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beccaelizabethFinished reading JE today.
Mr Rochester is a monster, though he probably doesn't know he is. A monster of his time.
Jane is... well, I like the parts where she's saying she's not a bird she has free will, and she won't marry some dude because god says so, and she stands up for herself and makes her own money and looks after herself. I like that it is obviously quite difficult. But then I don't like the unlikely princess bits, here, have a fortune of your very own.
The bits I keep bouncing away from with much grrr arrgh is everything to do with disability. What a poisonous load of drek. It's like every disability stereotype and ghastly common trope all wrapped up in one book. I think about it and get so annoyed all the words get stuck together trying to get out. Shudder bad yuck.
I can see why Teach went over Pamela again in class. Compare contrast with other popular books full of ideas around a century earlier. There's a servant (compare governess, a higher class sort of servant) and the master wants to have sex with her. In one book he tries to rape her and then when she's all virtuous and he reads her letters he marries her instead. In the other he tries to marry her but there's the teensy tiny problem with already being married. So she runs away because now she's in a really bad position, says all the books. Mr R was threatening violence and she stopped him by crying, that's just nasty, here have a manual for stopping domestic violence, sure it will work. Blech.
So then in class Teach said again about Providence and how there were spiritual autobiographies where people wrote their whole lives down so they could look back on it and say God Did It. So once JE runs away there's a lot of God Did It. And it leads her to her cousins and a fortune and a preacher asking her to marry him. Well, more telling her really. He tells her God Did It too. She says :-p to that and she'll be a curate and do priest things if god says so but not marry a bloke who thinks him saying so equals God Says. Yaay Jane! Weird book though, with the believing Providence fixes all coincidence.
The ultra creepy ending though... so when she's the servant and she's poor she doesn't like being given gifts and runs away from the prospect of half his property and thinks they're all unequal, but then she inherits a bunch of money and he loses a lot with his property burning so they end up equal so hey, happy! But her biggest happy is now he's disabled he really really needs her.
*hiss spit*
There are so many layers of bad in there.
Sure you can read it as a spin on women's forced helplessness and dependence, and how in order to be equals a man has to need her just as much as law and custom fixes her to need him, and to do that he has to be all disabled. But even that way it's damn creepy. It's just a tangle of gross bad wrong when there's disability involved. For a start he's all miserable and shut up in a small place with just a servant in the dark. It's like karma for what he did to his wife. Except disability isn't karma. Also the book never tries to do anything nice for his wife so it probably don't think it's karma for that part anyway, if it's karma for anything it's for having mistresses. See, now he can't even look at other women! *shudders* It's like it makes him safe by making him blind and maimed, he really truly needs her now, nobody else will do, she's his eyes and he won't let anyone else touch him and blah blah fucking blah how grotesque is that. Being someone's carer is not is not is not being someone's wife. Just a few important points of dissimilarity. It's not a good basis for being a wife neither. And why isn't he more able to look after himself anyway? Well because of his time, because the only treatment for any of it is to let him shut himself away where nobody has to look at him. He needs training and assistive devices, or at least a couple of shifts of helpers and some practice getting around familiar places, plus some mental health care for the whole depression problem, but none of that is even conceptually available at that time.
I am so very very pleased to be living in the future. Please to only be getting better. We could lose so much again.
I know she would have married him when he was healthy and rich cause they got all the way to the altar that way. It's just that the surrounding chapters concentrate on her not wanting him to buy her stuff and on him being scary and on the verge of violent and her placating him and sneaking away when he's asleep. So he's not exactly ideal then. So her happy ending is to fix that by making him poor and disabled?
*shudders of yuck*
It's like their world sets them up to be nothing but messed up, there's no healthy happy on offer. Gross.
And I'm still circling around the part that's obviously most disturbing, his actual wife. A doctor says she's mad so her husband locks her in a small room with a drunk. For the rest of her life.
It's hell, a little vision of hell.
And yet the book thinks she's the monster?
Not one word for her as a person, as a woman, as someone who actually has damn solid reasons to try and get rid of her jailer.
Just says she's mad from a family of mad people and locks her in a small box.
Monsters.
Sorry anyone that likes the book, but the disability things are just gross bad wrong.
ETA: Yes, Mr Rochester is a creep and the list has some good points. Except the last. Ugly isn't a good point.
Treating Adele like a charity orphan because he doesn't believe her mother when she says he's the father, that's creepy too. And the school he sends her to Jane had to take her out of when she went to look, it wasn't a good school. Given the school Jane grew up in and liked one wonders how not good it would have to be. Bad.
"Wide Sargasso Sea" is the other set text for this term so I'm reading it next.
And 'The Madwoman in the Attic' I had previously tried to read but it was full of Freud and other rubbish so I gave up.
Mr Rochester is a monster, though he probably doesn't know he is. A monster of his time.
Jane is... well, I like the parts where she's saying she's not a bird she has free will, and she won't marry some dude because god says so, and she stands up for herself and makes her own money and looks after herself. I like that it is obviously quite difficult. But then I don't like the unlikely princess bits, here, have a fortune of your very own.
The bits I keep bouncing away from with much grrr arrgh is everything to do with disability. What a poisonous load of drek. It's like every disability stereotype and ghastly common trope all wrapped up in one book. I think about it and get so annoyed all the words get stuck together trying to get out. Shudder bad yuck.
I can see why Teach went over Pamela again in class. Compare contrast with other popular books full of ideas around a century earlier. There's a servant (compare governess, a higher class sort of servant) and the master wants to have sex with her. In one book he tries to rape her and then when she's all virtuous and he reads her letters he marries her instead. In the other he tries to marry her but there's the teensy tiny problem with already being married. So she runs away because now she's in a really bad position, says all the books. Mr R was threatening violence and she stopped him by crying, that's just nasty, here have a manual for stopping domestic violence, sure it will work. Blech.
So then in class Teach said again about Providence and how there were spiritual autobiographies where people wrote their whole lives down so they could look back on it and say God Did It. So once JE runs away there's a lot of God Did It. And it leads her to her cousins and a fortune and a preacher asking her to marry him. Well, more telling her really. He tells her God Did It too. She says :-p to that and she'll be a curate and do priest things if god says so but not marry a bloke who thinks him saying so equals God Says. Yaay Jane! Weird book though, with the believing Providence fixes all coincidence.
The ultra creepy ending though... so when she's the servant and she's poor she doesn't like being given gifts and runs away from the prospect of half his property and thinks they're all unequal, but then she inherits a bunch of money and he loses a lot with his property burning so they end up equal so hey, happy! But her biggest happy is now he's disabled he really really needs her.
*hiss spit*
There are so many layers of bad in there.
Sure you can read it as a spin on women's forced helplessness and dependence, and how in order to be equals a man has to need her just as much as law and custom fixes her to need him, and to do that he has to be all disabled. But even that way it's damn creepy. It's just a tangle of gross bad wrong when there's disability involved. For a start he's all miserable and shut up in a small place with just a servant in the dark. It's like karma for what he did to his wife. Except disability isn't karma. Also the book never tries to do anything nice for his wife so it probably don't think it's karma for that part anyway, if it's karma for anything it's for having mistresses. See, now he can't even look at other women! *shudders* It's like it makes him safe by making him blind and maimed, he really truly needs her now, nobody else will do, she's his eyes and he won't let anyone else touch him and blah blah fucking blah how grotesque is that. Being someone's carer is not is not is not being someone's wife. Just a few important points of dissimilarity. It's not a good basis for being a wife neither. And why isn't he more able to look after himself anyway? Well because of his time, because the only treatment for any of it is to let him shut himself away where nobody has to look at him. He needs training and assistive devices, or at least a couple of shifts of helpers and some practice getting around familiar places, plus some mental health care for the whole depression problem, but none of that is even conceptually available at that time.
I am so very very pleased to be living in the future. Please to only be getting better. We could lose so much again.
I know she would have married him when he was healthy and rich cause they got all the way to the altar that way. It's just that the surrounding chapters concentrate on her not wanting him to buy her stuff and on him being scary and on the verge of violent and her placating him and sneaking away when he's asleep. So he's not exactly ideal then. So her happy ending is to fix that by making him poor and disabled?
*shudders of yuck*
It's like their world sets them up to be nothing but messed up, there's no healthy happy on offer. Gross.
And I'm still circling around the part that's obviously most disturbing, his actual wife. A doctor says she's mad so her husband locks her in a small room with a drunk. For the rest of her life.
It's hell, a little vision of hell.
And yet the book thinks she's the monster?
Not one word for her as a person, as a woman, as someone who actually has damn solid reasons to try and get rid of her jailer.
Just says she's mad from a family of mad people and locks her in a small box.
Monsters.
Sorry anyone that likes the book, but the disability things are just gross bad wrong.
ETA: Yes, Mr Rochester is a creep and the list has some good points. Except the last. Ugly isn't a good point.
Treating Adele like a charity orphan because he doesn't believe her mother when she says he's the father, that's creepy too. And the school he sends her to Jane had to take her out of when she went to look, it wasn't a good school. Given the school Jane grew up in and liked one wonders how not good it would have to be. Bad.
"Wide Sargasso Sea" is the other set text for this term so I'm reading it next.
And 'The Madwoman in the Attic' I had previously tried to read but it was full of Freud and other rubbish so I gave up.
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Date: 2011-02-12 06:38 am (UTC)