Jane Eyre, like Harry Potter, is viciously bullied by a fat spoiled cousin, and she is also wretchedly excluded from the warmth of family—she listens to Christmas parties while shut up in a little cupboard with only a doll to love. By her own admission (told many years past childhood), Jane isn’t a sweet child.
She doesn’t receive an invitation by owl to a special school that affirms what she knows in her heart to be true–that she is very different inside than those around her judge her to be. She is not whisked away to Hogwarts but to a wretched school called Lowood. And yet she finds in the depth of her misery, a capacity for self awareness and self-acceptance and a sheer spirit that works a kind of magic. Banished to that grim boarding school, abused beyond all endurance, she at last confronts her aunt as children never did in the Victorian age, calling her bad and hard-hearted.
“Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.” Even though Jane later feels that this act of vengeance was like a sweet but poisonous wine, it is as necessary to her future development as Harry Potter’s wild escape from his tormentors with its own dash of sweet revenge (his bully of a cousin is given a pig’s tail).
You have to be someone before you can be no one. This insight, often repeated in Buddhist circles, seems like a paradox. We need to dare to really be ourselves, to take up space, to express that our feelings are hurt and so on, or nothing can really be known. Transformation is not a new thought to think. It is a drama to be lived.
Tracy Cochran 