Contemplation on Romantic Love
I am sitting on my mom’s couch, watching the 2011 Jane Eyre and wondering, what made Jane fall in love with Mr. Rochester? I have never understood how people could fall in love so easily in the periods in which these movies take place. What is it about these movie’s content and dialogue - outdated as it is - makes me hopeful that there is something worth sticking around for?
But as I sat on my couch filling out my sudoku about forty-seven minutes in, it clicked for me. Maybe all we want is to be told by someone else “what we are” and what we feel in a world constantly alienating us from ourselves. We want someone to reflect the things we don’t say, back to us without ever having to tell them. Someone like Mr. Rochester who says, “You are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. For I can see in you the glance of a curious sort of bird at the closed-set bars of a cage, a vivid restless captive. When put free it would soar - cloud high.” ((Jane Eyre -2011), 47:26) This I conclude is what makes Jane fall in love.
Another example I’ve found and come back to often is in Moonstruck when Cher calls Nicolas Cage “a wolf”, which makes him (iconically) flip the table and “take her to the bed.” He later says, “That doesn’t make her a lamb”, and that this is enough of a foundation to fall in love and break off a marriage proposal?!? This must only sound crazy to someone who has never been in love romantically.
Once we know that this feeling is reciprocated, this must also be what makes us stay. And when the illusion of being known is not upheld and nurtured, it fades and you are left with the only thing you had before - yourself. I find that we want this from even our friends, we come to them and give them our problems and like them more or less based on the advice they provide us with. But this I conclude, must be what makes Jane Eyre fall in love(from the perspective of an inexperienced audience) so easily with Mr. Rochester.
If you haven’t watched I highly recommend both movies. Jane Eyre is also on my reading list for 2024. In 2023 I fell in love with leading female characters who are witty and know how to hold their own. This book and movie appear to fall into this category beautifully.