Reading JANE EYRE in 2018 America

Wealth and family connections. Chronic mistreatment of vulnerable children. The despising of the poor by those comfortably well off. Institutional life in place of home life for the poor. Lessons in “humility” and “gratitude” to those warned to keep their “place.” -- But even in that place, flickers of kindness and opportunities to better herself. Leading to — independence, and then, in her new position, an unexpected sense of home and feelings of respect and love. -- But the veil is torn away and reality revealed, followed by the direst poverty, hunger, situational homelessness. Dangers to the homeless are real, while those with homes perceive threats from the homeless. Of course, the story does not end there....

The character of Jane Eyre herself as well as her story were something quite new to English literature. What a difference from the world of Pride and Prejudice we find in Jane Eyre! And I say this as someone who loves the novels of Jane Austen.

But in Jane Austen’s England and the class to which the Bennett daughters were born, a young woman’s only respectable end was marriage. “Independence” was a disgrace, if not a scandal, depending on how it was achieved — or, rather, “independence” was defined only by wealth, and so brought about by the right kind of marriage. Class distinctions were paramount. Servants were invisible. “Sensibility,” the name given to overwrought passion given free rein by the wrong kinds of reading in Sense and Sensibility, could lead to nothing good. 

Then along came the mystery author “Curran Bell” (Charlotte Bronte’s nom de plume), with her passionate little orphan, Jane, with her innate sense of justice. Revolutionary! I ask my women friends, whose life rings truer to yours in its essentials, that of Eliza Bennett or that of Jane Eyre?

Does the child deserve ill treatment? She is dependent on an aunt by marriage who detests her, as do the three children who are her blood first cousins. You would think that tie would mean more, but Jane’s mother was sister to the cousins’ father, so they are cousins by a female relative — and one who, moreover, married beneath her station. The brother could forgive, but his wife could not, and their children have no love for their cousin. The 14-year-old boy is particularly cruel and despicable, telling little Jane that she “ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mamma’s expense.” Jane’s mother’s sin had been to marry a poor curate, against her family’s wishes. Her punishment was to be disinherited by her grandfather. Jane’s parents dying of typhus (her father contracted the illness while visiting those poorer than himself, in pursuit of his calling), her uncle adopted her — and loved her — but then he also died. Family wealth is not to be shared except under the most careful legal arrangements, and the daughter of a disinherited relative by marriage has no claim on the cousins’ mother beyond the promise made to her dying husband — conveniently set aside in time, the better to suit her own feelings and purposes.

Jane’s background is given quickly in the novel’s beginning. Mr. Rochester’s character and the lively relationship he comes to value in Jane is the focus of most readers and has been mine in previous readings of the novel, but this week I come to it with a different heart, with different heavy thoughts. I see the fictional aunt’s and boy cousin’s heartlessness in the first two chapters against current stories — in 2018 — of girl children accorded lesser value than their male contemporaries. Issues of poverty and wealth add another dimension. Envy, hatred, retribution -- it's all there.

The Bennett family and the mother and daughters in Sense and Sensibility are close to adulthood and their “poverty” relative only to the wealth of antecedent generations. Little Jane Eyre, on the other hand, despised by her own relatives, is daily schooled in “humility,” first in the home of those relatives and afterward in the charity school to which she is sent. She succeeds academically, however, conquers her temper, and after six years as a student is promoted to teaching in the same school. It is independence of a sort, but the scope of the school world does not satisfy her. She wants to see more, to experience more — and, still determinedly independent, she seeks and finds a position as governess. 

When one of Jane Austen’s characters prepares to go out as governess, she is an object of pity to friends and to the author. For Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the position of governess is an achievement — not failure but success. In Pride and Prejudice, only the housekeeper, “Hill,” is given a name. In Mrs. Reed’s house, we know Bessie and and Abbott and Robert; in Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield, even the footman, Sam, is named. Is it a difference in the times or in the eye of an author who sees beyond social conventions? Perhaps something of both. 

Jane Eyre was feared by many in its time. The novel exposed a young woman’s capacity for passion and urged moral equality, not only among various social classes but also between men and women. If Jane is elevated late in the novel by an unexpected inheritance, so is Mr. Rochester brought low by injuries sustained in the fire that destroys Thornfield. Their respective changes in fortune do not make the man the woman’s inferior, however; what is brought about is an equality of fortune to align with the moral equality Jane had claimed from the start — and which Edward Rochester could not help acknowledging and respecting, even at his most desperate.

What if, what if??? we may ask, imagining other paths the story might have taken, but Bronte shaped her novel to the characters she conceived, and so their end is not contrived but, according to the individuals they were and the circumstances of their lives, inevitable. Society is left as it was, except that readers of Jane Eyre have been given a glimpse of different values and possibilities. 

Paul Krugman had an interesting opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s part of what he wrote in refutation of the notion that only blue color workers feel “economic anxiety” and are responsible for the current political climate:

…It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety. 

You might think this is impossible, that having a good job and a comfortable life would inoculate someone against envy and hatred. That is, you might think that if you knew nothing of human nature and the world. 

I’ve spent my whole adult life in rarefied academic circles, where everyone has a good income and excellent working conditions. Yet I know many people in that world who are seething with resentment because they aren’t at Harvard or Yale, or who actually are at Harvard or Yale but are seething all the same because they haven’t received a Nobel Prize. 

What is happening in our country today, he says (and I agree) is “not about populism." The power behind it, the money and influence behind it, come from the privileged who don’t want others to share their good fortune.

What has become of Bronte’s vision? Of respect for honest work, of truth spoken across classes, of moral equality between men and women, of the “American dream” for all Americans? What has become of the American dream vision it used to seem most of us shared for our country?

“Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. … At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence … I used to rush into strange dreams at night….  By nine o’clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.” - Charlotte Bronte, JANE EYRE

I'm not even separated from my true love, and still it takes that second cup of coffee every morning for me to shake the nightmares of these times.

My Concerns: Independence and Independent Access

Today’s post is a sequel to the one preceding, as I continue musing on the value of handwriting. I will try very hard not to beg the question or to exaggerate the case to be made in favor of cursive script. I'm also including some sunny winter scenes to sweeten the pot.

Why do we put a high value on health, other than the fact that being sick is usually no fun at all? Aside from the yucky aspects of illness, don’t we also love to feel strong and healthy, in large part, because it means we can do things for ourselves, because we’re not dependent on others when we’re healthy? Getting old brings changes much more serious and unwelcome than wrinkles and sags, white hair and dry skin. There is the inevitable losing of strength and energy, the dreaded “slowing down” -- in short, not being able to do all the things one took for granted when young and strong. That’s what makes old age such a drag!

And human independence goes way beyond the physical. Americans generally consider a driver’s license, a valid passport, plenty of money, and freedom from debt as possessions and states to be desired. Being grounded as a teenager, going to jail or prison as an adult – the punishment in each case is loss of freedom and the curtailment of choices – but crushing student debt, burdensome mortgages, and payments on credit cards and/or new cars also place restrictions on independence.

Are you with me so far?

Okay, how about this: I can’t help believing that real, sustainable, and continued intellectual independence and efficacy demand an ability to function in the absence of electronic devices. I’m not arguing against ever using the devices. How could I do that and not be a complete hypocrite, given that I composed this essay on a laptop device and uploaded it to the Internet? My argument is, rather, that we should not become so dependent on them that we are helpless when the power goes out. We need basic competencies.

For a long time, parents and grandparents have been worrying that children relying on calculators are not learning basic skills in arithmetic. Well, why should they? They have calculators, so why should they bother calculating in their heads or on paper? Isn’t learning to do that a waste of valuable time?

Math skills make a good subject for me to defend because math was always my weakest academic subject. If I could, I would have avoided it altogether after third grade.

But now, as an independent adult, I don’t have to trust blindly in a cash register total or what a clerk tells me “the computer says,” because I can estimate the cost of my selected items before I got in line. I don’t even have to take a calculator with me to the store and hope the battery doesn’t go dead, either, because I learned addition and subtraction, multiplication tables, and estimating (that last, for me, the most difficult) back in my school days. I do it in my head. Estimating did not come naturally to me, and my math anxiety, supplemented by innate stubbornness, resisted it for a long time. Why look for approximate answers when I could do the calculation and get an exact number? Now I estimate on a daily basis and am thankful to have the skill. I have three avenues open to me – mental estimating or exact calculation, calculation on paper, or resorting to a calculator. Isn’t that range of possibilities preferable to dependence on the electronic device?

My mother learned shorthand when she was young, and I never did, but I did learn cursive handwriting and also developed my own idiosyncratic abbreviations for note-taking in college and graduate school. Relying on someone else’s notes would have made me very nervous. How could I know another student had understood the lecture or captured all the important points? In all honesty, I admit that I only took a typing class in high school because my parents insisted. Moreover, having that skill as “something to fall back on” – their argument -- worked against me for a long time: I kept falling back into jobs I hated! But finally I got it together to finish an undergraduate degree and go on from there, and being an excellent typist still serves me well.

Touch typing, that is. All fingers employed. One hundred and twenty words a minute. No two-thumbs texting or pathetic hunting-and-pecking with forefingers! 

      

I won’t reiterate here all my reasons for valuing books on paper a topic I’ve covered before (most recently here), but I do apply similar reasons to my case for handwriting. That is, I value it not simply out of nostalgia or because I grew up writing by hand or because ink is retro and cool, but because I can write on paper wherever I am, without an expensive device, without charging cords or batteries, without rare minerals having been extracted from the earth and without sending plastic and worse to landfills, and because I needn’t trust in a “cloud” to store my words or a sophisticated system to transmit them. With pen and paper, I exercise independence.

Blogging would not exist without the Internet, and those of us who participate obviously use electronic devices to share our thoughts. Blogging takes place only by virtue (!) of a virtual world. But my entire life would not be over if my online life came to an end. The truth is, I like being offline at home, and I like being disconnected when I’m out walking with my dog. That, of course, is a matter of preference. Perhaps others would feel their independence – their powers – diminished in the circumstances I find so freeing. I get that. I do.

But that’s my point. I can go back and forth. And that, I think, the ability to live in different worlds, to use different tools and media, as circumstance demands or as preference indicates, is the greatest degree of independence possible.

What does it matter, one of my readers responded (on my Facebook link to the earlier post), the form of communication young people use, handwriting or texting or some other digital means, since all are ways to communicate. True, but to me this is like asking why learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and estimate if you have a calculator. For that matter, given the availability of audio books, why be bothered to read? Why not just listen to someone else doing the reading?

As for me, I’ll listen now and again, but I would certainly not trade literacy for listening. Neither would I give up handwriting (or touch typing) and be confined to poking my fingers and thumbs at a tiny screen.

Here’s another thought: Most Ph.D. programs have traditionally had foreign language requirements. Some gave that up to allow computer “languages” as substitutes, which seems suspect and squirrelly to me in most cases. A language is not, after all, a code. The intention of the original requirement was to ensure an ability to read important texts in their original language; a secondary benefit that comes with second-language acquisition, however, is the realization that many of the concepts we take for granted in our native language are not universal. Different people divide the world up differently. They see the world differently. It’s important to learn that. It’s the difference between learning to converse and read and write and think in a second language and having to rely on a program or “app” to translate for you.

So as far as the ability to read historical documents is concerned, what if future students of history were required to learn cursive handwriting in the same way they might be required to learn Latin or French or Russian? As a specialized professional skill? I can imagine the day, not far in the future:

LANG 350: “Cursive as Foreign Language”

And for many people, if an ability to read historical documents is all that’s at stake, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the vision. Well, here’s what’s wrong with it from my point of view, and it’s the same thing that’s wrong with giving up on learning second languages (or learning to read, for that matter) because “smart” machines can do the work for us:

Having the machines should make our worlds bigger, not smaller; enlarge our access to the world rather, not shrink it; give us greater flexibility and choice and independence. Not stunted brains and overgrown thumbs.

And I’ll stop now to ask, as the scary truck driver asked a hitchhiking friend years ago, in an ominously threatening tone of voice after subjecting her to his extreme political views, “Agree or disagree?”  If you disagree with me, though, that’s fine and dandy, because I’m enjoying thinking about the pros and cons of cursive writing on this winter’s day. It’s a pleasant mental vacation from the season’s national political campaigns and primaries, isn’t it?