The golden age of modern literature

The Oscar decision that most disappointed me last week was that Jane Eyre didn't win for Best Costume Design.

I thought the costumes were beautiful, and complemented the vibe of the story and the personality of each character perfectly.

The interesting thing is that I noticed for the first time a few years ago (on about my fifteenth re-read, but my first since college) that Jane Eyre is actually set during the (long) Regency. I was wondering, because of some details in how clothing and hair is described in the book, but this weird passage clinched it:

"[H]e laid on the table a new publication—a poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days—the golden age of modern literature.  Alas! the readers of our era are less favoured.  But courage!  I will not pause either to accuse or repine.  I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day.  Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction.  Poetry destroyed?  Genius banished?  No!  Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought.  No; they not only live, but reign and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell—the hell of your own meanness.

While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of 'Marmion' (for 'Marmion' it was), St. John stooped to examine my drawing."

Marmion was published in 1808. (I don't know whether this tirade applies to all poetry after the Romantics, or just the poetry published between 1808 and "ten years later" when Jane is supposedly writing. Charlotte Brontë: genius and a bit of a weirdo, am I right?)

"But it's cool that they always make the clothes Victorian in movie adaptations," I thought, "because it's such a Victorian book. Putting Jane and Rochester in Regency clothes would be as weird as that Pride and Prejudice where everyone has leg-of-mutton sleeves."

But trying to pick apart why I feel that way is a little harder. What exactly is so quintessentially Victorian about Jane Eyre? Is it the deep POV? One could argue Jane Austen did deep POV in her books, especially Emma and Persuasion. Is it the dark seriousness? Thackeray is as light and funny as JA. Gothic horror is even a Regency genre! Is it just the style of the prose? In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf said,

"The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: 'The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.' That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it."

But it's not a very rigorous argument, apart from whatever opinions on the idea of a "woman's sentence" one might have. I don't think Jane Austen invented a new sentence, although there's no doubt she's a great writer who did some new and brilliant things with dialogue. Victorian prose was generally more ornate and formal than what was stylish in the Regency, and googling the quote Woolf used turns up "The New Monthly Magazine" of 1823, when that shift was already happening.

The one thing I can come up with that I feel pretty sure about is that the way Brontë uses the Regency is very Victorian.  While doing some research on Byron and his fans last year, I read an essay about silver fork novels, a style of popular novel that, according to Wikipedia, "dominated the English literature market from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s" (Jane Eyre was published in 1847). Many silver fork novels, as far as I can tell, were a precursor to our Regency romances.  They depicted the lives of the British aristocracy in detail, hence their name, and according to the essay I read ("Silver-Fork Byron and the Image of Regency England" by Andrew Elfenbein in Byromania), many of them took place in the Regency period and were love stories where a rake reformed and married the virtuous heroine at the end.

But to Victorian readers, that had a much different significance than I think it does to us. The Regency represented a period of decadence and immoderation in English history, and the Regency aristocracy especially so: the "middle-class" values of chastity and thrift became so much more important at all levels of society during the Victorian era.  The Regency rake's reform also symbolized the Regency Era's reform, and his shift to responsible landowner represented England's shift into the morally upright Victorian Era.

Jane Eyre certainly fits that paradigm: Rochester's aristocratic moral degeneracy is transformed by Jane's rigid sexual morality (and the class differences between them don't hurt either!).

What do you think? What makes Jane Eyre feel so Victorian? Are we just stereotyping the period's literatures based on their most famous female writers?

Could you see Jane in high-waisted dresses and poke bonnets?