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In telling of her star-crossed romance with the Byronic Edward Rochester, the narrator of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre must reveal Rochester's shameful secret: his insane wife, Bertha Mason, locked in the attic. Jane's firstperson narration mercilessly represents Bertha as inhuman, "snatchfingl and growlfing] like some strange wild animal" (250). Brontë later regretted this representation, writing that "profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of [Bertha's] degradation" (qtd. in Rogers 346; Grudin 148). Jane herself makes a brief nod to sympathy, remonstrating with Rochester that "'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady ... It is cruel-she cannot help being mad'" (257). Yet Tane's repeated descriptions of Bertha as animal commit significantly more violence on the madwoman than Rochester's complaints ever do. Her hypocritical lip service to compassion masks her ruthlessness, and Jane's narration urges us to see her, not Bertha, as victim of Rochester's duplicity and the patriarchal power structures of Victorian society.
Director Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 adaptation is titled Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, implying faithfulness and inviting comparisons to the original text. Zeffirelli built his reputation on adaptations of classic texts, including The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Romeo and Juliet (1968), but his Jane Eyre received mixed reviews from critics who called it everything from "gripping and accessible" (Sterritt 14) to "flabby" (Simon 57). Zeffirelli's film reveals a vexed allegiance to its source as it steps away from Brontë's first-person perspective and takes control of the narrative out of Jane's hands, particularly in relation to Bertha. Drawing on the multiple viewpoints of film, Zeffirelli is Jane Eyre represents key scenes from a variety of perspectives, destabilizing the focus on Jane and giving added attention to Bertha. The film also rearranges plot elements, creating significant disjunctions both between the novel and the film and between what characters in the film claim and what viewers see. Most notably, the moment when Jane confronts Bertha and the scene of the fatal fire at Thornfield Hall re-imagine both women's positions vis-àvis the novel's power relations. In these scenes, viewers see Bertha not as the savage double of Brontë's book; rather, she emerges in Zeffirelli's film as a complicated and more rational character. In addition, fire becomes a central symbol in...