“Reader, I married him” is the low-key climax of Charlotte Brontë’s gothic, proto-feminist novel Jane Eyre.
In a new “erotic re-imagining” of the book called Jane Eyre Laid Bare, the climaxes are of an altogether different nature. It’s more a case of: “Reader, I ravished his candlesticks, perved on his private bondage orgies, then spent 77 pages rogering him silly.”
Released by Pan Macmillan in Australia this week, the publication is the latest in a long line of steamy novels billed as mummy porn.
Book sales suggest these texts are indeed popping female readers’ corks – despite the fact that the prose is decidedly flaccid. (Most are guilty of 50 shades of bad writing at the bare bottomed minimum.)
Like R-rated revamps of other classics such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Jules Verne’s seamen-filled Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jane Eyre Laid Bare involves a dumbing down and an (alleged) sexing up of the original.
Eve Sinclair – the author listed after Brontë on the front cover – wastes no time on literary foreplay. She has the novel’s straight-laced heroine orgasmically exploiting the agreeable jiggling of Mr Rochester’s horse-drawn cart in the opening pages.
The erotic encounters that follow come fast and furiously. Actually, make that fast and stereotypically. Aching loins, trembling buttocks, willing tunnels… At one point Mr Rochester’s throbbing member is described as busting loose from his britches like a “great sea serpent… attempting to rise up and break free from the deep”.
Oh, dear. Where are those harpoon-happy Japanese whalers when you need them?
We all know that the slapstick inelegance of the average sex act makes it virtually impossible to translate this sweaty endeavour into suave fiction. But the clunky pornification of Bronte’s masterpiece is particularly objectionable because the novel in its virgin state already sizzled.
Not because of the quaintly antiquated mentions of muffs, black beaver bonnets and the joys of Madame Pierrot’s “fluent tongue”; but because it is full of explicit encounters involving the sexiest organ in the human body – the brain.
Like the fiery verbal jousting between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the feisty intellectual combat between the self-possessed Jane and the Byronic Mr Rochester are extraordinarily arousing.
Having them shag each other senseless every second strips them of all their smouldering understatement, rendering them indistinguishable from the generic throng of rent-a-genital stars in other pornography.
At one particularly low point, Sinclair throws historical continuity to the hounds and has the master of Thornfield Hall give his governess an oh-so-twentieth-century Brazilian pubic trim.
Reader, it’s unutterably wretched.
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