The art of writing

I am in a sullen mood this morning after reading that a e publisher, (name shall go unmentioned) is jumping on the mommy porn rage, and plans to spice up the classics such as Jane Eyre.  My heart just started thumping when I read that and I wanted to cry. My god, am I a creature from another century? I have no issue with porn, mummy or not, but I was astounded at the lack of respect to a fellow artist. I don’t know of any artist, in any medium, who does not give a large part of his soul, his essence into a produced piece of work.

Does it really matter that the artist has been dead for more than a hundred years and their work is now in public domain? Do we really have the right to take the hard work of in this case a writer, a writer who had to fight against so many odds. Who had to write in an era when it was not “proper” for women to write, an era when so many women took male identities just to sell their work, and if sold, often received a pat on the head with a comment like –that was very clever of you dear, and once found out that a woman dared to write as she had, the writing was critiqued as being coarse.

Is Rochester now to walk into the room with silk bondage ropes? Charlotte Bronte when she was writing Jane Eyre was ahead of her time when she explored the themes of sexuality, early feminism, and religion. Jane Eyre was a work of art, a classic that has withstood the test of time. When she published it, she published it to the best of her talents and under the male name of Currier Bell.  It was her vision, her story. Who are we to come along and because there is a current best seller topping the charts, to sully her work and turn it into mommy porn just to gain monetary rewards? Where is the art, in taking the work of someone else and slamming in some bondage?

I am just shattered with disgust. Am I over the top? Am I just one lone person out there who thinks all of this is fine? Is there any artist out there who has slaved away at their work that wants to see it turned into something else a hundred years from now? Yes, we have adaptations, yes, we have parodies, but the essence of the work is the same. There have been films, retelling of the story from another character’s view point, even continuations of the story, but taking Jane Eyre and other classics and putting them into mommy porn is beyond all common sense. Surely there are plenty of writers starving for work, who could create new original works of mommy porn? Why not utilise them? Why take the work of a classic literature and turn it into mommy porn? This quite simply is the rape of Jane Eyre.

English: Title page, first edition, en:Jane Eyre. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)