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Popular Culture Review
Jessica, and it will soon be revealed that Wesley, Paul’s brother, had also wanted
Jessica. Betsy falls for Paul, Wesley still wants Jessica, and Betsy’s solution is
to attempt to cure Jessica through a voodoo ceremony. The ceremony does not
work. Jessica is, it turns out, already under a voodoo spell and—furthermore—
she is likely dead and was turned into a zombie at the moment of her passing.
(Not that it matters, Paul tells Jessica, as he had long ago stopped caring for his
wife who, like Rochester’s Bertha, was guilty of indecorous behavior.) Voodoo
drums summon Jessica. Wesley opens the gate barring the mansion, so that she
can join the ceremony; he follows, holding an arrow. A priest sticks a pin on a
doll. Wesley is seen pulling away from his former love, arrow still in hand, the
undead bride now definitively, incontestably dead. He carries her into a stormy
sea. The movie ends where it begins: a beach in the West Indies, Wesley and
Jane drowned. Betsy and Paul can now be together.
Whatever the differences in narrative might be, all three versions of Jane
have a great degree of agency. They are all fully engaged participants in their
own romances.
That both the movies and the novel allow for an active Jane is not
necessarily surprising. Nor is the degree of agency terribly dramatic. In all three,
after all, the story hinges on a woman who will marry her employer, so the
heroines’ agency extends only as far as their capacity to deal with grievances
and overcome obstacles to this end. The most significant obstacle in all three
texts is the presence of a previous wife—mad and locked up in two texts,
catatonic and possibly undead in the other. What becomes increasingly more
interesting, however, is the tangled relationship between agency, obstacle, and
film grammar in I Walked With a Zombie and Jane Eyre, particularly since it is
Lewton and Tomeur’s vision, in I Walked With a Zombie, that allows for a
greater range of actions while engaging the heroine in what Gilbert and Gubar
see as the central preoccupation of 19th-century women writers, whose
“novelists and poets . . . are often both literally and figuratively concerned with
disease, as if to emphasize the effort with which health and wholeness were
won from the infectious ‘vapors’ of despair and fragmentation” (2033).
It helps that the heroine of I Walked With a Zombie is no longer a governess
but a nurse—hence professionally concerned with disease—and that she is in
charge of caring for Jessica, this version’s “Madwoman in the Attic.” Other
differences abound, but given the radically divergent markets of these two film
versions—as well as the radically different set of circumstances surrounding
both films—it’s equally intriguing to find so many similarities embedded in the
fabric of these texts.
The most striking immediate similarity between Jacques Tourneur’s /
Walked With a Zombie and Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre is the wealth of
staircases and shadows to be found in both. Both films will introduce thenheroines these shadowy, angular new spaces via long tracking shots in which
most of the interiors are hidden from view. These interior spaces are crossed by
highly dramatic, and highly angular, shafts of light that serve to suggest both the