Jane Eyre Doused the Flair of Vampires

Last Summer, I, like millions of other females around the country, fell in love with a vampire named Edward Cullen.  I stayed up until all hours of the night squealing and giggling as this modern Dracula swooped into Bella Swan's life and showed off his vampire strength and amazing looks.  I read New Moon in a record twelve hours and Eclipse in not much longer.  The Twilight Series quickly shot up to the top of my list of favorite books.  In June of this year, I anxiously pre-ordered Breaking Dawn began a long wait for August to come and bring the latest installment of the vampire story.  I made one rule for myself.  I would have to finish my Summer reading assignment before losing myself in the new book.  So I began Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and in so doing, ended my love affair with vampires.

Jane Eyre was a new kind of reading for me.  It required much more patience than the vampire books.  The plot was more subtle and hidden between paragraphs and pages of description.  At first, I found the book tedious and wondered how Bronte had managed to continue writing it without becoming distracted.  It was not until I reached page 400 that I realized I had fallen in love with the language, the words, the carefully constructed sentences.  Suddenly, It did not matter what Bronte was describing; I just enjoyed immersing myself in it.  I had been baptized by the amazing literature and come out a new reader.

There was another handicap when I first began Jane Eyre that I expected to doom the book to the bottom of my reading list, and it was the hero.  Edward Fairfax Rochester seemed to be as different from my Edward Cullen as it was possible to be.  He was described when Jane first set eyes on him as old and ugly; furthermore, he was not kind and protective like my Edward.  He was snide and crafty.  I did not understand how a book with such a disappointing main character could sell a single copy.  Then Bronte pulled another surprise on me.  She proceeded to transform my view of Rochester before my eyes with his words and actions.  What's more, he was not flat and perfectly understandable like Edward Cullen.  He had depth that I had never expected.  He was the kind of character I could believe actually existed.  Gradually, I turned my literary affections from the seventeen-year-old vampire ever squished between two covers to a thirty-eight-year-old vulcan.

The Twilight Series had also been a pleasure to read, but I had never quoted it.  I had never discovered a single sentence that was especially witty or that applied to any aspect of my life.  It was just a simple, predictable, page turner.  As I read Jane Eyre, I discovered a new genre of book.  It was not a page turner.  It was a page stopper.  There were phrases, sentences, paragraphs that were worth marking, remembering, and quoting.  I found myself applying words that had been written over a century ago to my life in the twenty-first century.  It was crazy.

I finally reached the end of Jane Eyre and grabbed the copy of Breaking Dawn and prepared to spend the night reintroducing myself to my beloved Edward Cullen.  I got through a grand total of fifteen pages before I had to give up.  I could not stand it.  There was no depth or language.  Where were the paragraphs of description?  And that Edward Cullen was so shallow and disgustingly good looking.  I just could not force myself through it.  Over the past month I have been forcing myself through it with the inertia that was once required to get through an assigned novel from school.  I am almost through it now.  I am going to force myself to finish it before I can read a book of substance like the next book we are reading for class, 1984.  Or maybe some more nineteenth century literature like a little Jane Austen or Dickens. I never could have imagined writing this last month, but what else can I say, Jane Eyre ruined Breaking Dawn.