Loves Final Go.

This has to become something by tonight. Due 10 am. My eyes are sleeping. And I haven't read the 8 texts. But I've gotta dish it out, so tomorrow I am done, finished. Undergraduate, so soon!, I've barely gotten comfortable.

Love is woman’s attachment to experience, the obligation to bare offspring, and a commitment to compose herself—all women—yes, that’s right, to speak for once and for all. Yet, pleasure alone does not release her, nor persuade her to share and speak in the present. Why does the life of a story begin with what wasn’t accomplished, what the heroine couldn’t make happen? The novel is the author’s chance to be the first to captivate, to decide—change history—and then, she chooses the Other. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). We are made to wait; she isn’t ready. Love, life starts again with the line that is not the woman’s truth. And yet, it is the author’s reality. Readers open, willing from the beginning to not judge her first, and be on her side or, at least, stay in her mind. Instead, the writing resists readers’ expectations: the responsibility for revealing, resolving distance, and delivering revelation. If the female has been waiting for her moment to finally be seen, why does it take longer when she is in control— as it is, a free hand, which writes—why must the reader continue at great length to know her? The feminine flows backward; against expectation, woman lives through reason. In a dual, [in]tense effort to recreate herself and be woman, she rationalizes and romanticizes. And through the very object of life that’s resisted—the story of man (male and female)—she sews the split and extending herself becomes, at once, both—the product of a rationalized romance. Even classic literature like Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre, in retrospect, shares Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life’s inevitability to be a modern self-project for the woman to listen to her intuition, and take a chance to become her own truth by the end.

Unprotected by a social position or family, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is perhaps, in turn, desperate for a new life. Young and with no social power either, she often hides behind a curtained window. But when John Reed discovers her, Jane is devalued and maltreated by her single freedom—literature. Protecting herself against his “heavy limbs…large extremities…flabby cheeks” makes her smaller and insignificant in the eyes of the Reed family. In this scene, weight and literature are held against her as obstacles around autonomy. Silenced, Jane is placed in seclusion to learn complete submissiveness. This not only causes her body to react hysterically, but also is the episode that inspires her to speak and ask to be sent to charity orphan school. Sent, Jane has a chance for another life, but discovers the conditions are no better: the minister provides girls with starvation levels of food, freezing rooms and poorly made clothing and shoes. Again left to bare the conditions of the outside, Jane survives by controlling her perception; using her imagination to distract reality, she finds warmth, richness and prospect in her interior.

This analysis may ask the reader to see Jane, as she did not want to be seen. And for this, I may be deemed superficial, modern minded and/or uninterested in knowing her in the way Bronte intended—as a female loved without physical beauty. However, it is because of a concern with knowing her—why she became an iconoclastic character, admired for the respect she required—that I challenge she be looked at in the light of her lack, and scrutinized for her aesthetic starvation and starvation from food, for it is these nutrients which bring character to life in the first place.

To pay Jane attention for her strength alone is a selfish desire to have her represent a female that has not achieved considerable approval in literature before. By not staring at her under the corporeal gaze, the reader hopes this means he will be given the same advantage as well. In other words to applaud Bronte’s portrait of a plain “not pretty any more than I am handsome” (140) female is to, again, dismiss what isolates her. In Rochester’s words, “besides it is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away” (140) and does not hold the reader responsible for his own vulnerability to empathize. “I never take supper”…”…I am hungry: so are you, I dare say, only you forget” (475). Had the external found its way only casually into Jane Eyre then I would not press the reader to complicate it or make it a concern, but Bronte consciously inserts questions of hunger and the quality of appetite into the narration that this would not be a careful analysis without closing in on it as a confession. In the Anatomy of Love, Helen Fisher explains the phenomenon, if not importance, of love at first sight: “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex…” (49). This, of course, is the point that in support of Rochester’s feelings for Jane, the reader will insist his attraction was powerful because of her inward mystery. And in the vein of Stendhal was intensified and aroused by his incentive to encourage Jane to speak—talk of herself—so he could formulate an interior reading that would crystallize her beauty. Such associations are honest interpretations of the male’s pursuit. He knew his aim and motives were not errors and candidly “believed it was an inspiration rather than a temptation: it was very, very soothing—I know that” (145).

“…But to the clear and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true…I never met your likeness…I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express…Why do you smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable, that uncanny turn of countenance mean?” (280).

Since Rochester’s intrigue in Jane is favorable from the first sight, one must locate the conflict—indecision—of Jane Eyre to see what the Other’s heart will help her body transcend. The Other certainly pushes, not only the reader, but Jane to confront the unknown. “You are afraid—your self-love dreads a blunder” (147). It may be the male’s intuition here, that helps dissolve her coarseness. As a child, Jane had no one to confide in and the two school-friends she had made left only a trace of memory in her life (Helen Burns died from typhus epidemic and Miss Temple married and moved). “So it is, whether for reasons of ideology or experience,” that Ethel Spector Person would consider Jane’s consequences of human deprivation and starved interaction to be why “many of us regard love with a split or alternating consciousness…a form of self-deception or even self-destruction…we long for and seek it out” (102).

Having few experiences, Jane escaped into literature to find images to fill her ignorance. And therefore, her sense of truth had always been removed from the real and her sense of self was always detached, isolated, “half suffocated with thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle them: thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere long. I looked at the blank wall: it seemed a sky thick with ascending stars—every one lit me to a purpose of delight. Those who had saved my life, when, till this hour, I had loved barrenly, I could now benefit” (418). Images (the imago and the imagination) are Jane’s infatuations; her central means of sens(e)ation that above all longs to channel, what Fisher deems, “the feeling of helplessness” (70). Therefore, Rochester represents the drive toward self-transformation. He is not the means she lacks, but the force capable of changing the way Jane sees her self in the world with others.