reagan’s Reviews > Jane Eyre > Status Update

“Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a liar?”

“Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have heard you called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions.”

:3

No no never mind. Everyone should be a Jane. Her strong sense of justice amidst a culture that silences women and children is satisfying.

“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.”

“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”

Wordy but I like it. I want to be a principled Helen Burns, but I’m more of a Jane Eyre I think.

“She ought to look” or “ought to be”. I’m reminded that our present culture is progressive. In the 1800s, a child was seen and not heard, expected to project a dutiful happiness instead of their true misery.