Good Charlotte

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.  These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is — I repeat it — a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

"The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth — to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose — to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it — to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him."

-- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Preface, 2nd edition (21 December 1847).

Recently finished my second reading of Jane Eyre.  It is not the book I read as a teenager, looking for a slurpy Gothic.  I didn't realize its seminal place in fiction, seeing only the hackneyed trope of governess-falls-in-love-with-master-with-dark-secrets.  I didn't appreciate the rich splendor of the language, seeing only a lot of very small print taking a lot of space to do what could have been done with fewer and shorter words.  I didn't, most importantly, admire or even perceive the bravery of the author and her heroine and the choices they both made, as I was seeing with a 1970's teenager's eyes with no idea of the suffocatingly stilted life of a middle-class, isolated Englishwoman in the mid-19th Century.  I thought Jane "sappy" and wished Rochester were better looking.  I wanted them to stop the endless verbal fencing and tear off a piece.  I had probably just finished reading Valley of the Dolls.

This time, of course it was completely different.  The most heart-stopping passage for me is not in the text, but the Preface, quoted above.  Bronte was responding to her contemporary critics who found the work "coarse," especially if, as was rumored, the pseudononymous author "Currer Bell" was a woman.  If I thought that Bush, the folks at Fixed Noise, and all the fundamentalist Right could understand the big words, I'd send it out as a big spam mailing, because it says so perfectly what needs to be said, and said often.

Right on, sistah.

Comments

[Houston]

That's a fabulous quote. I may quote you quoting her. I don't remember anything about Jane Eyre other than having to read it at college. I don't even remember if I liked it or if I suffered through it. Maybe I'll get it on cd and listen to it. I'm listening to Obama's Dreams from my Father right now. It's interesting, and he has a very pleasant voice. Want me to send it to you and Dorothy when I'm finished?

[Houston]

That's a fabulous quote. I may quote you quoting her. I don't remember anything about Jane Eyre other than having to read it at college. I don't even remember if I liked it or if I suffered through it. Maybe I'll get it on cd and listen to it. I'm listening to Obama's Dreams from my Father right now. It's interesting, and he has a very pleasant voice. Want me to send it to you and Dorothy when I'm finished?