Re-reading Jane Eyre

I recently read Jane Eyre for the third time, and as usually happens with a re-reading, some moments which had previously passed me by were suddenly vivid and powerful.  Helen Burns, Jane's doomed schoolmate at Lowood had seemed tiresomely pious before but on this reading, her fatalistic willingness to endure unjust punishments on a daily basis was an eerie reminder of the weird depths to which Christian belief can plumb. 'With this creed,' she says 'revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low: I  live in calm, looking to the end.'

Like all great characters, Jane herself sounded as if she were alive and close by. She was as sincere, righteous and spiky as I remembered from my last reading and that only served to make her comments on her former pupils at Morton school so jarring. Near the end of the novel, as she leaves her post as teacher, she remarks on how the best of the poor girls she had taught were 'as decent, respectable, modest, and well-informed young women as could be found in the ranks of the British peasantry. And that is saying a great deal; for after all, the British peasantry are the best taught, best mannered, most self-respecting of any in Europe: since  those days I have seen paysannes and Bauerinnen; and the best of them seemed to me ignorant, coarse and besotted compared with my Morton girls.'

Our peasantry is better than yours!  This was probably Charlotte Bronte's own view based on her first-hand experience of life on the continent (she had worked as a teacher in a school in Brussels.) It's an odd thing to read in 2017 and stranger still to hear from a character who throughout her story seems so aware of the multi-layered nature of people and of how hard life can be for those who have been dispossessed, abandoned and despised.  And who would have thought that foreign travel with man-of-the-world Mr Rochester would bring out the petty chauvinist in Jane? 'Reader, I voted Ukip.'

It's a bum note in a great novel but so is Nick Carraway's mockery of Wolfsheim's Jewish nose and of the newly-prosperous trio of black people being chauffeured by a causasian - 'I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry.' in The Great Gatsby. And so, more famously, is Tom Sawyer's degrading treatment of the slave Jim near the end of The Adventures of  Huckleberry Finn when he turns the plot to rescue Jim into an elaborate game.

I do agree with those who say we should avoid judging classic works of literature by our own moral standards but that won't stop me from feeling a little queasy when I read any of the examples above.