More from Shirley!
"Communicative on her own affairs she usually was not, because no one cared to listen to her; but today she became so, and her confidant shed tears as she heard her speak: for she told of cruel, slow-wasting, obstinate sufferings....
Miss Mann felt that she was understood partly, and wished to be understood further; for however old, plain, humble, desolate, afflicted we may be, so long as our hearts preserve the feeblest spark of life, they preserve also, shivering near that pale ember, a starved, ghostly longing for appreciation and affection. To this extenuated spectre, perhaps, a crumb is not thrown once a year; but when ahungered and athirst to famine--when all humanity has forgotten the dying tenant of a decaying house--Divine Mercy remembers the mourner, and a shower of manna falls for lips that early nutriment is to pass no more. Biblical promises, heard first in health, but then unheeded, come whispering to the couch of sickness: it is felt that a pitying God watches what all mankind have forsaken; the tender compassion of Jesus is recalled and relied on: the faded eye, gazing beyond Time, sees a Home, a Friend, a Refuge in Eternity." Chapter 10
This makes me wonder if it is women's plight to suffer loneliness, to feel abandoned, neglected, abused, mistreated, unloved, unwanted, alone at the sacrifice of loving others. I have felt many times like Miss Mann. What confounds me the most is, the cure Bronte offers seems to be wrapped up in good deeds, industry, or children. Are children that wonderful? I will have to think about this for awhile. How can so many current womanly issues be bound up in a book written 1849? I will have to say, I do not think God is the neglectful and chastising God as Bronte makes him out to be.
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Self-Reliance -Emerson
"If our young men (and women) miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men (and women) say she is RUINED. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to her friends and to herself that she is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of her life. A sturdy lass from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who TEAMS IT, FARMS IT, PEDDLES, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on her feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. She walks abreast with her days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for she does not postpone her life, but lives already. She has not one chance, but a hundred chances." |
here we go!
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