Dov into Reading

THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR A 30YEAR OLD MOVE HERE In Audition a man loses his wife and uses the power and authority he has as a movie producer to set up auditions for a movie that will never get made so he can find a girlfriend.

its revealed the 'perfect girlfriend' he found is a woman who was abused as a child by a man who 'trained' her to be good at the arts (its been a while but i think her family abandoned her at the school? I need to rewatch it)

the 'big reveal' which most cis men in 1999 didn't see coming was that she was obsessed with this man who treated her kindly, saw her for her 'worth' (being pretty and talented... and submissive) and ends with her torturing him with a plan to kill his family for the crime of breaking his promise to 'only ever love her and no one else'

In Obsession, the woman is not someone made by other powerful men into an obsessed killer-- she's made by her Nice Guy friend who has power over her via magic stick to become obsessed with him.

I don't even really want to compare the two plots here, I more want to pose the thought of:

What was the culture around women in Japan in 1999, and what is the culture around women in the USA in 2026, and how well does that map to the way the women are treated by their male 'love interests' (used loosely)

I have many, many thoughts but i don't think Obsession is a subtle film, neither is Audition, but it's not as over the top as naming your protagonist Bear right after the 'bear vs man in the woods' debate went viral.

I read Misery to get a pallet cleanser from 18th century Russian literature and to give myself a 'popcorn read' that's just fun and mindless

Jane Eyre I'd started a year ago, and put down because the characters operated in a world I really could not understand, the logic made no sense to me as a modern reader with zero connection to UK culture (sure, i could have done more research on the UK in the time period and the social caste system therein but i have less than zero motivation to do so, so i just put the book down)

So when I came back to J.E. and Misery started seeping out of the pages I realised the turn of luck I'd taken with my reading choices. I'll make headings for each section because this will, as usual, be long.

Plot Summaries

I assume you, a tumblrina, probably are aware of Misery's plot: Stephen King a famous author crashes his car, his 'number one fan' (who, incidentally is a killer nurse with a scrap book of all her kills) nurses him back to health to force him to revive the book series he had successfully killed off the protagonist of in an attempt to pursue more artistic writing. She accuses him of recovering too quickly and chops his foot off (amongst other things) and in the end he escapes and manages to kill her but is left riddled with PTSD

Jane Eyre, I had heard was a rags to riches love story but with an undercurrent of menace. I was expecting a Wuthering Heights situation of an Othello like fall to madness and doomed love interest and was left flat footed with what i found within.

Jane Eyre is a girl who grows up taken in by cousins who hate her, her aunt resents her, her uncle doesn't care about her, her cousin abuses her verbally and physically. Jane is seen as a petulant and ornery child because she is reacting to this as an 8 year old would, so her auntie gets the most vile headmaster in England to come and take her to his school where she's put through horrific abuse (starved, frozen, beaten) she makes friends with an incredible little girl who tries to protect her and take her in and show her the ropes, but she dies of an outbreak of scarlet fever leaving Jane once again alone.

Jane's school is found out after the plague outbreak to have horrific conditions and her food and living areas get revamped after that but at that point the damage has been done to her, so when she leaves the school, she doesn't reach back out to her extended family, she writes into the paper that she can work and gets a job half the country away and leaves.

She, at 18, falls deeply head over heels in love with the owner of the mansion and him a 45 year old douchebag falls in love with her too. He tries to marry her only for it to be revealed that the person setting fires at night in the mansion is his wife, who he married in his slave holding lands in the Caribbean, but got sick of i guess? and just keeps her in the attic under lock and key, she tries to break out constantly to burn the whole house down, to kill her husband, but she always ends up back in her attic prison where she's never let out nor spoken of.

Jane flees, finds another rich family, and (of course like all literature at the time) finds out she's secretly rich, and then goes back to the 46 year old prick (a year has passed) to find his wife has successfully burnt down the mansion and flung herself from the roof, but failed to kill him. Jane, now 19, marries this guy and promises to take care of him now that he's lost an arm, an eye, and most of his eyesight.

The Point of This Post

Both books, to me, are horror books.

Jane Eyre is about a horribly abused child learning through horrible life choices that the only worth she has in the world is her ability to take care of others, and she ends up drawn to abusive evil people who she constantly feels enthralled by.

Misery is about an artist who is trapped by someone who only sees his worth via his output, who knows the end of his life will come as soon as his art is finished.

Jane Eyre is the broken down woman learned to be a servant to a task master, Misery is about being locked up because he isn't just a book-vomiting machine. The locked up wife, Bertha, in Jane Eyre, is the same character as Misery's Paul Sheldon except Bertha doesn't have an expiration date on her life.

Even when its found out she is being imprisoned, no one does anything. They just allow her to continue her tortured existence, while Paul Sheldon has the world searching for him, and is saved by people who have been trying to find him all winter.

Misery, next to Bertha's storyline in Jane Eyre, is a novel of hope. Bertha's story from start to finish was always going to end in her death. be it from suicide, old age, or her husband deciding keeping her locked up cost too much she was doomed from the start.

Jane Eyre's ending is quite stomach churning knowing everyone in that house is complicit and fine with this slave owning, wife imprisoner marrying a teenager and using her as a full time nurse for the rest of his life. It ends on her having a child with him, but not having time to raise the child, despite that being her passion and talent, because she's too busy taking care of her awful husband.

Comparisons to Other Literature

Jane Eyre was published in 1847, predating Dracula in 1897, one of the more famous 'locked in a tower' narratives, and far far predating Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca in 1938, the peak of 'young idiot marries sketchy man with the wife haunting the narrative' you can get.

So much like how Scarlet Pimpernel sets the tropes for future action/adventure books but when reading it now it feels really poorly paced and quite contrived, i feel Jane Eyre reads the same way. It feels like there's SOMETHING there that you can't quite mine out of it, and you can see its influence in future literature of the same genre, but what I don't get is Scarlet Pimpernel isn't upheld as a classic and Jane Eyre is... I really can't see why it keeps that crown

Perhaps it's because the abuse of the girls school was written from real life, and it caused major changes in the way boarding schools were run at the time, but I just can't see how this is considered something worth reading in the modern day.

I must say, from the start, Nastasya Filipovna was one of the most compelling characters in the book... she brings lightning to every situation, which becomes a welcome breath of of movement in the stillness of the narrative as it creeps along, sadly

At the beginning as characters are introduced and given their distinct motivations and backgrounds and characters its a rich and fulfilling text!!! but once we know everyone it very much fades into itself until there's a new spark.

I do wonder if a lot of the length of this novel was due to the method of writing. Hand written Russian in a time of extremely high illiteracy rates in the Russian empire must have been time consuming and costly to edit, and I serioulsy doubt a few thousand hand written pages are easy to demand rewrites, but then other novels of similar eras don't need the fat trimmed nearly as much so maybe i'm just avoiding saying its VERY slow.

I found it interesting that you could almost HEAR the author's voice chiming in when trying his best to discuss things from a centrists viewpoint, but very clearly stating everything from an extremely conservative for the time point of view. He seeths at the mention at nihilism, he allows ippolit the tubercular teen to ramble on for pages and pages (a full 5% run time of the book) railing against the upper classes and setting himself up in a scenario for himself to become a victim in the eyes of all and ending up as a fool.

You can hear Dostoyevskii's voice and gravity of his memory when he launches into a 12 page breakdown of EXACTLY how it feels to be doomed to die, standing on the firing squad line, knowing this breath will be your last, when your stentence is commuted (which happened to him, I didn't know it happened to him reading the book but this particular passage rang so much more real than any other I looked it up and sure enough, he'd been sent to a labour camp instead of being shot by firing squad with his sentence changed literal minutes before death)

I thought it had incredible bursts of energy, this novel did, but i fear it fell far too short of the energy needed to make this tome really worth reading. Dostoyevskii's viewpoint very very clearly is that the Russian Orthodox church is the only moral church and is doomed to lose its way if it allows its practitioners to become Catholicised.

He really is quite callous about poor Nastasya Filipovna. It's implied that her home was burnt down so her father would be forced to sell it along with himself and his family as serfs, to a landowner that wanted the land. The landowner then raped Nasatasya Filipovna for her entire adolescence every time he went to his dacha (summer home) there, and in the opening of the book we meet her, as his ward, being essentially auctioned off for marriage so the man can marry a younger and more naive version of her.

She seethes with rage, she cares less about revenge than justice. She wants Ganya to prove to everyone he's a slave to money, she wants her molester to be shown as a creep lecher, she can't respect the Prince because he sees her as a child would: with no mark on her honour, and she hates seeing him see her like this, it's painful for her to be seen and loved so purely. So she leaves, with nothing, renouncing her wealth given to her by her molester, and is pursued by every man in the room on troikas in the snow.

Of course she ends up with the fur trader, made sudden millionaire, who will doom them all. Its written in the first few pages if he is allowed to be with Nastasya Filipovna he will kill her within days or months of the wedding. By the end of the book he's squandered his millions of rubles, and murders Nastasya Filipovna for the crime of, after leaving him at the altar many times, leaving the prince myshkin (the mouse prince) on the altar, proving to him she would possibly, if given the chance, leave him after all. So he makes sure she never can.

You'd think that with all this incredibly interesting backstory and motivation Nastasya Filipovna would be allowed to be portrayed as a confliced human with very little power doing the best she can with what she has, but instead we spend the vast majority of the book following the Prince Myshkin who is confused by his own emotions, and has the least convincing love story arc I've ever seen written in my life.

You can tell Dostoyevskii has the interactions of the aristocratic class down to a science, but when it comes to actual feelings he's totally lost. It's better I think to read his works where women are few, as-- upon further investigation-- he was basically useless when speaking to women, and my god does it show.

I think it's an interesting novel, but directly after i turned to Gogol and the way the characters jump off the page, the way the stories move and even characters who truly have no interest in the world around them, not unlike prince myshkin, are still interesting to follow and read, are night and day.

I heard Nabokov was a famous Dostoyevskii hater, so I've downloaded his essays on Russian Literature and will be reading them entirely to satisfy my itch of hearing someone say that no, he's not in fact a great author and is in fact overhyped haha