Jenna Starborn: or, Jane Eyre and Gen Tanks

It is a truth universally acknowledged -- and, in the land of English majors, almost universally lamented -- that any sufficiently popular work of literature will be cannibalized and reworked from as many different angles as there are genres of fiction, provided its copyright is expired. Sometimes, the result is considered groundbreaking, or at least intelligent enough to receive critical acclaim on its own (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea comes to mind, as does Gregory Maguire's Wicked). But sometimes, the result is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or any one of the hundreds of Austen spin-offs for sale at your local bookstore, in which Elizabeth and Darcy return as private detectives, range abroad as spies, or simply engage in sexual activities the likes of which could make even Wickham blush (or perhaps just start taking notes).

I must confess, I have in fact read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In fact, there were moments when I rather liked it, because buried beneath all that zombified gore were the original words of Austen's text which had begun to captivate me the first time I read Pride and Prejudice. I had of course re-read the novel since then, but somehow returning to find my favorite passages within a different context made them stand out even more, and if I had any residual positive energy to spare for the spin-off, it was because it reminded me how fully I was in love with the original.

This and other examples have led me to realize two things about reading adaptations, updates, or spin-offs of favorite texts: 1) They will never be as good as the original, and 2) They will nonetheless surprise you by teaching you things about the original text you never really knew. The first point seems obvious; the second requires examples, and this is where Jenna Starborn comes in.

The idea of a science-fiction re-imagining of Jane Eyre might be enough to send many of the literary sort off to premature graves, but frankly, Jane Eyre and science fiction were probably of the two most significant forces in my life when I was seventeen-turning-eighteen. I was introduced to one around the same time that I was writing my International Baccalaureate Extended Essay on the other (in case you were wondering, "Images of Conformity and Individuality in Post-War Dystopia" got full marks), before I had ever entered a university English class and therefore before I discovered that most people disagreed with my assertion that Victorians and aliens were equally deserving of literary merit. I went through my senior year of high school blissfully ignorant of the prejudices harbored in many university English and creative writing departments against those who read or wrote the dreaded "genre fiction," and I'll never stop being thankful that I did, because I have a feeling that in the long run, being that kind of person would have diminished my ability to read and enjoy Jane Eyre as surely as it would have destroyed my ability to read and enjoy Jenna Starborn.

Sharon Shinn's novel might not live up to the source of its inspiration (see Rule 1 above), but reading it was an engaging experience in reading beyond the horizons of what the university deems "literary" and frankly gave me a deeper understanding of why Jane Eyre works on me in the way that it does (see Rule 2). The plot follows closely the basic narrative path of Jane Eyre: Jenna Starborn, grown in a gen tank by a woman who wanted a child of her body but could not conceive, becomes obsolete mere months after she is born when her "Aunt" Rentley (who has not yet legally adopted her) is one of the first women to purchase an artificial womb. She gives birth to her own son, and suddenly Jenna is left as a half-citizen member of a grand household in which her basic needs are cared for but she is ignored as something between a nuisance and a mistake. As a girl of eight, Jenna is sent off-world to a charity school that focuses on teaching its pupils useful mechanical trades, where she graduates with all the knowledge necessary to fill a post as a nuclear generator technician. After a few years spent teaching theoretical physics, Jenna, who has adopted for herself the surname "Starborn" common to many unclaimed children of the gen tanks, tires of her post and seeks employment as the personal technician on the estate of wealthy landowner Everett Ravenbeck, whose mining interests on a terraformed world with a hostile atmosphere require the constant protection of a generator-powered force field.

The extent to which Shinn's re-imagining relies on what I think of as "shorthand" -- the reader's implied previous knowledge of the source text -- made me realize the necessity of those portions of Jane Eyre which, dear readers, I must confess to occasionally skipping. When I began Jane Eyre as a girl of seventeen, I knew nothing of its plot; I empathized with Jane's childish tenacity, felt the indignity of her suffering at the hands of her aunt and cousins, and waited with baited breath to see the kind of woman she would become. But after the terror and defiance of the Red Room scenes, I was left with chapter after chapter of her experiences at Lowood, which, although certainly character-forming, were nonetheless dull. Even her first weeks at Thornfield did little to alleviate the boredom, so that by Chapter 11 I, too, began to long for "incident, fire, life, feeling" -- and in subsequent re-readings, conducted primarily for pleasure, I had a tendency to skim over everything until Jane's meeting with Rochester in Chapter 12.

It wasn't until I noticed that Shinn was attempting something similar in her retelling, by condensing the content of those first chapters so that they didn't get in the way of Mr. Ravensbeck's arrival, that I realized exactly how important those "boring" first eleven chapters really are to Jane Eyre. They subtly manipulate the reader into sympathy with Jane, so that Rochester arrives on scene only when the reader is as willing as Jane to accept his appearance as a positive change. Edward Rochester may be a deeply unlikeable character in many respects, but after the eight-year-long dry spell to which Jane (and the reader) has been condemned, it's no surprise that she falls for the first thing that makes an impact in her world, and takes us down with her.

Because I know Jane Eyre, I was ready and willing to fall in love with Jenna Starborn -- but it's precisely because I know Jane Eyre that I didn't. The abridgment of Jenna's childhood hardships made her less sympathetic to me than Jane has always been, but it also made me less eager for the Rochester-analogue to come onstage. In this and many other instances, I felt like Shinn was so bent upon delivering just what her readers expected, and getting it to them before they could complain, that she inadvertently overlooked the longing that is, for me at least, the motor of Jane Eyre's plot (and Jane's character) in volumes I and II.

This isn't to say that any change to basic plotting, style, or character in a spin-off or adaptation necessarily destine it for the worst. In fact, I frequently read adaptations just for these changes or additions, so I was quite pleased with Shinn's inclusion of the character of Janet Ayerson. With Jenna taking up the job of a nuclear technician rather than a governess, Shinn still needed someone to oversee Mr. Ravensbeck's Adele-analogue bastard child, and thus Janet Ayerson appears onstage as a necessarily less feisty Jane Eyre figure who must watch the child but will never win the love of the master. Instead, Janet runs off with a wealthy and attractive friend of Ravensbeck, who woos her with promises of marriage but installs her as nothing more than his mistress and disposes of her when he becomes bored -- a shocking and unexpected reminder of the danger that Jane Eyre and Jenna Starborn both face in loving men above their station who could so easily destroy these women's characters with no fault being returned to the men for doing so.

It was at about this realization that Jenna Starborn began to disappoint -- because, though Jane of course was trapped within the nineteenth century, Jenna maneuvers in a world of the future where one might be tempted to expect something closer to gender and class equality. Unfortunately, this isn't a possibility Shinn seems prepared to provide for; though she does concoct a reasonable backstory regarding the exploration and settlement of space by wealthy families who instigated an interplanetary class system as a means of retaining their power, doing so seems at times like an easy way out of dealing with what I consider some of the really interesting questions. For example, does the Jane Eyre plot, so concerned with the value of sexual virtue (for women, at least) and embroiled in concerns of marriage still play out the same in a future more sexually promiscuous and less traditionally bounded than the present? How would a clever author have to rearrange details of plot and character to conceive of a Bertha-analogue character who provided a significant plot impediment without the institution of marriage? At the very least, I expected Jenna and Ravensbeck to participate in a more explicitly sexual relationship than Jane and Rochester (by which I mean not that I expected them to jump each other after a relatively short acquaintance, but that I expected them to at least allow themselves to think about it, something the narrative conventions of the Victorian novel more or less forbade Charlotte Bronte to do). However, in this, as in my desire to see a retelling that managed to find a suitable replacement for the marriage plot, I was disappointed; the courtship aspect of Shinn's novel is nearly as Victorian in its sensibilities as the original. The wedding vows might require the characters to swear that neither of them are aliens whose interbreeding with humans has been forbidden, but beyond that, it's a ceremony like any other.

I could go into even more depth about the multiple minute differences of plot, style, and character between Jenna Starborn and Jane Eyre, but I think I've gone far enough now to prove my Rule 2 of retellings, and anything else I have to say will probably consist primarily of whining that should really have been silenced by Rule 1. Jenna Starborn isn't Jane Eyre, but it does manage to ask some interesting questions, whether intended by the author or not, and makes me see Jane Eyre in a newer, clearer light -- and is no less worth reading for the former than the latter.