TV 연속물 <제인 에어>: 여성인권선언서에서 가족드라마로

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has been most repeatedly adapted into films or TV dramas, perhaps due to its popular association with impassioned romantic love of Jane and Rochester. However, it is such a paragon text enmeshed with feminist and (post)colonial issues that it has invited various critical approaches which compete against each other. This paper is interested in how those complicated critical issues of Jane Eyre are figured in and re-interpreted in the contemporary BBC television drama serial adaptations. In the first half of the main body, this study compares the novel with the drama versions point by point on the specific issues of 1) whether the celebrated declaration of female liberty of Jane beginning with "Anybody may blame me who likes..." is included in the drama version, 2) how the female relationships, especially that of mother and daughter, is embodied, and 3) how Bertha, the very person who keeps the key to the mysteries of the novel and the whirls of criticism about the novel, is portrayed. The famous manifesto is mostly wiped out of the drama versions except in that of 1983, and the equally famous dream scene, where the mother-like figure directed Jane to flee from Rochester's temptation, is completely deleted from all versions, while the telepathic communication of Jane and Rochester is unvaryingly included. Therefore, the drama adaptations give priority to the male-female relationship over the relationship among women. As for Bertha, she cannot be said to be completely justified even in the 2006 version, where she is portrayed with deeper psychological depth than the other TV versions. The second part of the main body questions exclusively how the adaptation of 2006 places a high value upon family, the accomplishment of family to be exact, which, in fact, was tacitly disapproved by the author as oppressive to women in a patriarchal society. The so-called "domestic ideology" forces innumerable women not less talented than men to remain in the limited private sphere as an "angel in the house." The portrait of Reed family, which young Jane is mercilessly excluded from, makes it clear that the ultimate task imposed on Jane is to establish her own family in order to be an independent individual. And the portrait of Jane-Rochester family enveloped in the wreathy frame at the end emphasizes Jane's success in accomplishing her goal and at the same time reaffirms the importance of the monogamous family. In conclusion, this paper argues that the conventionalization and containment of critical issues seems to be the inescapable trap even the TV-miniseries adaptations of classic literature, expected to be more 'faithful' to the original than other popular adaptations, fall into despite their recent artistic sophistication.