A Good End to Bad Things (Wuthering Heights CH 22-34)

I'm in a strange mental space upon finishing this book, so forgive me if that is reflected in this blog.  I had intended to give a fiery denouncement of this book, and I still may, but it is less likely now.  It's rather like attending a funeral of someone who had done you ill in the past.  Death puts this weird perspective on things.  Even the prospect of someone dying makes so much forgivable and we see that person in a rosier light than we did when they were healthy and seemed to have all the time in the world.

Given that, I think it would be best to section this post on Wuthering Heights into certain themes.

The End
The final third of the novel was actually more interesting than the rest of the novel.  Cathy's father died and Heathcliff forced her to live under his roof and began to torture her especially after Linton died leaving everything to him rather than her...which of course was the plan all along.

There's this very subtle shift that occurs after Linton dies and Heathcliff wins.  It's so subtle that I almost wonder if I'm making it up.  There are moments and beats, shades of ways Heathcliff says things that seem to show that deep down he realizes how very hollow his victory is.  He's fought, railed, abused, and tormented everyone his entire life.  Now that everyone he could have been victorious against is dead and he's "won" there's nothing left.  His life's actually without any sort of meaning.  Certainly he continues to abuse Cathy and Hareton, but there are moments where he stops himself in the middle because he sees the dead looking right back at him through the eyes of the children.  He's won...and nobody could care less.  Indeed, the children have gotten to the point where they are just waiting him out.  They don't say as much, but it's clear they can see an end to their torture, and so are less fearful of him.

Cathy's situation is particularly interesting to me.  Here she was an intelligent and empathetic creature always trying to do right even if she got confused by romance, and once under Heathcliff's thumb she began to shift into this terrible creature.  She causes discord for fun, delights in mocking Hareton for bettering himself by learning to read, and is generally spiteful to all.  Here we go again, I thought, the apple isn't falling far from the tree.  I was genuinely surprised to find what resistance there was in both of their hearts to this darkening.  There were a few genuinely hopeful moments in the last third that indicated that these children (well, I say children but they were 23 and 18 years of age) would not make the same mistakes as their parents.

Heathcliff tells her that he will torment her as payment for living under her roof.  She boldly looks at him with the eyes of her namesake and says "Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and however miserable you makes us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery.  You are  miserable, are you not?  Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him?  Nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you when you die!  I wouldn't be you!"

Right next to that piece is my notation in black ink, "Daaaang, sister!"

Later Hareton and Cathy start to fall in love when both realize their toxic ways are less than beneficial and apologize to each other.  They begin to show kindness and tenderness in a house of abuse and naturally they are drawn to it.  They decide to make a little flower garden to please each other.  Unfortunately Hareton digs up the wrong bushes.  They explain and Heathcliff turns on Cathy.

'"And who the devil gave you leave to touch a stick about the place?...And who ordered you to obey her?" he added, turning to Hareton.

The Latter was speechless; his cousin replied - "You shouldn't grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornaments, when you have taken all my land!"  (Oh, snap!)

"Your land, insolent slut! You never had any," said Heathcliff.'

He goes to hit her, Hareton stands by her side and he pales.  It's as if they're saying, "We're just waiting you out old man.  You won't be able to torment us forever".

For Earnshaw, Catherine, Edgar, Isabella, and even Linton, to a lesser degree, Heathcliff was something they had to endure in one form or another for the rest of their lives.  His obsession and abuse shaped them and there was little hope of a reprieve.  For the kids, they can swallow it down and not be permanently shaped by it.  With Linton dead, he realizes, he leaves nothing of his own behind.  Neither of the titles or lands were ever truly his.  He was a foundling replacement in the stead of a child who died at birth.

Any remorse he may have had fades quickly at the prospect of being reunited in death with Catherine...which was pretty weak in my estimation.

The book does end happily and I was quite pleased with the ending, but it is not even remotely a book I would read through again just for that ending.  I'll but the book on my "100 Books" bookcase and it will travel with me wherever I go, but it will never be opened again.  It's too infuriating and it's main characters too vile.  Most of my favorite books I return to in order to welcome my "friends" with open arms.  This book I'd only be capable of returning to with a clenched fist.

Love and Obsession/Passion
Much is made of the "Love Story" supposedly found within these pages.  I've looked at so many reviews that say "Oh, how I wish I had a man who loved me like Heathcliff" and I can't help but wonder what they mean by that.  He was abusive to every woman in his life including Catherine and terrible in general to every one else.  If you want a man to beat you about the face and neck, threaten your relatives, and attempt to murder your pets then I'm pretty sure that your average psych ward could grant you some prospects.

Now, naturally, no one wants those terrible things.  So, what could they possibly mean by that?

To my mind what they are saying is that they want someone who feels strongly, passionately, about them, and I get that.  I know so many people who say, "Man, if the fireworks aren't there then there's no point at all."  The problem with that is that fireworks inevitably fade.  They HAVE to.  The proverbial "fireworks" are nothing more than chemicals in the brain.  "Love" shoots us up with a crazy cocktail of hormones that are not unlike a drug.  It is AMAZING to feel that way for weeks or even months.  We easily become addicted to it.  Just like any drug our bodies necessarily acclimate to it and need more in order to just feel buzzed.  Instead of taking more hits we escalate situations in order to get the high.  This leads to fighting, and abuse.  As someone who was once the victim in an abusive relationship I can tell you that this happened to me and I stayed.  Why?  The mental and physical abuse was hell, but the makeup time was just the dose I needed to get high.  One of my friends at the time described it perfectly.  He said, "Imagine being in a cold, black box.  You're in there for weeks at a time and then she opens the lid letting in the warm sunshine.  You hope she'll take you out of the box, and she swears she will.  You believe it every time because it feels so good."  When you are addicted to passion you make the other person your "dealer" and you'll bow to nearly any whim for another high.

What Heathcliff and Catherine have is not love in any way shape or form.  It can be loosely described as "passion".  It is a wind storm devastating everything in its path leading to nothing in the end.  There's nothing tangible or real about their "love".  It's abusive to one another and everyone around them.

The real tragedy is that Catherine had love and didn't want it.  Edgar Linton treated Catherine with dignity, respect, and doted on her in every way he could.  Even to the end he was at her bedside refusing to leave or even sleep.  It wasn't loud, it wasn't exciting, but it was healthy, wholesome and, if she had let it, it would have nurtured her.  Genuine love is recognized not by how it feels but, rather, by what it does.  Passion will get you high, but love will sustain you when you are in the depths.  The fireworks do not last, and I thank God that they don't.  When you're high on endorphins you can be the blindest you've ever been.  You'll drink poison and swear it tastes like champagne.  When the passion fades you can see things rightly.  You can see what the two of you need to work on and how best to be each other's helpmate.  Getting high on passion is always self centered and genuine love is other centered.  Without some sort of morality healthy love cannot exist.  It's merely passionate, self centered obsession.

Why, Emily?  Why?
I've scanned a few articles on the net as to why Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights and have discovered that there is nothing on the subject directly from Emily or any of her sisters.  We are left with, as I declared in the first place, a terrible story about terrible people who do terrible things to each other.  Now I am compelled to add, "with a little hope at the end."

I do not believe that Emily Bronte wrote this book in order to celebrate this abusive "love".  It's much in the same way that Trainspotting was not, as many moral people believed and declared loudly, a book/movie that glorifies heroine usage.  Seriously, all you have to do is watch the first fifteen minutes of the movie to get that it's about the horrors of heroine usage.

All we need do is to look at who the "hero" of the book actually is; Nelly.  She is our perspective through 90% of the novel (the other 10% being made up of the unnecessary Mr. Lockwood).  Nelly endures the sufferings, celebrates the joys, and accurately predicts the demise of every character.  She's the only one throughout who cares about the others.  She's the only one who holds any hope of redemption for anyone.  Even Heathcliff she calls a Goblin or a Devil from the moment she sees him as a child and still keeps hoping she can nudge him into some sort of morality.

Charlotte Bronte, in speaking of the novel after it was published...sadly after the death of Emily, stated that it was the most accurate portrayal of life in those obscure manors that were such a distance from town.  Isolation from the rest of the "herd" produces these strange abuses and odd behaviors.

Once I realized that it is a critique of such people and life then it became infinitely more tolerable.  Still...not tolerable enough to read again.  How this book is on the top 100 of all time is still a mystery to me, but then again so is Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

Thank you one and all for sticking through this lengthy process of reviewing this book.  I appreciate how frustrating it must have been to wait so long between posts, but I just couldn't handle it all at once as I normally try to do them.

Next is George Orwell's 1984 which I expect will be a read that delights me.  Sadly, I will only be able to get a copy sometime after the first of next month.  Until then I'll be reading classic sci-fi magazines from the 60's in order to recover from this 100 Brontes on the Austen/Bronte scale...which only goes up to 10.

Pax,

W

A Case To Be Made (Wuthering Heights Ch 11-21)

Gentle ladies and, to a lesser extent, gentlemen of the jury, if you will indulge me, I would like to present my case.

There have been many love stories written over the eight millenia or so since human beings invented written language.  From those first chicken scratch cuneiform syllables to the garish modern implementation of Comic Sans and even upon entering into the all forgiving, healing light of Helvetica there has been much debate on the subject of what does and does not constitute a love story.  Certainly it can take many forms.

Some would have us believe that for a tale to truly be a love story it must end happily.  Romeo and Juliet, arguably the greatest of all love stories, would then be out of the running entirely.  Indeed, the modern romantic classic Possession by A. S. Byatt would only count because the modern couple gets together though the past couple does not.

I submit to you that for a love story to truly be that in name, it must actually show the protagonist couple in love and doing loving things to and for each other.  At it's very base element this must be present.

I further submit, therefore, that Wuthering Heights is the furthest thing from a love story since Machiavelli's The Prince or perhaps Mein Kampf.  I don't use these comparisons lightly at all.  When we look at Wuthering Heights what do we see between Catherine and Heathcliff?  Only passion; animalistic and self serving passion.  I do believe that I could excuse the novel as merely a tawdry little work if it was just animalistic passion.  Tawdry but not nearly a love story.

Seriously, though, what am I supposed to think about this Heathcliff?  A brute from the moment we meet him, cast into a family of brutes and selfish prigs, who has a certain amount of passion for a beautiful, sniping, selfish, conniving...wench.  All he knows is beating people into submission and all she knows is manipulating people for her own uses.  Why am I supposed to cheer for this couple?  At all?

I last left these people with Heathcliff having returned to find Catherine married Linton, who is now one of two people who actually seem virtuous.  It seems that Linton actually loves Catherine though her standards of "passion" are clearly not met in that relationship.  She teases and taunts Heathcliff with the marriage and disrespects her new husband in many respects by allowing/demanding that Heathcliff be allowed to visit whenever he likes.

Heathcliff reveals his plan to destroy Earnshaw through the son he neglects, Hareton, and then gets the bright idea to revenge himself on Linton, for marrying Catherine, by taking up with his little sister, Isabella.  Catherine correctly sees what Heathcliff is up to and says, not considering for a second that the same might be said of her, "Your bliss, like his (Satan's), lies in inflicting misery."  The husband overhears all, steps in, Heathcliff threatens to beat him, she says it's all his (Linton's) fault and how dare he accuse Heathcliff of being horrible...Seriously.  She declares "If Edgar will be mean and jealous then I will break their hearts by breaking my own."  Yes...she's intentionally going to pitch fits because her husband won't allow her to see a man who is passionately in love with her and has threatened to beat her husband bloody.  And this is love?  She spends the next few chapters being not so much a Drama Queen as a freaking Drama Empress.   She claims she'll kill herself and it's only out of selfishness that Linton wants her around.

It's about this time that Heathcliff comes around, scoops up Isabella to elope and, as any lover would do, hangs a dog by the neck so that it should die.  It would be belong to his new wife, Isabella.

When news reaches Catherine then she predictable falls into a brain fever.

This section is where I pretty much lose it.  Before, at Wuthering Heights, it was terrible people doing terrible things to other terrible people.  Now they are leaving a trail of broken hearts and damaged psyches in their wake because they insist on involving decent people.  Linton attends to Catherine and dotes on her before, during, and after the illness.  Sure, he's not the most passionate guy, I mean her prefers books to strangling puppies to death, but he cares.  Isabella warmly invited Catherine into their lives and she ends up repaid with abuse, physical and mental.

Isabella writes a letter to Nelly and asks if Heathcliffe is a man.  If not is he insane or a devil?  Seriously, honey, if you have to ask...you're in deep Bantha poodoo.  Upon Nelly pressing Heathcliff for an explanation he declares it was all Isabella's fault.  Hanging up her dog, beating her, no brutality had any effect on her so he continued to be brutal.

Gosh, he's dreamy.

Catherine takes ill even more.  Apparently her fake tantrums took their toll especially in light of her pregnancy (surprise) and near to giving birth Heathcliff gets wind of her illness and stands outside the house, hidden.  He's lurking, waiting until the husband isn't home and the door is accidentally left unlocked.  (So freaking gallant and not at all creepy!)

"Oh, Cathy!  Oh, My life!  how can I bear it?" he says upon forcing his way in.

"'What now?' said Catherine, leaning back and returning his look with a suddenly clouded brow:  Her humour was a mere vane for constantly varying caprices.  'You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff!  And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied...(ain't she a gem?) You have killed me-and thriven on it, I think....How many years do you mean to live after I'm gone?'"

Chapter sixteen begins with the fact of Catherine's death in childbirth...to which I could only manage to say, "Then why is there so much freaking book left?!?!".

Loving, chivalrous Heathcliff responds as anyone would expect a caring individual who just lost the love of his life would.

"May she wake in torment!...Why she's a liar to the end!...haunt me...only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you!"  Yeah, cause you treated each other so well when she was alive.  I mean, she must be in hell not being abused by you or be able to watch you tormenting her sister in law with a freaking KNIFE shoved between her teeth (actually happened).  She must be missing you something fierce.

As ever Nelly has the right of it when she says, "Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies."

We fast forward...Isabella escapes Heathcliff and Earnshaw to London, pregnant but more than happy to make it on her own than around those two.  She gives birth and names the child Linton, hoping that will disuade Heathcliff who only declares, as a good father would, "When I want it, I will have it."  Edgar Linton has named his child Catherine, after her mother, and sixteen years pass.  During that time Earnshaw died leaving Heathcliff with Hareton.  Isabella dies and Edgar goes off to fulfill his sister's wish of having Linton live with him.  Heathcliff objects and the poor, sickly child is brought into his care.  And why would he want him?  One simple reason; to have the ultimate in pathetic revenges; Linton to marry Cathy and then when Linton dies, because of the language of the law, Heathcliff would rule over both estates.  Of course he can't help but encourage Hareton to try for Cathy and thereby cause even more discord.  It's not enough to play with and ruin the lives of adults, but now he has to destroy the lives of children.

The worst part of it all?  There is still one hundred pages to go, and we already know how this ends because the beginning is the end; Heathcliff abusing both Hareton and Cathy around a fire.

I could spill all of my feelings about this book, what all it's taught me, and that sort of thing, but I think it's best left for the final entry.

I will say, however, that I got on multiple sites and read reviews for this book by many people.  The one thing that amazed me was how many people think that this is such a good love story, and how amazing Heathcliff is.  Seriously?

Renee commented on my last post about how there's a sort of Heathcliff arc in fiction.  Edward Cullen, Four, Christian Gray and all these guys who are dark, brooding, abusive types are so lapped up by readers as so dreamy.  I'd even go so far as to put Lestat in that category.  I guess it's likely human nature on some level.  When I was in high school who did all the girls want?  That guy who was no good for them at ALL...but gosh they want them.  They give their bodies and their lives to them and then when they are used up, abandoned with kids, past their "prime" they wonder where all the good guys are.

Now the interesting question, of course, is what would Charlotte Bronte think of her sister's work and does Rochester apply as the dark, brooding, abusive type?

I'll leave that to your gentle hands, dear jury, to type out into the comments below.  :)

Pax,

W

Terrible People (Wuthering Heights Ch 1-10)

From the outset I want to be clear.  Twelve chapters in I am NOT a fan of this book at all and am currently questioning its place on the the 100BYSRBYD.  The reason it has taken me weeks to write a blog post on it is because it has taken weeks for me too get through the first one hundred and eleven pages.  I sit down, read a few paragraphs and then I'm seized with an urge to do something else, anything else.

My lovely, long suffering wife has asked me multiple times why I don't just chuck the book and move onto the next one.  In response I cite the necessity to report it back to you, dear reader, on the blog.  She scoffs affectionately and becomes a bit more resistant to my whining and complaining.  Indeed, I have questioned the choice to continue on.  More than once I've wanted to use the book as starter for a fire...though I'm not in possession of an actual fire place.  I have read worse...(Twilight...ok I can't honestly say I've read the WHOLE thing.  Two paragraphs are enough) and I would chuck it but for one thing.  I've been told that I'm ten times as entertaining when talking about something I dislike.  I used to have a friend who would bate me into topics just to watch me go off.  I may have said this before but, if you want to watch someone explode then in person ask me my feelings on Star Wars Episode III.  Hopefully blood won't shoot from my eyes the next time I give a dissertation on that topic.

I think it is wholly appropriate that Wuthering Heights is being turned into a high school drama on the Lifetime channel.  The drama is pretty much Gossip Girl level so far, but that comparison will be further explained later.

From the first page I had this image of young Emily Bronte watching how successful her older sister was and decided to just give it a go.  The scenes where Lockwood, our spy glass into the lives and history of the denizens of Wuthering Heights, narrates are thoroughly intolerable.  I was predisposed to liking him at the beginning when he describes himself as a lonely sort who was as much of a grumpy bugger as I can tend to be, but there seem to be two distinct authors at work here.  The Lockwood perspective is ridiculously written.  Honestly, it's as if Ms. Bronte wrote out the chapter in a normal voice and then took a thesaurus and upgraded all the words to an unnecessary level.  I spent the first fifty pages thinking, "These are some pretty awful people" and I have yet to think otherwise.

When Nelly begins to tell the back story of the strange little group of interrelated figures then the verbiage eases up and we are able to relax into the story.  Sadly the story of the past is no better than the present.  It's a story of terrible people treating other terrible people terribly by doing terrible things.

If I was to compare Emily's work to her elder sister's I would say that Charlotte's is superior.  Primarily this is because there is at least a ray of hope in Jane Eyre.  In that novel terrible things happen to decent people who remain decent and even treat terrible people decently.  There are no redeeming qualities in any of these characters save Nelly who is simply a bystander and storyteller.  Earnshaw, Catherine's elder brother, is so abominable and abusive that he thinks nothing to threatening Nelly by forcing a knife between her teeth.  Heathcliff is a savage child with no thought for anyone but Catherine.  Catherine is the same but a "socially presentable" version and a complete idiot.

Catherine marries their neighbor, Mr. Linton, after Heathcliff has gone away for three years.  Heathcliff returns and reinserts himself into Catherine's life.  This quite naturally pisses off Linton to the point that he is crying about it and our "heroine" of the novel can't figure out why her husband is acting that way.  Linton has been a bit of an idiot himself, doting on Catherine and appeasing her in all things to keep her "happy".  It's so bad that when Nelly tells Catherine that she shouldn't test or push Mr. Linton like this she replies, "I have such faith in Linton's love, that I believe I might kill him, and he wouldn't wish to retaliate."

It was at this point that I realized I may not be reading just a book about horrible people...that may just be the point.  It took nearly one hundred pages for me to go, "Wait a minute...maybe Emily Bronte is mocking the rich.  She might just be pointing out to the rest of the world how horrible these people in estates far away from normal humanity are."  If this is so then it doesn't make me love it any more.  Unredeemable people being unredeemable doesn't exactly make for a redeemable book.  We've seen into their future, miserable around an estate that is falling apart, so from the outset we see that this doesn't end happily.

The moment it gets all Gossip Girl is when Catherine's sister-in-law, Isabella, declares that she is interested in Heathcliff.  Heathcliff gets all Charles Bass and smiles at how much damage he could do there.  To wit; To marry Isabella which would piss of Catherine who still loves him and in order to get the fortune of Linton which settles one score and meanwhile Isabella is little more than collateral damage. Gossip Girl walked a fine line of glamorizing and viciously criticizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous.  As a species we are never so vicious as when the stakes are so small...unfortunately their small stakes were people's emotions and reputations.  My complaint with Wuthering Heights is exactly the same as I had with Gossip Girl...what's the point?  I get the same feeling from both of those as when I read a graphic novel called Everyone Dies and Nobody Learns Anything.  From the glimpse of the inevitable end I really don't see a point.  Catherine and Heathcliff are pretty much Ross and Rachel to me.  I don't even want to see them together.  So wherein cometh the hero?  What is the point of the novel?  A cautionary tale to not be an egotistical abusive jerk?

I'm truly hoping the novel takes an unexpected turn and delights me, but one third of the way in I can't imagine that it will.

Pax,

W

A Most Appropriate Ending (Jane Eyre Ch. 31-The End)

In one great blast of reading, many thanks to my children for being understanding and fending for themselves while Papa read "the lady book" (as my 3 year old son referred to it), I finished Jane Eyre.  I was told during the course of this novel by a friend that I would cry at the ending.  I'm not sure how I could cry given the situation at the end.  As usual, I'm getting ahead of myself here.

We last left Jane she had left the warmth and hospitality of Moor House for her own austere cottage in her new situation as a teacher to the local poor children.  To our modern sensibilities we can easily gloss over some of the statements Jane makes regarding her pupils that were, in all actuality, fairly revolutionary.  She declares of them,

"I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest geneaology;  and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born."

This, in the Victorian era, must have been a touch of a slap in the face.  In a time where nobility was still revered as being infallible and your "betters" it would take a character such as Jane to both see and point out that there is little "better" about those "betters".  Consider that every "best born" that she has encountered has proven themselves to be both ill mannered and of a baser quality than the servants and commoners all around her.  As a teacher of both the noble and the common she would see that there is little difference at all.  Every religious person is so far removed from the example of the Lord Jesus Christ as to be unrecognizable.  The "heroes" of the novel are men of science (the doctor who tended her compassionately at the Reeds), a headmistress of the school who claimed no particular faith, a child riddled with consumption, and a man a "lord" who cares nothing about the hierarchy of things.  The villains claim to know Christ and seek to force change in others while the heroes barely claim Christ at all, have no idea what is best for others let alone themselves sometimes, admit their own faults and failings, and don't seek to change others much at all.

And here is where I must bring up St John Rivers, Jane's cousin.  It's hard to decide which "villain" is more vile; Brocklehurst vs. Rivers vs. Aunt Reed...in a cage match to the death!  All three are vile in such very different ways.  Aunt Reed you can almost forgive simply because of the situation.  Does that grant absolution?  Likely not.  She damaged a child, but if you're a parent you know how easy it is to think you are doing what is "best" for a particularly willful child only to turn around and realize you've made a horrible mistake.  Brocklehurst's lack of consistency is to the point of self delusion, which isn't born out of cruelty though it may in effect be cruelty.  As with Aunt Reed he seems to genuinely believe what he is doing is what is actually best for these "slatterns".

St John is in a whole other category.  Aunt Reed and Brocklehurst didn't seem to use their "piety" for selfish and controlling ends.  Neither actually wanted anything from those they treated poorly.  St John, however, was more than happy to worm his way into Jane's heart and use whatever he found there to manipulate her into meeting his desire.

On the surface St. John appears to be a decent sort of fellow.  He's willing to take Jane in though he mistrusts her at first.  He rises in the middle of inclement weather to attend to the needs of a poor person in his congregation.  St. John roams far and wide on a daily basis to see to the spiritual health of his parish.  All honorable things.   I initially took his lack of conversation as general deepness of thought or adherence to the scripture that says one should only speak what is beneficial and avoid idle talk.  Unfortunately, as it turns out, the silence is that of a calculating mind.  He manipulates Jane into learning Hindustani instead of the German she has been studying.  Well, manipulates is too weak a word.  He pretty much demands.  And why does Jane comply?  Our typically strong willed Jane seems to just accept his will over her own.  He did save her from certain death.  He is her highly respectable cousin so...there is some feeling of indebtedness to be sure.  But he begins to push her harder and harder the closer he gets to his date of shipping out to India as a missionary.  She begins to sense something is amiss when she realizes the following,

"As for me, I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation."

And then the other shoe drops, as it were, and from out of left field he asks her to be his wife and to accompany him to India.  First of all...first cousin marriage...yeah...that's weird.  He confesses that he's been molding her and shaping her (aka grooming...ya jerk) to become his perfect help meet.  She says "As a sister, yeah, totally I'll go with you to India." (abridged version) He continues to demand it has to be as his wife.

Pages upon pages are dedicated to their back and forth on this issue.  It very closely reflects the back and forth between Jane and Rochester cattiness, but there is no fun, no joy in it.  Why?  Because St John is a controlling and manipulative jerk.

Maybe it's because I've watched "Kingdom of Heaven" too many times (Love that film.  It speaks to men the same way Jane Austen speaks to women) or perhaps it's my adequate knowledge of history, but anytime someone even hints at saying "God wills it" apart from the original apostles and Jesus himself...I'm going to question the heck out of that presumption.  These two go back and forth, Jane the ever resistant when cornered, and here we see the difference between the two suitors.  When Jane stands her ground before Rochester, yes he's not happy about it, but his admiration for her grows because she is being very much who she is.  She is very much being everything Rochester loves her for.  When obstinate before St John he constantly plays the "God's Will" card as a means to force her to bend to his will.  Jerk.

She is, unsurprisingly, smart enough to notice that "he asks me to be his wife, and has no more of a husband's heart for me than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the stream is foaming in yonder gorge."  He then overplays his hand in responding, "Refuse to be my wife, and you limit yourself for ever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity.  Tremble lest in that case your should be numbered with those who have denied the faith..."  Oh, she sees him for what he is now.  "As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission -"    He's austere, despotic and worried of limiting himself to barren obscurity.  All of his trips to help his parishoners, when none would go out into the night and the gale, is for his own glory, not the Lord's.

In reference to the very difference between her refusal to her suitors she tells the reader, "To have yielded then (Rochester) would have been an error of principle;  to have yielded now (St John) would have been an error of judgement."

Allow me an aside here to reflect on my own relationship.

There is something in the "religious" mindset that doesn't know what to do with a willful woman.  I adhere to the Christian faith intensely and am constantly baffled by this.  I've found myself quite unwittingly having been a "Feminist", of sorts, all my life when compared to much of the views regarding women in the older generations whom I've listened to.  My wife comes from a far more rigid, right wing, patriarchal system than I ever did.  I was raised "non-denominational" which is probably where most of my flexible spiritual thinking comes from, I suppose.  We went from Methodist, to Baptist, to Assembly of God, to "community church".  I can pretty much praise with anybody.  However, there's been a noticeable thread throughout each of them that, as I said, doesn't know what to do with a willful spirited woman.  When they find one they'll talk about how she's supposed to be submissive, meek, gentle, kind, respectful and all these virtues that really aren't meant to be limited to women.

So, when I found my wife one of the odd things was that half the attraction was to how spirited and vibrant and willful she was.  Well, IS still.  She has her own mind and it is a fabulous mind.  She's more intelligent than me (by 2 IQ points, but still I grant her the credit of it at every opportunity) and I so value how differently than me she thinks.  She has a very strong personality and is intimidated by no one.

She'd told me this before, but it has come up in conversation while reading Jane Eyre, that her parents and grandparents were flabbergasted with her idea of marriage.  She declared that she wasn't going to marry a authoritarian man or a controlling man, that she would only marry someone who would make decisions with her.  "But...what if you disagree?  The man is the head of the house (in our faith) and so he gets to make the decisions.  What happens when you disagree?"  She shrugged it off and said, "We'll talk it out and come to a consensus."  As her husband of 15 years I can tell you that this is precisely what happens, and not because she pushed her philosophy.  It's because from the beginning we mutually respect each other and each other's strengths.  Now, as a Christian, yes, I do agree that I am the "head of the house" and have the "final say" power granted by God...but if I don't have to pull rank why should I?  When people have told me half joking "Will, control your wife!" I jokingly reply back "Ha! You try it and see how far you get", but the truth of the matter is we talk.  We share our perspectives (sometimes loudly) and we do hammer out a consensus.  8 times out of 10 we both look at a problem and can see a clear path.  The other 2 times it takes some thought and usually we're one or both of us missing information.  If my wife and I discussed it and I could see rationally what she could not see and it was going hurt damage one or both of us then and only then would I "pull rank", as it were.  I married a rational, intelligent, clear thinking woman.  To "pull rank" just because I can would be to deny that she is any of that.

The older generation of ladies, not just the men, also have tended to tell the younger ladies "how to be".  In some instances this is actually beneficial and wise advice.  My wife has been given advice on a number of occasions to just be quiet, smile and nod, and obey, keep your opinions to yourself, let the man make the mistakes and have his way and that's how you find peace in a marriage.  Yeah.  Not even so much.  How is that being a "helpmate"?  How is that being a "co-laborer"?  That's not having a wife.  That's having an employee.  I didn't marry her to just sit there and look pretty, to be seen and not heard.  The farther I've gotten into this book the more I realized I sought my wife and married my wife because she's very much like Jane.  She even wants to learn to paint.

We not return you to your regularly scheduled program:

Jane "flees" Morton in order to find out more information about her beloved Rochester who as it turns out, is no longer impeded by a previous marriage.  Granted he is now blind and mutilated, but none of this even phases Jane because, well, why would it?  She does not love with her eyes, but her soul.

When she first appears Rochester doubts his senses and his sanity.  I love how the moment she mentions that she is an independent woman with five thousand pounds a year his response is, "Ah! this is practical - this is real! ... I should never dream that."  Money was never an issue, never a negative or a positive to him.

Like any man Rochester is leery of imposing his mutilated and unkempt self upon Jane.  She would have to feed him, lead him by the hand (literally...one hand is all he has left), and bathe him.  He sees himself as an elder invalid and doubts Jane would ever be content as his nurse.  She declares nothing would make her happier.  Rochester plays a verbal "card" to test her meaning by declaring it is because she delights in sacrifice.

"Sacrifice!  What do I sacrifice?  Famine for food, expectation for content.  To be privileged to put my arms around what I value - to press my lips to what I love - to repose on what I trust; is that to make sacrifice?  If so, then certainly delight in sacrifice."

The conclusion is one of the sweetest, most heart warming, and life affirming I have ever read.  Love has won, though in not the beautiful wrapped in a bow sort of way the world likes.  Love has won in the way that life is...a mess.

Why has Jane Eyre endured for 150 years?  Why is it so beloved?  Because it is true.  It is the way life is, warts and all...and there is hope.


Pax,

W

In Like a Lion...(Jane Eyre chapters 27-31)

Chapter 26 ended with the revelation, blunted for me as it was by my sister's lack of "spoiler sense", that Rochester was already married and married to a crazy lady.  The wedding was called off, the madwoman revealed to all parties involved and bizarrely, or so I thought at the time, Jane cutting herself off and away from Rochester.

in Jane Eyre there is not single antagonist, no enemy, no arch villain trying to thwart Jane from every joy and happiness.  There are multiple antagonists each with a different mask, each with a different "mental problem".  I am putting that phrase in quotes because I'm not exactly certain that they have a "mental problem" and I don't want to diminish the very definition of "mental problem".  It may seem a trifle like splitting hairs to you, dear reader, but it is a fairly important clarification in my mind regardless.

First we see John Reed who is all rage and abuse towards Jane for no purpose other than that he can.  Mrs. Reed is another "villain" who despises Jane because of ridiculous standards of society.  Jane's mother, Mr. Reed's favorite sister, married "low" and now she's forced to deal with her.  Her secondary "villainous" trait is that she refuses to see that her children could ever do anything wrong.  Denial is such a strong force and causes infinitely more damage than it brings comfort to the denier.

Following Mr. Reed is another self righteous individual in Mr. Brocklehurst.  Of all of them I tend to despise him the most.  He is a vain man who uses religious piety to shove down, humiliate, and abuse others.  I cannot stand his narcissistic inconsistencies.  Perhaps it is because I am closer than I'd like to be to a very similar individual.  The world around him is well served by his pontificating on how it should run and act, yet he is guilty of sins and improprieties ten times worse.  And if you expose his "short comings", as he would call his egregious sins, he will lambaste you for judging and acting like you are so much holier than he.  He once laughed and bragged about verbally abusing a store cashier to the point that she was crying.  Her sin?  Not knowing how to count back change correctly.  He actually said how lucky she was to have him criticize her, so lucky that he came along and set her straight.

Sorry, I digress.  I just see his face every time Brocklehurst is mentioned.

Miss Ingram, haughty and proud, is another villain...but hardly a villain at all as it turns out.  Gone in an instant.

So up until the madwoman in the cage once wed to Rochester, these were all villains that Jane could endure, that Jane could "out live" in a sense.  Her situation would one day change and they all could be left behind.  Mrs. Rochester, however is an immovable object.  Mrs. Rochester cannot be reasoned with, or endured.

Chapter 27 opens with the fallout.  Rochester pleads and begs, goes so far as to threaten violence if she will not see reason.  (Speaking of which...the footnote in my Penguin Classics edition mentions that the quote regarding "violence" means that he is threatening to rape her.  Where do they GET these people?  Rochester is many things, including an analogous Beast to Jane's Belle, but a rapist?  Did they even read the book they were footnoting?)

I spent pretty much the entirety of chapter 27 feeling nothing but sympathy for Rochester.  I'm tempted to think that this is due to my gender.  I can't fully say how women would react to his entreaties and all out begging.  (Given that my wife has had to stop reading so heavy a book during tax season my usual touchstone for feminine behavior questions is unavailable to me.  Le sigh.)  Perhaps some ladies see him as a scoundrel or less than honorable.  Perhaps some of the female persuasion see him as pathetic for being this emotional and distraught.  As for myself...it's all too familiar.  I have been there.

I have been on record as having never broken up with anyone I've ever dated.  I've always been on the receiving end.  The first time I felt like the breath had been stomped out of me and a gaping void where my heart was supposed to have just been.  She gave me a note in passing after school as she was going off to her job at the mall.  I didn't need to have read the note.  It was written all over her face.  The only reason that I needed to read it was to find out the why of it.  It was the stupidest reason imaginable, in retrospect.  It was totally her, not me (she was 17 but had fallen in "love" with a guy who was 34 and who had taken advantage of her) but at the time it couldn't fit in my matrix.  What had I done?  What could I have done differently?  Was she worth winning back?  None of that was on my mind.  Nothing reached me logically.  There was just this psychological gaping, sucking chest wound.  She had someone drive her to work...and I ran.  I was in such a panic.  I begged, I pleaded, I cried, I got down on my knees in the hardware aisle and wailed.  That's pretty much how I'm sure Rochester felt, though he probably had more self respect and held a bit more decorum.  He had all the more reason to wail since he actually had a woman worth it.  This girl I begged to come back came back to me weeks later when she'd had a pregnancy scare and asked me to claim it as my own so her lover wouldn't go to jail for statutory rape.  That was a bridge too far given the weeks of pain and depression...and I burned that bridge with a laugh.  I literally laughed.  Self respect came a bit too late, but I arrived at it all the same.

All this to say, from the male perspective I understand perhaps a fraction of what Rochester is going through.  Mine was with a girl unworthy of my affections.  I can't imagine what it would be like to lose one so truly worthy as Jane.

He is in such a horrible position:  stuck between a drooling, murdering, basket case and one of the most noble and praiseworthy of all women.  He loses Jane and is stuck with the former.

When Jane says that she believes he would hate her as well were she mad, Rochester replies,
"Then you are mistaken, and know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable.  Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own:  in pain and sickness it would still be dear.  Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still..."

He goes on to relate the unfortunate circumstances regarding his former, or rather current in point of fact, marriage.  They are an understandable mistake at every point.  Rochester then relates how his love grew for Jane over the weeks and months.  "I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem".  Dang.  Yes, he made a mistake in keeping this from her, he doesn't deny any of this.  To him the madwoman in the attic is dead and their marriage annulled by her violent, maddened mind.  Jane's emotions and resolve appear to be all over the map.  There is a war in her soul.  This battle is not over whether she forgives him or not, she declares very early in his discourse that she had already forgiven him.  To the modern mind this may seem strange.  I even have it written in my copy "Jane...stop being DUMB!"  and "Sigh...Jane...Oh, Jane...COME ON!".  Again, perhaps it's my gender that sides with Rochester on this.

Rochester launches a logical gambit at her, bringing in to question her value placement, "It is better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach?"  Just as when Jane launched her assault on Mrs. Reed I was cheering him on at this point.  Honestly, who is hurt by this?  What's her point?  Does she really see him as married to this...thing upstairs?  How does that count?  Who is she trying not to injure?  Is it just the principal of the thing?

Jane replies with the very quote on the back of the book, which I presume to be the most famous quote.  (though it is truncated and her heroism in this moment neutered by the absence of the direct why of it, namely God).
"I care for myself.  The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.  I will keep the law given by God: sanctioned by man.  I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now."

"given by God; sanctioned by man."

Again, as with those precious cranial neuron shifting moments with Helen, I am left with only one response.

"Well...crap."

No single page in this whole book, thus far, is as marked in black ink with all my notes and underlining of quotes as this one.  And why?  Because Jane give words to what we, the reader, so needs to hear.  You cannot help but be challenged, at the very least, or changed, at the very best, by the words she continues with.

"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is not temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.  If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?  They have a worth - so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe in it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.  Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by;  there I plant my foot."

My only response that I can muster when I read that is like a black lady in church who replies to the preacher with a deep, soulful "Mmmm hmmm" as support.

This is how you can tell a good writer, a masterful writer, apart from the rest, and I may have mentioned this in Pride and Prejudice, but it bears repeating.  There is no villain here.  She's not hitting this moment and all the ladies shout, "You go girl!  You don't need that man!  You fine by yourself!  You do you, girlfriend."  These are two people, as she declares many times, in such a deep and consuming love who cannot be together.  Is it so terrible that he wants her?  He wants her for all the right reasons.  Rochester loves her for the very essence of her being.  She is not a strutting peacock for him to show off and then put away when he's bored.  He wants her for everything and in everything good and bad.  In the presence of so expansive and anchored a love, when compared to a woman who is violent and literally out of her mind...yeah...I'd try everything to keep Jane as well.  Is he wrong?  No.  Is he going about it in a wrong manner?  Hell yes.

It is the principal of the thing.  For Jane it is a foundational principal of life and godliness.  If she were to marry him while he was still married it is a soul level violation for her.  He says it's a convention of man and no one is hurt, so who cares?  We hear this a lot in our society.  She replies, and rightly, that it is a law given by God, sanctioned by man.  Sure, man sanctioned it, but it is God who made it a law.  Not a "convention" a law.

As she bears down and maintains the sanctity of her soul and digs her foot in, the most remarkable thing happens.  I should expect it of Rochester by now, but it surprised me still.  Her defiance, her sticking to her principals...only makes him love and admire her more.

"Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once so frail and frail and so indomitable."

He's pissed, he's in pain, he wants what he wants, and here she is being more beautiful in spirit, more admirable, than ever before.  In the presence of pressure she turns into a diamond.

There is a simple moment two paragraphs away from there that shook me.

"What unutterable pathos was in his voice!  How hard it was to reiterate firmly, 'I am going.'
'Jane!'
'Mr. Rochester!'"

This is the moment I want to see done well in the film.  So much hangs on this simple exchange of names.  There is a tension so thick you'd need a ship to break through.  It is the axis upon which the entire book rotates.  This is "the moment" if ever there was one yet.

"'Withdraw, then - I consent...'"

In all of fiction I'm not sure I've ever read a more tortured and absolute "I love you" than that fraction of a quote right there.  By heaven, I'm tearing up right now...silly sod that I am.

"I had already gained the door; but, reader, I walked back - walked back as determinedly as I had retreated.  I knelt down by him; I turned his face from the cushion to me; I kissed his cheek; I smoothed his hair with my hand.
'God bless you, my dear master!' I said."

And that is the most tortured and absolute "I love you too" in return.

I was going to write about how enchanted I was with chapter 28.  Bronte has this whole very cool moment where she has Jane alone out on the moors, disconnected from every living thing.  There's a character in the novel I'm working on ("The Dawn Chorus") who asks the main character who he actually is when naked, alone, in a cave.  That's when we truly know who we are.  When we don't have anyone around us to provide context, who are we really?  Jane gets to her genuine self there and I love the internal matching the external.

So, there I did it.  I feel like it detracts from the discussion of chapter 27, though.  Man, that chapter.  It's the kind of chapter that makes a writer think he has no business being in the same...well, business as Charlotte Bronte.  Lord, these women could write.

Pax,

Will

Vocab Freaks, Feast and Frolic! (and hey...Kickstarter is a thing!)

Once again I'm between chapters (by heaven, this book...I'm pacing myself because it's so good) and so it's time to go through our past chapters and pick out all those pesky archaic words and dine sumptuously upon their definitions, derivations and the odd etymology.  It's quite a smorgasbord this time.

Before I get into that I really wanted to let everyone know that I have begun a Kickstarter for my beloved novel The Reliquary.  I apologize to those who are attached to me through other social media who may have been subject to my other postings.  We're at 3% in three days, which is fabulous.  We have only 27 more days to go.  Sadly, this project will only go forward if people like yourself choose to back it.  It is an all or nothing proposition.  Please give generously and you will get generously!  There are quite a few reward tiers available from 5$ to as high as 200$ which features super exclusive prizes.  There's a perfect fit for anyone who wants to help me in this creative endeavor.

To find out how Kickstarter works you can get that information HERE.
Click HERE for my actual Kickstarter page.

Regardless of how much or how little you are able to do, your support means everything to me.  I thank you in advance.  Even just hitting +1 and sharing this post with others is ever so appreciated.  I want as many people as possible to have a chance to read my novel and come to love the characters as much as I do.

Now!  On to the Vocab Freak's Frolic!

I do feast so well upon these old novels.  There are so many good words that we've forgotten or have no more "use" for.  Of the 27 words we'll be looking at today a mere 13 of the show up as worthy of inclusion in my word processor's dictionary.  You know you're a Vocab Freak when you find yourself delighted that you know a word your phone or word processor's dictionary doesn't.  :)

Sublunary:  Naturally, one expects the word to mean "beneath the moon".  However that doesn't quite fit.  It is derived from that Latin "sublunaris" which means "terrestrial".  Fair enough.  The definition is an "belonging to this world as contrasted with a better more spiritual one".

Negus:  I was rather interested in this word, given my culinary arts background.  One of my other great delights, besides gaining a robust vocabulary, is finding old world drinks and foods that we've lost.  A negus was essentially mulled wine but that you swap the hot wine for hot port instead.

Pefidy: "deceitfullness; untrustworthiness"

Canzonette: "in music, a popular Italian secular vocal composition that originated around 1560"  One of which you can listen to HERE sung by a lady who appears to be taking it a tad too seriously while simultaneously seeming unimpressed.

Cachinnate:  According to the online dictionary, "It sounds exactly like what it is..." to which I thought, "an alien insectoid mating ritual?".  Of course I was wrong, but so was the online dictionary, in my opinion.  Continuing the quote, "it's what you do when you laugh loudly, guffaw, or cackle, and probably embarrass and annoy everyone around you."  Uh...huh.  Ca...chi..nnate...  I'll let my dear readers judge that one.

Physiognomy:  One of the great surprises in Jane Eyre, for myself at least, is how pervasive the pseudoscience of Phrenology is throughout.  Some bit of it is in just about every section of the novel.  Physiognomy is a companion pseudoscience that is "the supposed are of judging character from facial characteristics".  You see this in effect particularly in the "fortune telling gypsy" scene.

Choler: "one of the bodily humors, identified with bile, believed to be associated with a peevish or irascible temparment.

Blent: "past participle of blend"  Fair enough.  I should have expected that.

Averred: "to state or assert to be the case"

Adventitious:  "happening or carried on according to chance rather than design or inherent nature"

Ribald:  "referring to sexual matters in an amusingly rude or irreverent way".

Sententious: "given to moralizing in a pompous or affected manner"  And this usage didn't even come from the section with Brocklehurst in it.

Dentelles:  "ornamental tooling used in book binding, resembling lace edging"

Spoony:  "sentimentally or foolishly amorous"  Apparently my spooning with my wife is spoony behavior...fair enough.  :)

Sago:  "edible starch that is obtained from a palm and is a staple food in parts of the tropics..."

Abigails: "a lady's personal maid"

Minois Chiffone: (referencing Louisa) "attractive, but in an unusual way".  From further research I've found that it generally refers to an unevenesss of facial features.  This very imperfection, or multiple imperfections, are considered attractive...because of their asymmetry.  Interesting, I thought.

Saturnine: (descriptive of Miss Ingram) "dark and moody"

Contumelious:  "scornful and insulting; insolent"

Beldame:  "a malicious and ugly woman, especially an old one; a witch".  Beldame has got to be one of my favorite words in older language.  It's almost a mocking word because it come from the French "bel" which means beautiful and then the English "dame".  So it means literally "beautiful older woman" but is spun on its ear in usage.  I love fairy tales and fantasy stories that use the world "beldame" as a descriptor.  I think I first encountered it in Neil Gaiman's Coraline which was how the ghost children referred to the "other mother" with the black buttons for eyes.

Lassitude: "a state of physical or mental weariness; lack of energy"  To be a parent is to be in a constant state of lassitude.

Deglutition:  "the act or process of swallowing" Huh...

Badinage:  "humorous or witty conversation"  If you notice, I've added a little badinage to some of these definitions.  Let me know if you think it works better than just a list of words and definitions.  I kind of like it, but I'm not pertinacious about it.

Pertinacious:  "holding firm to an opinion or a course of action"

Seraglio:  "the women's apartments in an Ottoman palace"

Dudgeon:  "a feeling of offense or deep resentment"

Bathos:  "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous"

I hope you learned a few things.  I certainly did.

I'm hoping to have my next blog post, regarding the actual story contents of the book, by perhaps the end of the week.  I've gotten to the point where I am compelled to savor it.  I wanted them together, now I'm pissed they're apart, and can't wait for them to be reunited.  That moment of realization for Jane is going to have to be amazing.  I can't wait for it, but I want to draw it out a bit.  There should be two more entries before I finish this book and pick up Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird".

Don't forget to +1, subscribe, share and the like if you happen to enjoy my meager scribblings here.  I guess they aren't scribblings since I use a keyboard.  Would it be "my meager...key clackings"?

At any rate...I remain, faithfully,

W

Love in the Time of Madness (Jane Eyre Chapters 21-26)

When it comes to good love stories, I'm a sucker.  My favorite love story couples of all time are Benedick and Beatrice from Much ado About Nothing, Patrick and Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You and by extension Taming of the Shrew, Christian and Satine from Moulin Rouge, Harry and Sally from When Harry Met Sally, Aditi and Hemant from Monsoon Wedding, Amelie and Nino from Amelie, nearly every couple in Love Actually, the eternal couple through all of time and multiple incarnations in Cloud Atlas, and, last, but never least, Wesley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride.  I suppose I should add in Lizzy and Darcy as well as Jane and Rochester now.  They have, after all, passed the test of time as couples...200 or so years and all.

You'll likely notice all of these are from plays and movies.  That's not accidental.  I generally find love stories in fiction to be tedious and contrived.  It's far too easy to write love stories with too much or too little pining or longing or any other emotion.  It's a rare novel writer that can hit the nail on the head in this regard.  In a movie though, the emotions are rarely overwrought.  An actor or director can immediately sense when the scene is wrong because of too much or too little emotion or expression.  There are filters there to ensure a pretty decent product.  Writing...it's easy to screw up.  When I wrote The Reliquary I was super conscious of this fact and took great mental pains to keep Simon and Cassie's love story well balanced with what was going on around them.

So why these happy few?  Well, perhaps calling them a "happy few" is a little misleading.  The above couples are what I like to call "difficult" love stories.  There is always some truly difficult impediment to their love.  Many of them have nearly fatal flaws in their personalities that would likely keep them apart, or society, or some force outside their own control.  Why do I like them so much?  It's hard to pin down all the reasons, however one reason, for certain, is that their love is earned.  Whether they have to get over their own pride, strive through deadly circumstances, these couples earn their love every step of the way.  I recently realized that this very reason is why I love Disney's Beauty and the Beast.  In the land of Disney films, and most fairy tales in general, the Prince happens upon the fair maiden at just the right moment and kind of gallantly stumble into a marriage with the fair maiden.  The fair maiden doesn't ask many questions, something magical happens to save them and they live happily ever after.  Beauty and the Beast is strange in this regard because Beast has to actually change for the better, and Belle accepts him in his full on bestial form.  This is a couple that sees, full in the face, their own flaws and draws together eyes wide open. 

And this, above most things, is precisely while I love Jane Eyre.  

I had mixed emotions when Rochester finally reveals to Jane that the whole "Miss Ingram Affair" was a mere ruse.  Cheap move, Bronte.  Again, this device is used in multiple Harlequin romance novels to this day.  To see it in its "classical" form was difficult.  Readers everywhere must have gasped and thought it clever at the time.  To modern audiences I wonder if it comes off as cruel.  But, with pretense and deceptions cast off, the happy couple begins to speak of their love for one another...and again, as with Pride and Prejudice, it sounds so much like my own experience with my wife.  

"and wherever you are is my home - my only home."

Oh my goodness, talk about a novel speaking my very heart.  200 years later I have said this very line without ever having read it.  It is so true to my very experience.  

I couldn't read the section regarding the day after Rochester's proposal without thinking of the Vigilante's of Love song Sweetness and Light. Bill Mallonee sings a very "difficult" love song and says "Love makes us better than we really are/Sometimes it happens over night".  Jane's very regard for herself changes with the morning.

"While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain:"  As if she had ever actually been plain to look at.  Had she been plain would have Miss Ingram been so venomous towards her?  

Bronte so repeats my own heart when Rochester declares, "...all the ground I have wandered over shall be retrodden by you:  wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's food shall step also."  I always thought this was a very strange desire that I alone possessed.  Once I asked some fellow married young men if they had the same and they replied unanimously "Heck no.  I'd never want to take her to my old hometown.  Too many stories she doesn't need to hear and people I'd rather her not hear them from."  Somehow I feel like every place I take my wife to "redeems" it somehow.  I always wish that somehow knew her when I was younger; that we could run in the same fields and forests when we were 9 or 12.  Taking her to those places gives me a sense that I'm weaving her into my past, sharing more of my story with her than just my present and future.  Sure there are people with stories to tell and things I'd on the one hand rather she not know.  On the other hand, I tend to believe that a clearer picture of me is a far better thing.  Many of those things I did when I was a "stupid teenager" and she's rational enough a human being to take that into account.

Rochester does an excellent job of proving himself to not be at all the idiot I nearly took him for at the end of the last blog post.  

"To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts - when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper:  but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break...I am ever tender and true."  

This is clearly not a man who is messing about.  Well, except to enflame Jane with a little jealousy.  

Jane and Rochester are clearly a couple on the same page and devoting themselves together for solid reasons.  

"After all, a single morning's interruption will not matter much," said he, "when I mean shortly to claim you- your thoughts, conversation and company - for life."

Single ladies, if you're paying attention at all, that is the right answer.  That is the only answer when you ask a man why he wants to be with you or marry you.  If he says "aw, baby.  I just wanna have fun with you" kick him to the curb.  As I've mentioned before "it all wrinkles and sags".  In the nursing home all that will remain are those three:  your thoughts, conversation and company.  If he's not interested in that, if he tells you that you talk to much, if he says you ramble, or that you talk about stupid stuff then he isn't worthy of you.  The man who is worthy of you loves the way you ramble, wants to hear you talk more, and is willing to engage with you in a conversation about stupid stuff.  One of the great reasons (of many) that I love being with my wife is because I have no idea what she's going to say next.  She isn't random, outrageous or anything like that.  It's just that I know she, like myself, is constantly evolving her opinions and thoughts.  I love the way her mind works and often her own thoughts and opinions shift and alter my own.  It's always a delight to talk to her, as a result.  Now if the kids could just stop interrupting every fifth syllable I'd be particularly grateful.  

Now, single men, if you're paying attention at all, find a girl like Jane.  Honestly, I have nothing but the utmost respect and adoration for Jane at this point.  If she happened to be at a party, not that she would but by force, she would be the one out of all that I would want to strike up a conversation with.  Why?  Out of so many reason, primarily because there is so little pretense with her.  She is so solidly who she is and cannot be anything else.  Honesty and consistency are high virtues in my book and they seem to be at the very core of who she is.  I love how she refuses to be anything but the governess she has been for the month before the wedding.  It certainly must have driven Rochester mad with desire, but that is precisely who and how she is.  When Rochester takes her to town and buys her silks and jewels she states, "...the more he bought my, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation."  When Rochester protests she says, "Do you remember what you said of Celine Varens?  - of the diamonds, the cashmeres you gave her?  I will not be your English Celine Varens...I''ll furnish my own wardrobe out of that money, and you shall give me nothing but...your regard; and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit."

Single men, that's the right answer.  If she wants for bigger and better things and withholds affection or uses it to get what she wants?  Kick her to the curb.  If she complains that you don't take her out to dinner enough or treat her like a princess (with money) then get rid of her quickly.  If she has Tiffany taste on a Walmart budget then get OUT.  Again, one of the ways I knew my wife was The One was because sitting down to a movie we'd seen 5 times before while eating pre-cooked frozen chicken and boxed mashed potatoes was just as good to us as eating at a fancy restaurant or hitting the dance club.  In fact, most days it seemed like more fun because we could do it in our comfy pajamas.

Now, the shock of the Crazy Lady in the attic didn't come quite as a shock due to my sister, aka "Our Lady of Significant Spoilers".  I can't think of a scarier moment than Jane waking to her going through Jane's things.  *shiver*  I watch horror films fairly regularly and that was a scarier image than much that I've seen.  

I purposely waited all day before I read the "wedding" chapter.  Everything was going so well and was so happy for Jane.  I couldn't help but put some temporal distance between that and what I was certain would be a crushing disappointment.  Somehow I felt I was respecting the character of Jane that resides in my head and hasn't lived through this before.

As I've mentioned before, I am fairly shocked at how much reading these two novels feels like a homecoming for me.  I was telling my wife that it's like when you go to a family reunion and meet cousins that you really don't know at all.  Your parents tell you to run off an play together.  You begrudgingly go play "kick the can" in the back yard, but then you find out your cousins are all awesome people with so much in common with you though you've never met before.  I hope that it's a feeling that continues throughout.

Pax,

W

Grumpy Buggers Need Love Too! (Jane Eyre Ch. 9-15)

If there is one thing that Pride and Prejudice, The Secret Garden, and Jane Eyre seem to be teaching me is "Grumpy Buggers Need Love Too".  I mentioned this to my wife and she snuggled close, kissed me on my cheek and said, "I love my grumpy man."  For a moment a bit of me felt like protesting, but then I remembered how closely I've been identifying and sympathizing with the "grumpy buggers" of these novels.  That and the fact that I got snuggles made me forget that I was going to protest at all.  It is rather interesting that these novels seem to have that as at least a component of their theme.

It is difficult to look back 100-200 years into the past and figure out why this seemed important enough for some novelists to include.  They touch on it a little bit, but it's important to remember we are talking about Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian etc. England and things are very different now and especially here in America.  Manners and deference to the social structure were nigh upon holy tenets of the Church and the nation itself.  For someone of great "standing" to behave in the ways Darcy and Rochester have in these novels would have been fairly reputation wrecking in many social circles.  It likely would have been considered a defect of character and few if any would be sympathetic with them.  These novels give the societal "monsters" a face, a third dimension.

We'll get to more of that later.  For now, ONWARD to chapters 9-15!

Spring comes to Lowood, which seems as if it should be a good thing but everything is a mixed bag.  With the warm sun and the blossoming green all about comes death.  Sickness runs rampant to the point that the teachers are too occupied to teach them and so many of the girls run fairly wild through the forest and surrounding lands.  If the foreshadowing of a cough and chest pain wasn't enough of a clue darling, wise, gentle Helen dies.

Honestly this was one of the most moving pieces of writing I have ever had the pleasure to read.  Charlotte Bronte proves her genius to me by fashioning such a glowing and realistic scene.  One of my favorite bits is when Jane's childhood is effectively over.  As they say, "Childhood ends the minute you realize you're going to die someday."

"And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell:  and for the first time it recoiled, baffled: and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf:  it felt the one point where it stood - the present;  all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid the chaos."

Her going to visit Helen, the emotional rawness, the small almost weeping conversations, Helen's peace, and the quote that follows just glowed inside me which I didn't expect.

"She Kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered.  When I awoke it was day: and unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody's arms;  the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory.  I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed;  people had something else to think about;  no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in a little crib;  my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck.  I was asleep, and Helen was - dead."

There's a purity to that ninth chapter that made it good enough as one of the 100BYSRBYD on its own.  In reading I had to stop there and bask in that moment.  It is so uncharacteristic for a writer, in today's fiction writing universe, to nail that moment so perfectly.

From there we move on and find that the illness sweeping through Lowood brings Brocklehurst under scrutiny and things become much better for the girls as those "who knew how to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy, compassion with uprightness" took over for the now shamed and questionable parson.

We quickly step over 8 years to find Jane as a teacher at Lowood.  Miss Temple leaves the school.  Jane realizes that her desire to remain a teacher there follows along with her.  She places an advertisement for her services as a teacher/governess and gets a reply from a Mrs. Fairfax at Thornfield hall.  Bessie (from Jane's time with the reeds) shows up to catch up and wish her well.  She gives a report of the Reeds that says things have turned out there pretty much as everyone paying attention figured it would.

She arrives at Thornfield and meet the wonderfully genial Mrs. Fairfax and Mr. Rochester's ward Adela Varens.  "She was quite a child - perhaps seven or eight years old - slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face and a redundancy of hair falling in curls to her waist."  It's been a long time since I've had a term bring me such ridiculous amounts of pedantic glee as "a redundancy of hair".

Jane gets bored of the tranquility and decides to go out to deliver a letter for Mrs. Fairfax.  Along the way she, unknowingly, meets Mr. Rochester who falls, along with his horse, on a sheet of ice.  Later Jane discovers who the man was and, after many days and much business with his tenants in the town about, is introduced to Mr. Rochester.  He is grim and sardonic, and treats Adele quite strangely.  Well, given the time period he treats everyone strangely.

His back and forth conversation with Jane (4(!) pages of him trying to get her to be open and honest and she trying to be polite and respect his position) was quite entertaining and, as mentioned at the beginning, endeared him to my own little sardonic heart.  As a modern reader I immediately saw his gruff peculiarities and assumed there was some painful experience behind it.  I wonder if someone in the 1800s reading this for the first time would have.  I value honesty, bluntness, and "plain dealing".  I would rather someone blow me off entirely than engage in polite, self-effacing, "Do you find the weather ever so intolerable?", make nice and happy...well...BS.  But would they, in that archaically polite society, give Rochester the benefit of the doubt or write him off as the lesser of the two Rochester brothers?  We saw in Pride and Prejudice how wonderfully everyone regarded D-bag Wickham even after he pulled his little tricks.  But, I digress.

In the back and forth Rochester plays with her, calling her a witch who bespelled either the horse or the puddle to turn to ice.
"When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse;  I am not sure yet.  Who are your parents?"
"I have none."
"Nor ever had, I suppose; do you remember them?"
"No."
"I thought not.  And so you were waiting for your people while you sat on that stile?"
"For whom, sir?"
"For the men in green:  it was a proper moonlight evening for them.  Did I break one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?"
(I love Jane's response here)
"The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done.

It's right there that the writer telegraphs, in the same way as we knew Helen would die, that these two will be together, or at least should be together.  Rochester ask if she has any aunts or uncles and she replies in the negative.  I couldn't help but think that might bite her in bustle later.

Mrs. Fairfax interrupts his stream of badgering questions to speak of her virtues, to which Rochester replies "Don't trouble yourself to giver her a character...I shall judge for myself.  She began by felling my horse."  I couldn't help but laugh at that.

Other things happen throughout the chapter that I likely should cover (we discover that Adele may be Rochester's illegitimate child via a Parisian singer/dancer who was happy to take his money and affections and then cheat on him, and there is something to do with an older brother who died leaving Rochester with a fortune it doesn't appear he actually wanted), but what I want to write about in this already long post is the art of Ms. Jane Eyre.

At one point Rochester pretty much dares Jane to show him her art because he doesn't at all believe that what he has seen is hers.  It's too good and must have been copied or whatever.  She brings her portfolio to him and he begins to assess both Jane and her art.  I love this scene in particular for three reasons:

1) Bronte so nails the universal artist struggle.  "As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived."

As a fiction writer I cannot tell you how huge that feeling is.  We are doomed, doomed, to be an imperfect filter for the brilliant, bright white ideas that are in our heads.  It is so daunting that it has actually kept me from writing on a number of occasions.  I cannot relate to you how disappointing and pretty depressing that can be.  The reason writers hate re-writes and hate the editing process is because they are time and time again confronted with how imperfect a filter they are.  Metaphorically, it's like having a beautiful child and then you're driving and get in a car wreck and your child suffers burns and lacerations and is disfigured.  It's your fault that it looks the way it looks and there's nothing you can do about it.  But it's still yours.  You are still proud of it and introduce it to people, and take care of it, but that feeling that it was your fault that it looks the way it does always lingers.  Maybe a bit morbid, but it's fairly accurate to my experience.

2)  What the heck would an art therapist have to say about Eyre's paintings?

I'm sure that they are foreshadowing things throughout the novel to come, or give light to her emotional state during her time at Lowood, but DANG.

3)  Rochester's reaction to them.

More revealing than what it says about Jane is what it says about Rochester.  "Where did you see Latmos?  For that is Latmos." he says pointing at one of the paintings.  Latmos, in Greek Mythology, is where the Selene, the goddess of the moon, seduced Endymion.  (The footnotes actually came in handy here.)  Endymion was a shepherd that Selene fell in love with after watching him night after night.  She caused him to fall asleep with his eyes open so that she could watch him in his full beauty.  She asks Zeus, I think, to make the shepherd immortal.  The shepherd then married the glowing celestial beauty and had 50 children with him.  After his realization that he sees Latmos, he abruptly sends everyone away.  I presume that is foreshadowing of the tale of Adele's mother.

As with Pride and Prejudice I am surprised at how much I'm loving this book and wondering why I disregarded them before.  They have proven to me how engaging non-genre fiction can actually be.

In many ways this project of reading the 100BYSRBYD is a bit of a homecoming for me.  When I talk to other people who love the books on the list it's like meeting long lost family.  Last night I was at "Small Groups" we attend through our church and someone overheard me talking to my wife about Jane Eyre  and was curious why I was reading it.  I explained and a couple people piped up about different books and authors that should (and are) on the list.  One guy went off on Alexandre Dumas and his work The Count of Monte Cristo, to which many in the room said "Oh, I saw the movie of that.  It was pretty good."  At least three people replied in unison "No.  No, no no no.  It doesn't even begin to compare."  It's so good to find other members of my tribe here on the blog or out in the world.  :)

By the by, I did correct my beloved, when she called me her "grumpy man", telling her that the correct term is "crotchety".  Oddly enough I was looking online for shillelaghs at the time I was explaining this.  I swear it was a coincidence.

Pax,

W

You Keep Using That Word...

Before I get into this word that, with a wink to Inigo Montoya, does not mean what I think it means I wanted to say a brief thank you to those who have been reading.  The first post on my reading of Jane Eyre was the most popular by far, and I thank you.

Last night I was distracted off and on when my wife finally asked me why I kept checking my laptop.  I replied that I was checking my Blogger account.  She laughed at me giving me a look I know pretty well.  I contended that, no, I am not an "attention whore".  While the number of views were steadily going up was impressive I maintained that I was looking for comments.  I value comments very highly.  I crave interaction and the grinding of ideas upon other ideas.  If my commentary is way off base, or if there is another way to see what I've read, or even if I'm spot on then I want to hear about it.  I never think of myself as the be all end all authority...especially on something I've only just read and haven't ruminated on for at least a decade.  I am, thankfully, a perpetual student who is all to familiar with being dead wrong or half right in most instances.

All that to say to those who viewed at all, "Thank You" and to those who commented "Thank very much".  Many have +1'd which I greatly appreciate as well.  I'm very new to this whole Google Blogger process, however I very much recognize the value of every +1.  I thank you.  Also, if you look on the right by the picture of my son you can subscribe/follow and I'm sure every edition will make its way to you at least through Google+.

Now, as I was saying... Slattern

In talking about the Word Nerd side of my journey through the 100BYSRBYD I have to begin with slattern.  I've watched quite a lot of BBC films and shows.  In all my years of enjoying my severe Anglophilia I had always taken the word "slattern" to be spoken in the same manner and tone as "strumpet" and so have a similar meaning.  I used to just "absorb" meaning through examining the tone if spoken and through sentence context if read.  It was lazy, I know.  Part of the reason I'm doing the whole "Word Nerd" aspect is to correct such defects in my self-education.  I've even gone so far as to use the word "slattern" to a girl who was involved in "strumpety" (strumpish?) behavior because I knew she'd take it with a laugh.

So, when Jane arrives in Lowood and they start throwing around the term "strumpet" for children I was understandably shocked and confused.  Inigo Montoya immediately popped into mind and I was committed to not being Vizzini.  I looked it up in the dictionary.  Alright, an online dictionary, but I did go the extra mile to use the OED.  By heaven I'd love to have a hard copy of the full OED.  That's Hardcore OG Word Nerd right there.

Slattern: (noun) dated A dirty, untidy woman.

Fair enough.

It's only when we Americans get ahold of the word that we make it mean slut/prostitute.  We make everything dirty, apparently.  A nation of slatterns...in the original sense...although there may be an argument made...never mind.

Oddly this is a far more "cerebral" book than Pride and Prejudice but somehow I'm finding less words per page that I am unfamiliar with.  Now it is time to...

Define all the words!

Caviller:  One who raises irritating and trivial objections

Bilious:  1. Affected by or associated with nausea or vomiting  2. Spiteful; bad tempered

Captious:  Tending to find fault or raise petty objections.

Opprobium:  Harsh criticism or censure

Fagging:  To work or run errands for a senior pupil.

Convulvulus:  A twining plant with trumpet shaped flowers (includes Morning Glories)

Execration:  The act of cursing or denouncing

Parterre:  A level space in a garden or yard occupied by an ornamental arrangement of flower beds.

Pelisse:  A woman's cloak with arm holes or sleeves, reaching to the ankles.

Rushlight:  A candle made by dipping the pith of a rush in tallow.

Inanition:  Lack of mental or spiritual vigor and enthusiasm or exhaustion cause by a lack of nutrition

Animadversion:  Criticism or censure.

Meed:  A deserved share or reward.

Expostulation:  An expression of protest.

Assiduity:  Close or constant attention to what one is doing.

Chilblain:  A painful, itching swelling on the skin, typically on the hand or foot, caused by poor circulation in the skin when exposed to the cold.

Exigency:  And urgent need or demand

Hebdomadal:  Weekly.  (LOVE this unnecessarily long word for something so simple.)

Perfidious:  Deceitful and untrustworthy.  

Tucker:  A piece of lace or linen worn in or around the top of a bodice or as an insert at the front of a low cut dress.

Excrescence:  A distinct outgrowth on a human or animal body or on a plant, especially one that is the result of a disease or abnormality.

Organ of Veneration:  A phrenology term that denotes piety and saintliness.

Fervid:  Intensely enthusiastic or passionate, especially to an excessive degree.

Barmecide:  Illusory or imaginary and therefore disappointing.

The only other thing I wanted to mention on the "Word Nerd" front was....by heaven she likes semicolons and colons.  I've never seen the like in any other I've ever read.  I had to remind myself how to process them by reading the sentences out loud, much to the confusion of my three year old son.

Pax,

W

Darkness and Questions of Faith (Jane Eyre Chapters 1-8)

I was initially struck by how much thicker of a book Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is to Pride and Prejudice.  It wasn't so much that I didn't realize that there would be some thick books in this series of 100BYSRBYD, but it did give me pause.  Had I chosen to I could have blown through Pride and Prejudice in a week.  Instead I wanted to take the time to ruminate on it and pace myself so I didn't burn out.  Jane Eyre's girthiness made me realize that this project is going to probably take two years at minimum, but more likely 3 or more.  Surprisingly that doesn't bother me.

What does bother me is knowing that Tolstoy's War and Peace is coming down the pike and it's even bigger than this book.  I literally used that book as a doorstop back when I tried to hork it down after high school.  Don't ask me why.  My friends were in college, I was working as a grocery bagger and had little mental stimulation so I was feeling bad about myself and...yeah.  I got 4 pages in and my brain went numb.  It was a particularly warm summer for Alaska and the door to my room had to be kept open somehow.  It was either going to be a $9.99 paperweight or a doorstop.  I could have used it as a meat tenderizing mallet, now that I think on it.

So...Jane Eyre intimidated me a little bit upon pulling the book from it's Amazon.com box.

The first thing I noticed, when I finally plucked up the courage to begin ingesting the text, was "Holy Carp, this book starts out DARK."  By comparison Pride and Prejudice is a ditzy, floofy summer beach read.  Seriously, from here on out we'll determine a books darkness and/or heaviness of subject matter on the Bronte/Austen Scale (tm) (Patent Pending).  Granted my knowledge of the classics isn't as vast as others, but ,bloody hell, it can't get much more bleak than this.  Even Dickens comes off marginally lighter.

The darkness begins at Gateshead with "leafless shrubbery...cold winter wind...sombre clouds...penetrating rain..."  Essentially "It was a dark and stormy night" for the literary set.  This pall is cast over the whole first 8 chapters and never lets up on the life of the eponymous Jane, who is an orphan sent to live with her uncle who dies soon after and leaves her with an aunt and three cousin who despise her.  She is very conscious of her "physical inferiority" to them.  Honestly, I thought the Dursleys from Harry Potter were the worst most despicable family in all of fiction.  Many people state that the terrible muggle family was based on the horrible families portrayed in the works of Roald Dahl.  Other people claim they are Dickensian in origin.  I submit that it is here, the the heinous Reed family, that we find a more likely inspiration.

Jane is physically abused by the eldest boy, detested by the sisters, and considered the source of all problems in the house by Mrs. Reed.  Within the young Jane lies the heart of a lion, however, that meets the injustices head on with equal ferocity though it gets her in even more trouble.  She develops a distinct sense of independence and is fine with being alone and despised...up to a point, naturally.  All want to be loved and appreciated at some point and she wonders why all hate her.

She gets sent to "The Red Room" as punishment one night and has a fit that I'm not sure I understand.  It's unclear whether what she sees is the result of her mind playing tricks on her or actual events amplified with meaning and dread through the mind of a child.

"Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings;  and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not out to express the result of the process in words."

Aunt Reed decides she is too much trouble to keep and an annoyance to her household at best and decides to find a school to send her off to.  A man appears named Mr. Brocklehurst who is the patron of Lowood.  Aunt Reed, of course, tells him that Jane is a liar and one of the worst sinners she has ever seen in her life.  And here is where I being to lose my cool.

I have, what has been called, an "overdeveloped sense of justice".  I see how things could be and should be rather than things as they are.  Little perceived injustices cause me anxiety and the great injustices of the world give me fits.  I've gotten a lot better with age but there was a time where I would think an American Feminist is an idiot and lacked the courage of his/her convictions because they were spending time, energy, and resources in vast amounts for something like protesting for the legal right to breastfeed in public as if that's the greatest threat to women's rights when people within our own country and elsewhere in the world are performing genital mutilation.  I still am bothered by the fact that people want to overturn a minor "evil" rather than create resistance for a major evil.  There is a better chance for success against a minor evil and success makes us feel like we actually accomplished something, no matter how petty it is, while a greater evil threatens without.  Here, I had forgotten the 200 year old notion that the rich and "genteel" were always considered morally right and beyond reproach while the poor were obviously poor because they were sinners and needed to have their souls purified by abuse.  (not exactly stated as such...but I trust my meaning is understood).

All that to say, I felt the creeping anxiety and white hot fury of "justice" once again throughout this novel.  I cheered Jane as she took these injustices head on.  My heart raced and my soul felt the "righteousness" of it burn within me.  I mean, come on, who can't cheer at this: (between Jane and Mr. Brocklehurst with the later beginning)
"Do you know where the wicked go after death?"
"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.
"And what is hell?  Can you tell me that?"
"A pit full of fire"
"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?"
"No, sir."
"What must you do to avoid it?"
I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: "I must keep in good health and not die."

I mean, that is just a perfect rejoinder that can't help but get a "Go girl!" from someone in the reading audience.  When she finally lets loose and rips into Aunt Reed with complete honesty and accuracy I bloody well cheered while reading in bed and that's not something I'm wont to do.  My cheering did not last very long, however.

We transition to Lowood and meet the terrible teachers, but for Miss Temple, and are introduced to the horrid conditions there.  We are also introduced to Helen, a bright little ray of sunshine who seems to be the opposite to Jane in outlook.  While Jane will fight back to those who would punish her, Helen accepts the abuse and points out where the individual was right to correct her.  Jane confronts her on this point.

"But I feel this, Helen: I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly.  It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved."
"Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine; but Christians and civilised nations disown it."

The notation I made next to this section is "What?!?!"

(Here is where I make a disclaimer.  What follows is steeped in Christian thinking and, as such, may be completely illogical to those who are not Christians.  It is written by a Christian struggling with his faith and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and is meant for an audience on a similar path.  If you continue...you have been advised.  I do not expect those outside of the Christian faith to understand, agree, or feel that it applies to them.)

I immediately rejected it as two century old ridiculous claptrap and fell into the fault of regarding our more modern age as so much more "enlightened" on this subject.  I found myself oh so very conflicted with this notion that the abusers should go unchallenged, the perpetrators of such horrible treatment should be just allowed to continue, that this book was advocating that these children should just "take it" and accept the system as is.

And then Helen pops off with a quote from Jesus, "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to those who hate you and despitefully use you."

Well...crap...

When Mr. Brocklehurst comes to the school and says that the children are better off being forced to eat burnt gruel or starve, should have their hair cut short to protect against vanity, and they need only ever wear plain dresses and should receive no comforts at all for the betterment of their souls...when Miss Temple says nothing but nearly laughs at the ridiculous man as his wife and daughters walk in plump, hair beautifully curled, and wearing silks and satins with ridiculous hats, I could only say, "What the freaking heck!  Here is a clearly terrible, wicked, inconsistent, hypocritical A-hole!  Why is nobody pointing out the hypocrisy to him and putting him in his place?!?!"  The darkness and misapplication of scripture is all around and no one does ANYTHING to push against it.  And then I remember further words of Christ:

"...do not resist and evil man..."  Matthew 5:39

It goes against every justice and consistency loving fiber in my body.  I want to smack this man who is doing this to these children.  I want to force him to see what he is doing in the light of the same Bible he's using to support their mistreatment.  I want him to blatantly admit his own hypocrisy and...dangit...that's not following what my Lord and Savior says to do.  It feels SO wrong, but there's a still small space in me that sees that the Lord has called most of us to be Miss Temples and Helens...providing light in the darkness and rest and encouragement for the souls of the weary and mistreated.

I still don't like it.  I'm still not fully convinced...but I see the upside down nature of everything Jesus tells us.  To those not in the faith it sounds like insanity and enabling the abusers.  But I can't deny the spirit of it just the same.

*sigh*

I have a feeling this is going to be quite a soul searching journey, this novel.

Pax,

W