In Re Jane, Patricia Park reimagines Jane Eyre in a modern setting where Jane is a put-upon Korean orphan living in Queens and working in her uncle’s small grocery store. Echoing Jane Eyre’s journey, Jane Re leaves her uncle’s small grocery store to be a nanny for a couple in Brooklyn, and later family obligations take her to South Korea before she returns to New York City.
The title puts Jane’s last name first, a Korean custom that symbolizes the importance of putting one’s family before self. Jane has a complicated relationship with her overbearing uncle and while they aren’t close, she suffers less at the hands of her ill-mannered cousins than Jane Eyre does. But that is the good thing about this book: the author did not try so hard to create exact parallels that things feel forced. The relationship between this Jane and her Edward is not haunted by his past but instead affected by his very present wife. Edward is a salt-of-earth ABD teacher married to a pretentious feminist professor and his “ward” is the little girl the couple has adopted from China.
While the book uses key Korean social concepts that are defined early and used repeatedly, they decided to include an appendix of terms Koreans use to address family members. I found this odd because while the appendix is an illustration of the complexities of how Koreans address family members, all of these terms are not used in the story. And as a student of translation, it was interesting to see how prejudice and confusion of words between English and Korean contributed to years of misunderstanding.
It took me a little bit of time to get into the story but I’m glad I stuck with it. At one point, I bristled when a character who used a mention of black people as shorthand for bad. This was a bit of oversensitivity on my part; there are people who really think this way and this character reflected this but that is no reason to quit on a book. The current climate just has me even more racially sensitive than I’d otherwise already be.
As I kept reading, I was touched by Jane’s feelings of Otherness within her own Korean community. We all feel left out for some reason. Specifically in this story, no one lets Jane forget that she is half-Korean. She stands out in Queens for not being completely Korean and she stands out in Brooklyn for being Asian. Her travels to South Korea reinforce her feeling of Otherness because South Korea is a rather homogenous place so she is out of step there also.
While I’d give the author a demerit for too many plays on Jane Eyre’s famous phrase “Reader, I married him,” she gets extra points for the lovely little nerdy gems she drops in for those who know the original novel and the genre, such as:
- Jane interviewing for a job at a firm called Lowood
- Discussion of an article called “Wanting a Piece of Fanny: Male Dominance and Violation in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park”
- A paper entitled “Who Let the Madwoman Out?: Bertha Mason and Nineteenth Century (Mis)Constructs of Female Hysteria, Madness, and the Vagina Dentata”
- A character named Currer Bell
Speaking of surprise characters, in some ways New York City itself is also a character. The communities she lives in shape Jane as much as her relationships. And managing to miss 9/11 entirely means that Jane is slightly out of step with the city.
I enjoyed this book. There was a part close to the end where it dragged a little but that is not unusual. Park didn’t just take the Jane Eyre template and apply it to Korean Americans in New York City; this is a thoughtful rendering of the story in a different context. I admit, there is something much more noble about the original Jane Eyre but in Park’s hands the heroine’s missteps make her less of an innocent, at times more annoying, and ultimately fully human.
