The Iron Maiden

This novel smells of childhood... of home of a lovely granny... of garden filled with Gillyflowers and Balsams... of peace and pie with blueberries 'n cream... you're only eleven... no children books were found in this house, and you, standing on tiptoe, reach the top shelf of bookcase and pull from a long line the one with most beautiful and girly cover (in white-pink with graceful letters and painted lace)... turning the pages in curiosity, snatching a glance "of what?", and, convinced that the story is "about girl" and, most important, this is "a book about love", you're starting to read without fear that someone will see and you'll be banned... because in this house you're allowed to do everything...

Contrary to the habit of "swallow" at first only the most interesting and then return to the boring details, you read every word not afraid of falling down on you funny old-fashioned dialogues and strange literary hooks, one of which ["reader, I married him"] is remembered once and for all...

It's so easy for you to imagine Jane temporarily turned into a moustached old Turk in a red fez with a hookah in his mouth reading the novel while sitting on the windowsill of a large Victorian mansion... a lot of children's coffins waiting for the pale girls exhausted with fever... quite a Dickens' character Mr. Brocklehurst with his promising fire and brimstone, prepared for everyone, including you, a most naughty girl in the world… and matured tiny little thing Jane, who so much reminds you a boxer able to hold the attacks so well... and beautiful nervous Mr. Rochester... Of course, he's beautiful... absolutely!.. It just can't be otherwise! It's just Jane didn't understand something about him or just didn't want to confess to her fellow readers that he's as handsome as he's intelligent and passionate... in the end, it's possible to understand her... the stories where beautiful wealthy gentlemen fall in love with good, but totally unattractive girls doesn't seem to be true at all...

A week later, finding you with a flushed faced and eyes swollen from crying, terrified granny wondered what was so distressing in a story with "happy ending":

- She's stupid! Stupid!! Stupid this Jane Eyre! He loved her so much! And she just run away... left him... He cried and begged... I hate her! Hate her!.. And let she go with her Rivers to Africa and teach poor blacks how to pray and how to blow their nose… Or it would be better if Edward no longer loved her and cast her out when she decided to come back!

Childish grief is inconsolable... Turned into pieces it stays somewhere in your mind till these days and, despite the fact that you grew up and, like Jane Eyre, have learned how to hold the attacks such as "right and left hook to the jaw", which life so much like to deal, the question "why there's So much of Such women" remained unanswered for you...

This book did not become favorite one in the series "Sentiments of the Age of Innocence"... A bad boy Heathcliff excited imagination and made beating heart flutter much more... But the trace of mysterious Mr. Rochester of Thornfield Hall remained in memory for a long time... Numerous on-screen personifications made you to come back... to be charmed with charismatic humor of the one, laugh at odd gloominess of the second, wondering about free, bordering with vulgarity demeanor of the third one... but "yours"... just "your own Edward", whom you would believe and for whom you would be ready to go in dress or tatters, under wedding rice or clumps of dirt anywhere-doesn't-matter-just-be-together was still unfound...

However, even in the most hopeless stories everything could change if there's Someone who can step in at the proper time and set it right... to prove that even into the image covered with paper dust and rubbed to blindness with dozen of re-filming one can breathe soul... for this very girl that once thought up for herself a beautiful master of Thornfield Hall there was only one chance in a thousand to meet him again after many long years... But if someone lights the stars in the sky that means someone needs it...

This film is like menthol milk, which doesn't exist, but one so much would like to invent it for life could become a little bit tastier and more desired... It fondles and saddens at the same time, and phrase said by one of the characters of Francois Truffaut's old film "La sirene de Mississippi" can explain its charm like no other: "You're so beautiful that your beauty brings pain..."

But can the dainty menthol milk turn out bitter?.. absolutely... if woman's strong little hand will add this bitterness to it... It will stick into loving heart a needle and will be turning it in a wound with care until the pain of the one who owns this hand will go... The pain of adult Jane for a habit of considering herself imperfect... for fear of being deceived... for injured women's self-esteem... for scalding jealousy and ruined expectancies...

Try it along with her... this long-suffered inexorable warrior of an endless army of not very beautiful and not very lucky women... attempting, but incapable of forgiving… giving excruciating pain to others because their own cup is overflowed... almost giving up hope... receiving a grant for happiness and refusing it of her own free will to save precious and infinitely loved "I"...

But it is really all so high, deep and severely?.. because each bottom has its own backside... one can make a hole: there, on the other side, everybody is walking upside down... it's like you just flew, like Alice Liddell, the whole earth throughout... and women's pride, which knows no pity, so often resembles a banal fear of being not desired enough… uncertainty of power over the "object of her affections"... endless torments of jealousy to all the "other" life, which will be surrounding this very "object" and with one she didn.t want to share him...

None of the previous adaptations of the Charlotte Bronte’s novel did not raise these questions... everything was scary... complicated... simple... to the full satisfaction of all parties...

She came... She fell in love... He fell in love... He tried to win her setting the naive snares of jealousy... he made a proposal... she cannot refuse... they were engaged... they were half-married... he turned out to be married to a crazy depraved woman that he hid in his attic… she did not forgive him and left... she suffered and almost get married to another man… she got rich… she realized that he's the best... she came back... he turned out to be blind, one-handed, lame cripple, but widowed... she decided to be his eyes, hands and legs... he cannot refuse...

Reader, she will marry him...

She will give birth to his children... They will be living happily ever after and will die in one day some time, surrounded with numerous children and grandchildren...

Romantic gothic of these stories and passionate play of the actors again and again made audience cry with tears of sadness while watching it and with happy tears in the end, when the creators demonstrated to them the happy grown Fairfax-Rochester family in hazy distance or quite clear...

And everyone, calmed and pacified, went drink tea and talk about "how it's good that they're together after all, nothing else matter..."

And no one expected that from childhood's old tale may be born quite a different story, which will make them think...

to be continued...