Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We watched one of the many versions I have of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre last night.  The one with Michael Fassbinder and Mia Waishowka.  I love how the landscape is so much the main character in this film, and the sense the viewer gets of the isolation, harshness of the weather and land, and the  desolation of it all.  The two leads are extraordinary, very passionate and the chemistry is incendiary.  I hate this Rodchester more than the others, and yet, I feel for him more as well.  Jamie Bell, as Saint John, is deep and contradictory and vivid.  He has a bit of the bully Jane experienced with her cousin as a child and Lowood School when she's older.  Yet he is not the bully Rodchester is, or reckless and brimming with passion.  And passion is what Jane seeks, to match her own.  She has her own inner darkness, and Rodchester speaks to that side of her, which heretofore has never been allowed out after being sent to Lowood.  They are deeply flawed, deeply complicated beings who understand each other.  The whole book is messy, gothic and anger inducing, and this film catches that tone perhaps better than others.  It may not be a perfect novel, but it is MY favorite novel, even now, many decades after first reading it as a child.  Jane Eyre is determined, and her tenacity is what attracts me.  She respects herself.  Many years ago, in the British Museum, I gazed on the handwritten first page of the novel, in Bronte's own hand, and I felt attached to her with my heart.  I still do.