What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based off the novel by Charlotte Bronte and adapted by Sumner Locke Elliot. The Studio One adaptation stars Mary Sinclair, Charlton Heston and Viola Roche, Ethel Remey and JoanWetmore. It was directed by Franklin Schaeffner. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, December 12, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open with the titular Jane Eyre (Sinclair) leaving the Lowood School for Girls, now a full-grown woman. The old woman at the gate seems pretty angry with her, calling her wicked and willfull. Jane ends up at a big drafty house, where she is to serve as governess for a young French girl named Adele. Overseeing this are the housemaids, the kindly Mrs. Fairfax (Remey) and the cautious Grace Poole (Wetmore.) They seem to get along, but spooky things are afoot.
A few minutes later, Jane is spontaneously monologuing at night about how much she loves the house when she hears some creepy laughter. She opens the door, and is yelled at by the Grace. She is told to never enter that part of the house. The next day, the master of the house has unpredictably arrived. This is, of course, the surly Mr. Rochester (played by a Grinch-like Charlton Heston), who mostly seems interested in whether or not Jane can play the spinet. He asks Jane to eat with him, much to the displeasure of the crazy women looking down from above. He tells her that the daughter is not his own, but rather one he adopted after her frivolous mother ran off to Italy. He then begins to get all angry and angsty, and Jane quietly leaves.
The camera stops us from seeing Rochester’s face for a while, creating suspense and emphasizing that Jane is continually subject to others’ glare
When he’s passed out from drink, we see the older woman we’ve seen previously holding a candle and creeping downstairs. She lights the carpet on fire, and smoke starts to go up. Jane wakes in the middle of the night, and finds said candle on her doorstep. She goes down to the smoky parlour and wakes up Rochester, then helps him put out the fire. He tells her not to tell anyone about the incident, despite her freaking out and him nearly dying.
After the act break, Rochester is entertaining two saucy tarts (one of them Roche in the shrunk-down role of Blanche Ingram) when Jane and Adele appear at the door, the picture of domesticity. She heads inside, but doesn’t fit in. She then tells Mrs. Fairfax that she must leave, because she loves Rochester. He comes out to apologize for his rude guests. He tells the girls that he’s lost most of his fortune earlier this year, and they immediately lose interest.
Adele is distraught at the news that her nanny is leaving. Rochester, meanwhile, just wants to know what he’s done to alienate her. He tells her that he’s very attached to her, in grisly language. Finally, Rochester confesses his love for plain Jane, and asks her to marry him, and she says yes.
Four weeks later, they hold the wedding. A Mr. Mason arrives from the West Indies, wanting to see Rochester. Jane comes down the aisle (okay, it’s just out into their backyard) in her wedding dress, but all is not well. Crazy Bertha is watching on from the window. Mason interrupts at the appropriate time, proclaiming that Rochester was already married to Bertha Mason in Jamaica. Bertha, it turns out, is the crazy woman in the attic, and Heston intones that God is punishing him. (This would be a go-to throughout his career.)
After a pitch for a Westinghouse electric blanket, Rochester summons Bertha down from her attic. She shrieks and lunges for Rochester’s throat — an understandable reaction for someone who’s been stuck in an attic for fifteen years. He does his poor-me routine again, and Mason takes off. This leads Jane to stand by a tree moodily, doing a voice-over about how she is like the wind. She hears Rochester’s voice, and decides to come back to him.
During her not-clearly-explained absence, the west wing of the house has burned down. As a result, Bertha is dead, and Rochester is hobbled and blinded. Despite this, she is still in love with him, and promises never to leave again. I swear, this felt like slightly less of a deus ex machina in the book. The closing credits advertise an adaptation of Mary Poppins which is sadly unavailable.
What I thought: Jane Eyre is probably my favourite Victorian novel, although that’s not such a difficult accomplishment. (In general, I find English fiction from this period kind of trite and parochial compared to what was happening in countries like France and Russia — but that’s neither here nor there.) So I was looking forward to this episode of Studio One. This episode is fairly accomplished, and certainly not a bad attempt at the material given the limitations of the format, but it left me feeling a little indifferent.
In order to fit a one-hour running time, Studio One had to cut many of my favourite parts from the novel, like Jane’s childhood as a rebellious and inquisitive girl or the strange interlude at a house with strangers who turn out to be her cousins. Elliot’s script instead narrows the focus to the novel’s most famous aspect, the romance between Jane and Rochester. This has the effect of making Jane’s character rather flat — she’s mostly a passive participant in this version of the story, not the strong-willed woman we hear about in the first few minutes.
Nevertheless, there’s clearly a reason why this romance has been so successful and fascinating for so many generations. For a male audience, the story provides a moral patina on ditching your old wife with problems for a hot young one. (And indeed, with Charlton Heston in the role of Rochester, the TV version at time risks becoming his story.) And from feminine perspective, Jane Eyre provides a Pamela-esque fantasy of class transformation, with the “plain Jane” bagging a handsome nobleman. Such fantasies still remain popular in the British imagination — just ask Harry Potter.
In addition to the romantic appeal, this was a story that much of the viewing audience would have already been familiar with, either from their English classes or from the film version released earlier in the decade (starring a reluctant Orson Welles as Rochester.) From this perspective, it’s okay that the script doesn’t quite hang together in isolation: the viewers would be able to fill in the blanks, and just enjoy seeing their favourite scenes re-enacted in the comfort of their own home. For Studio One, it was also another canonical text to add to their prestige and prove the viability of television as a means of presenting fine art and literature.
Jane Eyre is also a text that has been subject to frequent interpretation and reinterpretation within English literary studies. One of the most famous works of feminist criticism is Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which focuses on the really abominable way the text treats Rochester’s first wife Bertha. Jane’s impiety is fine for a young woman, but Bertha’s fate — trapped in an attic, loathed and disregarded by her husband, and ultimately consigned to a grizzly off-screen death — is what becomes of women who go too far in their transgressions against patriarchal society.
In most readings of the novel, there is also a colonial aspect to the villification of Grace, whose origins in Jamaica are textually linked to her madness. In the Studio One version Grace is imagined as a white woman, so this aspect of the source material has been de-emphasized. Nevertheless, Grace remains profoundly Other, a monstrous face in the window overlooking the happy domestic scenes of Jane, Rochester, and their surrogate child Adele. She’s barely even a character, just an obstacle the more neurotypical characters have to overcome. So yeah, it’s not the most sensitive portrayal of mental illness, and the Studio One adaptation does nothing to make things any better.
This would be Charlton Heston’s second appearance on Studio One, after “Of Human Bondage”, another literary adaptation in which he played a Byronic antihero. (We’ve also previously seen Viola Roche in Suspense.) For the role of Rochester, in which he needs to project more masculine confidence than sympathetic frailty, he’s perfect. I would imagine that Worthington Miner was hoping that he could make Heston a regular feature of the program, maybe even making him the kind of dramatic star that TV didn’t really have in this period.
For all the competence of this adaptation, and Heston’s charisma, it still feels a little hollow. So much of what I liked about Bronte’s novel was Jane’s strong, feisty narrative voice, and that’s almost completely absent here. As a result, this seems like less of a story and more of a sequence of events without much of a perspective.
Coming up next: We return to less highbrow fare with yet another episode in The Life of Riley.
The Eternal Couch Potato 