities, even if they don’t give him joy. Plus, all his servants and tenants speak well of him; there’s a hint that his father (and likely his brother) were not good stewards of the estate, but Rochester is. That naive 25-year-old is still in there somewhere, trying to do right.<\/p>\n

Then Jane, hired as governess to his ward, comes to Thornfield. And he sees<\/em> her. By which I mean that, out of all the people that Jane has encountered in her life, he is the first one to see her, acknowledge her worth, her intelligence, and her integrity. She is the polar opposite of his beautiful, troubled wife. He falls for her, as she falls for him. He’s also 15 years her senior, with power and money, a smart, sarcastic, bitter man. Jane is, for him, a sort of redemptive talisman. I don’t mean he doesn’t love her, but he also contrasts her to the increasingly deranged woman in the attic to whom he is married. And he decides–unforgivably–to pull a fast one and take for himself the consolation he has been yearning for for more than a decade: Jane herself. He knows Jane well enough to know that she won’t live with him outside of marriage. So he tries to trick her into marrying him. And when that fails, he throws a pretty unflattering temper tantrum. Jane runs away from him and the temptation he represents, and he is left where he began: with the madwoman in the attic, and the wreck of his life (only now everyone in the neighborhood knows that he’s married–he won’t be able to pull off that ruse again, even if he wants to).<\/p>\n

I watched the 1943 film with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine; t<\/span>he 1970 TV movie with George C. Scott and Susannah York; t<\/span>he 1983 TV miniseries with Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke; the 1996 film with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg; the 1997 TV film with Ciaran Hinds and Samantha Morton; the 2006 TV miniseries with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson; and the 2011 film with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska. I have sort of been soaking in Jane Eyre.<\/em><\/p>\n

Most versions are okay or better.* Among other things, in most cases the actors playing Rochester are much too handsome. There were two versions that really stood out to me. One is the 1997 one with Ciaran Hinds and Samantha Morton. When his bigamous plans for Jane go awry, Hinds’s Rochester is almost unhinged–and yet, when he confronts Bertha, there’s tenderness \u00a0and kindness, as if he remembers the beginning of that marriage before everything went wrong. But he’s also petulant, like a spoiled kid who has promised himself a treat and is mad as hell that he’s not going to get it. It’s almost an embarrassing performance–but that works for Rochester too.<\/p>\n

The adaptation I like best, in the end, is the 1983 Timothy Dalton\/Zelah Clarke version. It is relatively faithful to the book, and despite the fact that Dalton doesn’t look right (way too good looking) he has a sarcastic intelligence and wit (he and Jane exchange some zingers, and you get to see Jane’s pleasure at bringing her own wit to match his). And when his marriage is exposed, there’s a nice bit: he takes the clergyman, lawyer, and Jane to meet his wife, and when Bertha attacks him, he and Grace Poole tie her to her bed; Dalton has the air of a man who has done this task many times. He’s not cruel to her: like Adele and his servants and tenants on his land, she is a dependent to be cared for, even if her existence has destroyed the last hope he had. And when she gets out of her room and sets the house on fire, he tries very hard to save her, at the risk of his own life.<\/p>\n

Mr. Rochester is not a good guy. He’s just better than all the other men in the book (the contrast of Rochester with the Adonis-like, cold and calculatingly virtuous St. John Rivers is striking). At the end, coming to grips with losing Jane (and his wife, his home, his eyesight and (in the book) the use of one hand) he is the man he was meant to be.<\/p>\n

__________
\n*The Orson Welles version, written by Aldous Huxley, is very weird, and almost every version makes changes or omissions that I didn’t quite get. In the Welles version, St. John Rivers is the doctor at Lowood Institution! and I swear Jane is gone from Thornfield after the wedding for maybe a week–in some other versions the separation lasts a year or more, which makes more sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I may have too much time on my hands. In the last week or so I have watched seven different filmed versions of Jane Eyre, trying to see how each of them handled the question of Mr. Rochester. If you’re paying any attention at all, Edward Fairfax Rochester is a problem. He hides his wife […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-essays","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4851"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4897,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4851\/revisions\/4897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}