Jane struggles to untangle feelings of lust from feelings of love. Jane Eyre does not contain explicit sex, but it does have an earthiness that shocked its Victorian readers. However, I suspect an even stronger reason adults might object to calling Jane Eyre a YA novel is because it explores female desire so openly. After all, Jane Eyre is great literature! There is plenty of great literature on the YA shelf, I assure you, and I challenge anyone who doesn’t believe me to read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation by MT Anderson, or Exit, Pursued by a Bear by EK Johnston, or Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick, to name a few in a list that could take up my entire word count for this article. I know that many people who don’t read YA will balk at the suggestion that Jane Eyre is a YA novel. Jane Eyre, who has never seen a city, who has barely spoken to a man, is the quintessential young adult in this regard everything is new to her.
Young adult writing is often about firsts –first sparks of love, first kisses, first great disappointments. The fact that Jane is a “maturing youth,” taking her first steps into a wider world, makes her story particularly resonant for young adult readers. “In those days I was young, and all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give.” Right before she meets Mr Rochester, the man who will become her great love, Jane is on a secluded path when she is frightened by a sound: Jane Eyre is a book about finding one’s identity in the face of such adversity it is a book about coming of age In fact, she uses the tension of this balance again and again to give her story energy. Wasn’t an 18-year-old fully an adult by the standards of the day? Charlotte Brontë writes of a character balanced between childhood and maturity. But is Jane a young adult? some might ask.
0 kommentar(er)
