i picked up re jane after seeing it in a post on book riot. a retelling of jane eyre with a half-korean, half-white/american protagonist! i was in!
oh and if you read my previous post, and wondering why i was am okay with this retelling and not the last novel i read, was because park did take all of her storylines directly from bronte, instead, she took the overall structure, but wrote her own book.
before i start, if you ever read my post on jane eyre, you know that i loved it, but i did have issue with rochester being the only person ever talked with so i felt bad that she had no other experiences other than him. though i mean their love was true, i still always wondered you know. i didn't have this issue with re jane though i was shocked at times by how sheltered jane was but while during bronte's time all women were that sheltered, park made sure her jane was aware that she was.
just like jane eyre, re jane, started off with an orphan named jane that lived with family members that treated her poorly. jane hoping to escape her uncle, sang, went to to work as au pair for a family. the rochester of this work was ed farley, the father of the adopted girl, jane was in charge of. and just like jane eyre there was a wife, but while rochester's was locked away in the attic, this wife, beth, was not crazy (well not in the same way as rochester's first wife) that worked in the attic. i have to say the fact that ed and beth were married, made me very wary of jane falling in love with ed. whereas i gushed over rochester and jane's budding romance in jane eyre, i was really uncomfortable about ed and jane's, though it did make me hungry for heroes. even though park set up beth as an insensitive and overbearing wife and mother, i still was upset with jane for trying to be a homewrecker. i was grateful that park stopped ed and jane from having sex (the tip doesn't count for me), because i would not have been able to go on with the book. as you know from other books, i don't like cheaters. anyway, that is really where the parallels between the two books stop.
i will add that park did include nods to jane eyre, having jane address the reader as a reader and jane's first job was to be at a company named lowood. i thought these little details were cute.
back to the story, the climax of the novel, is when jane and ed decide to finally have sex, as i mentioned before it didn't happen. on the night that they were to meet and try it again, jane decided to go to korea to see her grandfather on his deathbed. the day she decided to leave . . . 9/11. so as i read, i couldn't really gage the era, i figured it was now. however, after a mention of the twin towers and the backstreets boys and of course this, i knew. i have to add, i feel like a lot of books have been alluding to this, which is fine, it must be mentioned especially if a work is set in new york. however, i feel like it shouldn't be used as a device to cause a drastic change, i think jane could have left on any day and the novel would not have lost anything.
okay, so jane went to korean. she learned more about who she is, which she needed. she even became engaged to a guy, but thanks to her aunt and this soap opera realized that she still loved ed. so she came clean to everyone, ed about her love, beth about their affair, and returned to nyc. however, once back, she realized just how different she and ed really were, and yes, dear reader, they broke up. which i actually appreciated, i mean they were at different stages in their lives and also there was so much more she needed to experience. i mean i was fine with jane eyre ending up rochester, because i mean what else was there for a single girl to do, then to be an old maid. luckily, though nowadays, we have so many options. it was great to see jane end up as an independent woman!
a greater part of the novel, aside from this kind of love story and self-discovery, was race, culture and identity. to start jane was mixed, her mother was korean and her father was america, due to this she felt like an outcast. people spoke and thought poorly of her mother. in addition to this, she never felt like she fully identified as a korean. it was the same situation for the child she was in charge of, devon. devon was a chinese girl adopted by two american parents. at school, she felt like an outcast due to her mixed cultured background. her mother, beth, tried to keep her immerse in chinese culture but she still was not accepted by her fellow chinese students. being mixed and being americanized culturally, i understood how both of them felt uncomfortable among people with the same racial identity as them. there was a scene in which jane and devon got moon cakes and devon became uncomfortable because although she looked chinese, she wasn't culturally chinese and couldn't speak the language. i used to feel the same way as a kid, i look filipino but was not raised culturally filipino and did not learn the language, so when i am around alot of filipinos i do not know, i feel uncomfortable. like jane and hopefully devon, you reach a point where, it doesn't really matter if your own people judge you, you have to learn to be happy with who you are.
in addition to this, i have to add that at the beginning i had mentioned how jane's family was mean towards her. in jane eyre, her family was outright abusive. however, in re jane, it was more of a cultural difference which made the reader and jane initially believe that her uncle hated and took her for granted. its tough because as an outsider, we tend to judge without really knowing, this is what occurred when beth and ed tried to tell jane that she didn't have to obey her uncle (ironically, ed was doing the very thing he critiqued jane's uncle of doing, being controlling). however, we gradually begin to see that jane's uncle is not a bad guy at all, he made sacrifices for her and he always made sure that she was taken care of even when she tried to push him away. and in the end, the reader realizes when jane does that some things were lost in translation that maybe what she took as an insult was actually him trying to help her improve or actually meant as a compliment. in the end, it was great to see her make peace with her uncle and culture.
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