anyway Jane Eyre is the most depressing novel i’ve ever read. what do you mean Jane got her happy ending??? This is horrifying. We constantly call other books from that time period revolving around strong heroines (such as Anna Karenina or, yet again, Madame Bovary) depressing, or horrible, but really i’d rather be Emma or Anna than Jane tbh. And like… yes, technically, it’s worse for them to commit suicide rather than marrying “the man they love”, because everything is always better than suicide i mean but… i’m talking about the effect on the reader. Idk i just feel like seeing the heroine you’ve spent so much time with, who suffered and struggled for her happiness, committing suicide is… well, at least if makes you question things about your own reality. you realize that women (even if theyre relatively privileged – Anna is nobles, both are cis, straight (until further notice), pretty etc.), if they dare to have personal wishes and aspirations, are driven to “madness”, despair and, ultimately, death. and it IS infuriating.
meanwhile, Jane Eyre… we’re so conditioned to expect a “she married him and they lived happily ever after” happy ending that, we when get it, that we don’t see it, at first, for what it is: an horrifying fate. Jane is so strong. She’s witty, smart, talented (a really gifted artist), optimistic, brave and resourceful. she deserved so much better than becoming the maid or nurse aka unpaid servant of a garbage man omg.
im sure plenty of people already pointed that out – but i think one of the reasons, if not the main, Jane Eyre resonates so much with women is that we’re essentially in front of the two choices young women have. (i’d say “young straight women” but since thats what women are meant to be…). you’re either 1) a saint and a martyr, never questioning your hard life conditions, (and she’s smart! and she is NOT docile! i want to point that out. it’s not about her personal qualities) like Jane, meaning you can, after many struggles, get your happy ending; or 2) the mad woman in the attic, a “beast”, a “monster”, a mad arsonist (also – don’t forget racism, since shes from the Caribbean). Then your fate is horrifying: locked up, literally tortured in your own house, ignored by your husband who is ashamed of you, literally mad with pain.
so first of all: all women, or at least most of them, feel like we’re constantly at the verge of madness, monstruosity, and this isnt an academic paper so im too tired to develop but… of course the first wife acts like a counterideal. be a Jane, dont be a mad woman in the attic, a monster. ok.
but what if youre the good kind of girl? what if you’re a Jane? the best you can hope for is to get married to an irritable man and be at his service for the rest of your days.
and i know straight women who have it worse! Rochester made progress. he respects Jane a bit more, at the end. but, still…. Jane deserved better.
tl;dr: the fact we think Jane Eyre has a happy ending is horrifying and really telling about the misogyny of our society
Okay lmao no need for that tone dude
1). The question isnt to know if she was “sick” or something, it’s about a). how Rochester literally sequestered her in her own house and tortured her (pov of the characters) and b). the message it conveys to the readers
2). You know damn well she hated Rochester bc of what he did to her and burned the house bc thats where she was abused. She was utterly powerless, and seized the right moment to do the only thing she could: arson. Bad faith, dude. Bad faith.
3). Okay but Anna – the character, not the message Tolstoy wanted to convey – left her family because she was in love with Vronsky like… yeah, she got punished (by God? i dont know) for leaving her family, because a Good Woman takes care and suffers for her family and god forbid she wants freedom and that’s… why i was saying? That outside of Good Behaving Married Woman you’re either a mad monster or, well, dead. The question here isnt to say that Anna did no wrong whatsoever and that she was a pure smol victim bean or whatever, its not about her morality, it’s that its really telling of what her society was like, and how women are (still) treated to this day.
I’ve come to realize that having an adolescent cat is like you gave a two-year-old a knife, and you have no way to take the knife away. Periodically the two-year-old gets pissy and tries to threaten you with the knife to get what it wants. So you can pick it up and hold it at arms length to keep it from stabbing you, but no matter what you do, you can’t take the knife away from the two-year-old.
this reads like some john mulaney quote its amazing
i had a nervous breakdown and a full panic attack bc i thought my cat had jumped out of the window and turns out this little bastard man was just dozing, hidden in my perfectly closed wardrobe???? get a cat they said. they’re adorable they said.
attention everyone this is the smug face of a true idiot child whom i adore
i had a nervous breakdown and a full panic attack bc i thought my cat had jumped out of the window and turns out this little bastard man was just dozing, hidden in my perfectly closed wardrobe???? get a cat they said. they’re adorable they said.
honestly i didn’t even think Zendaya is Meechee was that funny until it generated this much unjustified anger from someone and now it’s fucking hilarious
unjustified? UNJUSTIFIED???
fine, whatever, I don’t have to take this from a “nonbinary lesbian”. whatever that means.
you realize you’ve literally just made this funnier right
indigenous women & girls make up ~2-3 % of the Canadian population … but make up 16% of the total homicides in the country. there might be as many as 4000 missing & murdered indigenous women, if not more, in Canada since the 1980s. More than 30% of perpetrators of violence against indigenous women are white men.
I can’t imagine a world where 4000 white women could just go missing over the course of just a couple decades and there be absolutely *no* outcry or action from the “criminal justice system”
and people have the audacity to imply that Canada is past colonialism lmao
medusa-avenging-squad 