Plain Jane’s Calamity
by Barbara Diehl
Jane sees herself as anything but plain. Jane is no child in a primary reader who looks and sees and runs with a brother named Dick and a dog named Spot. Jane is no Jane Eyre, no pitiable governess, no almost-missionary’s wife. Jane is no Tarzan’s Jane, a Baltimorean bumbling her way through an African jungle. No, not our Jane. Our Jane sees herself a Calamity Jane, tobacco spitter, a beer guzzler, sharpshooter, fearless rider Jane, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
But look. See Jane in her gingham dress and bobby socks watch Dick play fetch with Spot. See Jane push funny little baby Puff in the carriage while Dick struts in Father’s fedora. But see Jane cower before the savage, unrepressed Bertha in the attic. But see Jane run from Thornfield Hall across windswept moors clutching her carpetbag of belongings. But see Jane need Tarzan to rescue her from lions and apes and kidnappers, time and time again.
See Jane ride the subway with her dog spray canister tucked into her cross-body bag. See Jane take coffee orders, take minutes of the meeting on a legal pad, take whatever anyone dishes out, take it with a grain of salt, take it on the chin, take it like a good sport. See Jane dream of a horse named Rochester, a lover named Hickok, of being addressed, with respect, as tribal chieftess, and sometimes Lady Greystoke.
See Jane dream of bursting through saloon doors with a Winchester rifle. Dream of a Stetson with an eagle feather. Of spurs. Of being spurred, an unbroken horse in a wild west show. Dream of herself in Father’s fedora, leaving little baby Puff with Dick so she can rip herself right out of that reader. Be Bertha shredding the bridal veil, burning the manor down. Plain Jane is only a bookmark. Plain Jane is not the story. See Jane know she will be any Jane but plain.
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poems appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, Raleigh Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Tiny Molecules, Sky Island Journal, Gargoyle, and Cleaver. She is the winner of the 2025 L+S Press Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series Contest.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Plain Jane’s Calamity”? Isn’t it true, how intensely we can feel about certain names? How we associate some names with people we love? How some names are ruined by their association with someone awful? And why do some names top the charts for millennia and others are as popular as poodle skirts and pompadours one year and passé the next? I love the idea of names and naming. Their meanings, histories, weight. I like the name Jane. I like the sound of it. Its single syllable. The drawn-out long A. It’s a strong, solid name. Jane didn’t deserve the term “Plain Jane” just because of a rhyme. What a calamity to be labeled that way. In this poem, Jane pushes back.
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