Helena Mary Cole

On Monday, I had an autistic meltdown, one that required some time to recover from. There were many factors that caused it. I won’t enumerate them all, but it did start when inadvertantly I sent Clark to school sick.

I hate it when that happens. I think it has very much to do with not being able to read non-verbal cues. It’s happened many times in the years since Clark started school, and it happens especially with him because he cannot tell me when he feels sick. If he’d refused to eat breakfast or get up out of bed or if he’d been feverish or anything like that, I probably would have picked up on it. He was a little stuffy in the nose, but he’d been stuffy for a few days already — I thought he was partway through a little cold. And when the time came for him to get dressed for school, he was awake, and he’d breakfasted, and he promptly let me help him into his uniform. It was a big surprise to me when, maybe an hour later, the school secretary called me and told me that Clark was very sick and they wanted to send him home.

This is one of those moments when I very keenly feel like a disabled person. The teachers caught on to the fact that Clark was sick almost immediately while I missed the cues completely. It’s almost as bad as my face blindness, in terms of how embarrassing it can be, with the additional discomfort of feeling like a bad mother, sending my child to school sick.

On Monday, things weren’t so bad when Clark and I spent the day at home together (neither Lance nor Leah was sick, and I’d already dropped them off at school by the time the call about Clark came through), but in the afternoon, some additional bombs came down, and by bedtime, I had fully melted down. Mr. Cole had to get Leah ready for bed instead of me because it became absolutely necessary for me to be in the quiet, darkened bedroom alone. And it took till today to be in a state where I don’t feel like I need a lot of quiet, dark and alone time in order to function reasonably well.

But another thing I’ve been doing to help get myself back to normal is reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

On Tuesday, I saw an old copy of it sitting around, and I snatched it up quickly, practically crying, thinking, “I need this right now!” I’ve read it about twenty times (at least), but when a meltdown hits, it can be so comforting to have something familiar. The fact that I know exactly how the story goes is exactly the thing that makes it so wonderful. As long as Jane is still being bullied at Gateshead, and Helen Burns is just as self-effacing as ever, and Mr. Rochester as brooding as I remember him, there’s a chance life can go on.

And then, well, every time I read it, I know all over again that Jane Eyre is as autistic as the day is long. Goodness, her autism is staring you in the face right there in the opening paragraphs, where Jane is already feeling completely misunderstood, and she’s in trouble with her aunt but she doesn’t know why, and Aunt Reed says she “regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me [Jane] at a distance; but until she heard from Bessie, and could discover from her own observation, that I was endeavoring in good earnest to aquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner — something lighter, franker, more natural as it were — she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little children.”

This could be the textbook on the female autistic experience. Jane is not melding well with the family group; she has no awareness of this because she is doing her best to be pleasing; she can’t understand why it’s not working; she has no awareness of the social cues she is giving and no awareness that they’re different from what people are doing; what she is feeling inside is not apparent in her facial expressions and body language; her aunt finds her manner “unatural.” In short, Jane has a totally different bonding style, one that her aunt and cousins can make neither head nor tail of, and so she is exluded, and bullied by her cousin John, etc. She and the Reeds are communicating so differently, they cannot understand each other at all. The very textbook on autism.

As the story goes on, you get more and more evidence of her autism, everything from her extremely vivid inner life to her passionate sense of justice and anger when witnessing injustice taking place to her alternative ideas about what makes a person of the opposite sex attractive. Mr. Rochester is thought by most people to be “ugly,” and she is aware of that, but in her eyes, that’s what makes his sex appeal so high.

Ah, what a controversial novel Jane Eyre was in its day! Charlotte Bronte was writing under a male pseudonym, but when word leaked out that the novel was written by a woman, people didn’t believe it. The idea that a woman would even think about sex appeal!

But anyway, I have a theory that Jane Eyre’s autism is what makes the book so hard to adapt into a movie. I’m not even sure that, if a director added autism as the piece that helps most with understanding the character, it would make a good movie even then. A lot takes place in an autistic person’s inner life, in his or her thoughts, reasoning, logic, unexpressed emotions, and that’s exactly where most of the story of Jane Eyre takes place, inside Jane’s head. How in the world do you adapt that to a movie, a medium of storytelling that’s visual by definition??? How do you put a camera inside someone’s head???

Also, moviemakes seem to be really bad at getting a handle on the main thread of the conflict and then following it through to a good conclusion. Again, I think the fact that the main thread of the conflict runs through Jane’s head makes that task virtually impossible.

I have seen exactly one adaptation that leads the story to a satisfing conclusion and that’s the one with Ruth Wilson, made for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre some twenty years ago or so. In that case, the screenwriter set the story up so that the main problem was that Jane was alone in the world and wanted to belong to a family. This is not what Charlotte Bronte was going for, but at the same time, it’s nice and people like it. The obstacles to that end are clear. It works well with the material available in the novel: Jane ends up finding some long-lost cousins, and becomes an adoptive mother to Adele, and marries Mr. Rochester and has children of her own. Jane also seems to be the head of her newfound family at the end of this movie version, something that flows, I suppose, of Mr. Rochester’s physical disabilities after the fire. Her headship in the famly is in line with the original text.

Jane Eyre is about a young woman exerting her independence. She gets married, sure, but not till her husband is a blind amputee and she gets to call all the shots in her life.

Why is it that most people only ever remember that Mr. Rochester ends up blind as a result of the fire that burned down Thornfield Hall? People have a strong tendency to forget that his left hand was also amputated. I had an argument once with a small group of young women who were asserting that Mr. Rochester didn’t lose his hand, and as they seemed to be united against both me and the truth of the matter, I found myself forced to go get a copy of the text and read to them the passage where it states very clearly that the surgeon “amputated his hand on the spot.” Honestly. They didn’t know they were dealing with autistic me who couldn’t bear to be accused of making things up, when I knew with 100% certainty that I wasn’t.

If you’re talking to an autistic person in that sort of situation, you might want to watch out. LOL We are very detail-oriented and our memories are excellent. If there’s a book or a movie we like, we read them and watch them repeatedly. I am perfectly capable of watching a movie all the way through, and then the moment it’s done, going back to the beginning and watching it again, right then and there, on the same afternoon. If you can’t compete with that, beware.

Well, when it comes to Mr. Rochester’s lost hand, I think we can put some of the blame on the movie adaptations of Jane Eyre here. It’s easier and much less expensive to fake a guy being blind on screen than it is to fake an amputated hand, especially in a case like this where it seems like overkill. Most of the movies do leave out the amputee thing.

The point is, it’s been nice going through this meltdown recovery with Jane Eyre. I also couldn’t help noticing the novel’s influence on my own work this time around. I first read it when I was either an older teenager or in my early twenties, and liked it. I studied it a few years later in a course called “Victorian and Edwardian Literature” in university. I think they added the Edwardian period because the professor wanted to put Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the reading list. “The horror! The horror!” But I liked studying Jane Eyre — it in no way ruined the story for me.

Imagine writing a novel that still has so much influence in the world almost two hundred years later! I am not at all sure I can do that. Seems very likely I cannot. My work must fill up its own little corner in the shadow cast by Jane Eyre. Also, twenty-five years ago, I visited Haworth, in England, and walked through the Bronte parsonage museum, and saw the little writing desk that Charlotte wrote all her fiction on, and I felt inspired to go home and write. I took my time about it, though, didn’t I? Lucky for the world of literature that Charlotte Bronte didn’t. She died not long before her 39th birthday.

Well, I wish you all a very happy Friday, and a Happy Thanksgiving if you are in the States and celebrating it this weekend.

Bye!