“I have now been married ten years. … I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. … To talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.”
JANE EYRE
CHARLOTTE BRONTË FELT SO close to Emily that the tragically bad notices for Wuthering Heights kept her from enjoying the generally good ones for her own first novel, Jane Eyre, published only a few months later. For her part, Emily was such a private person that she talked almost only with Charlotte. And talk they did. Each evening after supper while pacing around the parlor table “like restless wild animals,” they discussed their own writing projects and their revolutionary theory of the novel. As poets, they wanted to go beyond the realistic observation of events that had been the novel’s mainstay thus far (“more real than true,” as Charlotte once said of Jane Austen), and try for poetic power in language and psychological revelation in narrative. These long nightly talks between two immensely talented sisters still in their twenties, as critic Q. D. Leavis was to observe more than a hundred years later, “led to the novel’s becoming the major art form of the nineteenth century.”13
But here the similarity between these two women ended. In spite of sharing everything from parentage to professional dreams, and even with the uncommon influence each had upon the other, these two women had such different inner lives—and from them, created such different characters and ideas of love and power—that they are still among the best testimonies to the unique self in each of us. Unlike Emily’s protagonists, Charlotte’s never searched for romantic completion through others; and unlike Emily’s only novel, Charlotte’s didn’t end with the hint that love was a subject for the distant future. In Jane Eyre as in her other novels, Charlotte made self-completion the goal, the struggle to preserve an independent spirit the underlying tension, and loving oneself the only path to loving others. “One of the impressive qualities of Charlotte Brontë’s heroines, the quality that makes them more valuable to the woman reader than Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Catherine Earnshaw combined,” as Adrienne Rich wrote, “is their determined refusal to be romantic.”14
Of course, this may come as a surprise to many who saw the romance-addicted Hollywood version of Jane Eyre. It filtered out all but the novel’s central episode—and distorted even that. What’s left is the barest plotline of a poor young governess who falls in love with her rich employer, discovers he has concealed a mad first wife in the attic, runs away because there can be no legal marriage, and then returns after the wife has been conveniently killed in a fire that also blinds the man, thus giving the governess a chance to be a selfless caretaker for the rest of her life. But if that were Charlotte Brontë’s message, she would have gone down in history as simply another creator of the Gothic novel—that poor-young-woman and rich-older-man standby that depends for its zing on sex plus a woman’s inability to get rich on her own. Gothic romances provide for many women readers what sports and war stories do for many men: a fantasy of power.
In the real novel, however, Jane doesn’t meet Mr. Rochester until a quarter of the way through the story. By then, the reader is already hooked on seeing the world through the clear eyes of a very well centered heroine. Jane Eyre is one of the first female versions of the classic hero’s journey from adolescence to maturity—and an amazingly up-to-date one at that. From her first appearance as a ten-year-old orphan thrown on the mercies of a well-to-do aunt and cousins who humiliate her, to her graduation from a charity school where poor young women are turned into governesses for the wealthy, Jane shows herself to be one of those rare young girls who escape the fate society holds in store. Perhaps Jane’s status as an orphan saved her by giving her such good reason to harden herself against the expectations of others, or perhaps her harsh circumstances placed her as far outside convention as the Brontës themselves were. In any case, she is rebellious from the beginning.
When Jane arrives at her aunt’s house as a lonely little girl, for instance, she is advised to put up with anything and act grateful, but her child’s sense of honesty won’t let her. When “the young master,” her teenage cousin, hurls a book at her head to show that she is a beggar with no right to use the family library, she calls him all kinds of imaginative names. When her aunt locks her up as punishment, she gets sick from the sheer injustice of it. Strengthened and emboldened by the motherly affection of a servant, Jane confronts her cruel aunt-by-marriage with all the weapons in her small arsenal: “I’m glad you are no relation of mine. I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if anyone asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.”
Not only does she express anger, but she’s not guilty about it: “Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.” It’s little wonder that women readers taught to swallow angry words have loved this heroine who doesn’t.
Branded a liar and sent to a Spartan school whose headmaster wants “to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh,” she has the good sense to form alliances with a kind teacher and a classmate who help her to survive—a sort of feminist underground within the school’s patriarchy. Yet she knows they are not the ultimate authority either. Though still only ten, she has enough moral compass to disagree with this older classmate on the Christian wisdom of turning the other cheek. “I must resist those who punish me unjustly,” she explains. “It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.” Indeed, this gift for seeing herself in perspective allows her to be the “I” of her own story. It’s almost impossible to imagine Heathcliff or Catherine as a narrator.
At eighteen, having received an education and survived many hazards, Jane explains: “I desired liberty … change, stimulus … at least a new servitude!” In this spirit of adventure she places an ad for a position as governess and becomes the teacher of a young French girl who is the ward (and illegitimate daughter) of the infamous Mr. Rochester.
As we all know, she falls in love with him. According to Adrienne Rich: “Jane, young, inexperienced, and hungry for experience, has to confront the central temptation of the female condition—the temptation of romantic love and surrender.”15 But even with all the cards of worldly power stacked against her, Jane doesn’t project longed-for qualities of her own onto this man: to a miraculous degree for Victorian England, she has refused to suppress them. Instead, she tries to understand him as an individual through long evenings of conversation in which, as intellectual equals despite their twenty-year age difference, they talk about everything from her paintings of internal landscapes to his affair with the woman who gave birth to her young student. When their first love scene does come about, it is after she saves his life, not vice versa. She wakes him from a smoke-drugged sleep (a fire set, as the reader will soon discover, by his mad first wife during a rare attempt at escape). He then confesses that he had known at first sight that “you would do me good … delight … my very inmost heart.”
But, as we come to understand, this romantic focus on his own needs doesn’t bode well. He later tries many deceptions: lying about his interest in another woman to make Jane jealous; trying to redesign her with clothes and jewelry; and finally, tricking her into confessing romantic feelings for him. He does succeed in becoming, as Jane says, “my whole world; and more than the world; almost my hope of heaven,” but by that time, both she and the reader have the uneasy sense that this romance is doomed. Though the existence of his first wife is revealed only on their wedding day, it isn’t just propriety that makes Jane refuse his entreaties to flee to France and live with him. By the time he finally tells her the truth about this invalid wife kept in the attic—a wealthy West Indian he had married partly from greed and partly from lust*—Jane is clear-sighted enough to understand that this romantic story he relates in a last-ditch bid for her sympathies, a tale of instant attraction and eventual revulsion, reveals a pattern that has doomed other women in his life and will doom her, too.
“Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave,” Rochester had said in explaining his unhappy years in Europe while legally chained to a mad wife at home; “both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara.” Jane realizes that “if I were so far to forget myself … as … to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory.” Even his illegitimate daughter he refers to as “a dancer’s bastard.” Surrendering to romance, Jane realizes, might eventually reduce her, too, to a mad woman in the attic.
So, though she suffers enormous pain at leaving him, she flees this powerful, fascinating man with whom she has become so enmeshed—not as a Gothic heroine preserving her honor, but as a real woman saving her true self. With just enough money to take the first coach anywhere, she finds herself in a strange village and becomes ill from wandering in the cold rain. A young clergyman and his sisters rescue her. After she is well again and working as a teacher of farmers’ children, she dreams of Rochester sometimes—but has no intention of returning. Better to be “a village schoolmistress, free and honest,” she explains, than “fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next.”
There is one more temptation: the very modern one of giving her life to the cause of a high-minded husband. Asked by the young clergyman to marry him and go to India, she recognizes the coldness and egotism with which he assumes that her life should be secondary to his missionary work. “If I were to marry you,” she tells him, “you would kill me. You are killing me now.” He is shocked and calls her “unfeminine.” Shouldn’t a woman sacrifice herself to a husband’s good cause? It’s one of many questions that love would answer differently than romance.
But Jane shows her gratitude to this clergyman and his two sisters who saved her life. When an uncle dies and leaves her a tidy sum of money, she insists on sharing it equally with them. She also keeps enough money to be independent, and refuses to sacrifice herself to her students. “I want to enjoy my own faculties,” she explains, “as well as to cultivate those of other people.” Thus, she has work, people she loves, and even—that great rarity for a woman—financial independence, when, in a mystical experience, she hears the sound of Edward Rochester’s voice calling her name across the miles. She is now ready to hear it.
With the exception of Mister in The Color Purple, perhaps no male character is more changed by events over the course of a novel than the one she now finds. His injury and blindness from a fatal fire set by his wife are the least of it. He has a new acceptance of much that is outside his control. Instead of anger at what has been taken away from him, he appreciates what is left, as if blindness had focused his view inward and allowed him to see himself for the first time. For her part, Jane tells him, “I love you better now, when I can be really useful to you, than I did … when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector.”
Their sensuousness and sensitivity together are very moving. Their long talks are as interesting as their earlier ones, but without the intellectual jousting. Their whimsy and tenderness together are a long way from the imbalance of a Gothic novel. Because they are two unique people who act loving toward each other, we believe Jane when she says, after one child and a decade of marriage at the end of the novel: “To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.”
It’s not easy to generalize about love. Like each person who feels its invisible filaments stretching to another person, it is unique in each instance. Unlike romance, whose plots are uniform enough to be conveyed by shorthand—“if-I-can’t-have-you-no-one-will,” “transitional affair,” “middle-age crazy,” “the other woman,” “wartime romance,” and so on—love has no standard storyline and no agenda except to deepen the joys and cushion the blows of very individual lives. As Robin Morgan sums up in The Anatomy of Freedom, “Hate generalizes, love specifies.” And romance generalizes, too. When we look for a missing part of ourselves in other people, we blot out their uniqueness. Since most of us have been deprived along gender lines, we generalize about the “opposite sex” (or about any group that becomes “the mysterious other”), thus rendering it a blank screen on which we project our hopes (in romance) or our fears (in hate). No wonder romance turns so easily to hate, and vice versa.
But characteristics of love hold as true for lesbian and gay couples, who may be love’s pioneers in our own time, as for Charlotte Brontë’s daring nineteenth-century lovers. As described by those who experience them, they are remarkably similar to the marks of high self-esteem:
Each partner feels loved for an authentic self. Jane Eyre had to discover the independent part of herself through adventure, and Rochester found the dependent part of himself through tragedy. Romance, on the other hand, is about possessing and changing, and that’s the way people discuss it. The man who falls in love with a strong and independent woman and then tries to tame her, for instance, is not loving but conquering; a common romantic plot ever since The Taming of the Shrew. The woman who is obsessed by the question “How can I change him?” is not centered in her own life but trying to control his; a plot that’s common when women marry their lives instead of leading them.
Each one knows she or he could get along without the other—but doesn’t wish to. Free choice is essential to love. We can’t say yes to anyone unless we can also say no. Catherine and Heathcliff could do neither. Jane could stay with Rochester only after she was sure she could survive on her own. To be locked in an intimacy one can’t leave, for whatever reason, is to eventually feel resentment: what Camus described as “an autointoxication—the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence.” Which is why, as Clare Boothe Luce once explained: “With the equality of the sexes, there will be a lot more love in the world.”
There is plenty of room for playfulness, lightness, and humor. When two realities bump up against each other in intimacy, romance views the contradictions with anger or disillusionment, but love acknowledges them with humor. Romance is inflexible because it tries to predict and control, while love is open-handed and can improvise. Perhaps that’s why phrases like “I married him because he made me laugh,” “We laugh a lot,” and “Joking about my day with her always makes it better” are so often heard when people try to describe the otherwise indescribable feeling of love. No wonder Jane Eyre has passages that make us smile, but Wuthering Heights does not.
Each partner feels empathy for the other. Between the “masculine” extreme of focusing only on oneself (for instance, Heathcliff taking out his need for vengeance by marrying Catherine’s sister-in-law) and the “feminine” one of focusing only on other people (for instance, Catherine immobilized between Heathcliff and her husband), there is a midpoint of empathy and balance. Each partner maintains a strong internal “center,” yet can also see life through the other’s eyes. Charlotte Brontë embodies this image quite literally by having Jane “see” for the blinded Rochester. She takes pleasure in reading to him, describing the countryside, the weather—and he, who had been unable to accept help even from his servants, accepts this service because he feels her pleasure in it. Because we can imagine Rochester feeling the same pleasure in being Jane’s “eyes” if their positions were reversed—a big change from all the romances that are far too “gendered” to be reversible—we know Jane isn’t just one more woman in a caretaking role. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “Genuine love ought to be founded on the mutual recognition of two liberties; the lovers would then experience themselves both as self and the other.”
Love is not about power. Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself. Or, as Margaret Anderson put it, “In real love, you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.” If we love someone, we want them to continue being the essence of themselves. If so, then we can’t own, absorb, or change them. We can only help them to become what they already are. When we argue with someone we love, for instance, it’s more about trying to make ourselves understood than trying to win. “Perhaps that’s what love is,” as essayist and biographer Phyllis Rose said, “the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.”
Of course, everything is a journey, and nothing is a destination. But it seems to be true that, once we are past the early stages of absorbing parental love, some core of self-esteem is a vital preface to allowing ourselves to feel loved by others.
Take, as lawyers would say, a hypothetical case: Suppose the perfect lover were to suddenly appear. Without a core feeling of self-esteem, this perfection would soon be marred: What if he or she sees beneath my façade to who I really am? Jealousy would set in: Someone “better” than I am will surely come along. So would possessiveness: If I lose this person, I will lose the only one who loves me—since I do not. With really low self-esteem, we might even bypass these steps and go straight to devaluing the lover: If he loves me, there must be something wrong with him. If she went to bed with me, she would go to bed with anyone. In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.”
All this sounds like common sense—but unfortunately, it isn’t common. There are many more people trying to meet the right person than to become the right person. The genius of Jane Eyre was in showing us that the wrongness or rightness of a lover depends partly on our readiness to appreciate what is unique and best in him or her. We may turn a wrong one into a right one—and vice versa—by how we feel about ourselves. But our world is no more ready to hear that message than Charlotte Brontë’s was.
So here we are, locked in ideas of the romantic rescue, the magical “other.” Yet without looking inward, an individual woman may go on choosing angry men because they express the anger that she holds in. Or a man may go on marrying women he wouldn’t hire because he can’t imagine women as equals (think of the loneliness expressed by Rochester in his speech about mistresses). But even if we’re lucky enough to have been raised in an exemplary way, women who express anger often get punished, and so do men who bond with women. We have to face the fact that striving for a whole self means going against—and thus helping to change—most of current culture. But however great the struggle, the rewards are even greater.
In spite of all our gender-role socialization, for instance, sex-typing scales show that females who are more “androgynous”—that is, who incorporate more “masculine” qualities along with their gender-appropriate ones—have considerably higher self-esteem than those who rate as exclusively “feminine.” Perhaps this isn’t a total surprise, since “masculine” traits (for instance, independence and autonomy) are more valued in a male-dominant society than “feminine” ones (for instance, interdependence and connectedness). But the reverse is also true. Males who incorporate more “feminine” traits actually have slightly higher self-esteem than do those who rate as exclusively “masculine.” This is true in spite of the fact that society creates more behavioral situations that reward “gender-appropriate” traits, and also imposes more social penalties on men who deviate from gender norms than on women who do the same.16 Even though imitation is the sincerest form of flattery—and it’s far worse for men to become “like women” than vice versa—wholeness still has the edge.
Studies of creativity make the same point: creative people have both higher-than-average self-esteem and higher-than-average degrees of androgyny. The ability to impose one’s own view of reality, as the artist does, requires a degree of self-confidence. Furthermore, creativity is most likely to come from intrinsic interest, not external reward; from a desire to express the true self.17 It’s not surprising that our cultural images of creativity tend toward the androgynous, from the erotic androgyny of the double-sexed god Eros to the Hindu Kama and other gods of love and creation, from the intellectual androgyny of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group to priests in skirts giving symbolic birth with baptismal/birth fluid, and long-haired male artists.18
But for most men and most women, gender differences are only too distinct, and nowhere are the consequences of their differentness more painfully felt than in relations with each other. While women are encouraged to communicate, nurture, and otherwise develop those qualities that have special importance in maintaining loving relationships, men are rarely allowed to put as much energy into their intimate relationships as into their work, or to develop those “feminine” skills that would make those relationships rewarding. One has only to look in a bookstore to see the consequences. I picked up four current books that profess to be for the sensitive “new man,” for instance, but not one listed “love” or “romance” in the index. Though there is a new emphasis on men connecting emotionally with their fathers, there is no parallel emphasis on men connecting intellectually with their mothers. Among the more plentiful books for the “new woman,” however, there were a dozen that put “love” or “romance” right up in the title; many on mother-daughter problems; and several with chapters on the importance of the father-daughter connection. Women Who Love Too Much and other such books are helpful—but why is there nothing called Men Who Love Too Little? Until men are as focused on love, connectedness, and relationship as women are, the problems in those mutual areas can’t be solved.
If a long-term solution is in sight, it comes from raising children. Men who raise them do change. In one study, single fathers and employed married mothers had almost identical levels of “feminine” traits, in spite of all their preceding years of socialization.19 Charlotte Brontë’s transformed Rochester has been ridiculed by critics as a “woman’s man,” someone symbolically castrated by blindness who thus becomes more sensitive and connected to others. But perhaps he is a harbinger of a future man who will be made whole not by a tragedy, but by the daily needs and joys of nurturing children. Though Rochester was an idealization in Charlotte Brontë’s day, he might turn out to be, to reverse her comment about Jane Austen’s novels, “more true than real.” After all, patience, flexibility, empathy, interdependence—all these things are present in every male child. They only need to be required and rewarded instead of ignored and punished.
What if men not only raised children but were raised to raise children—so that even men who are not fathers, like women who are not mothers, still develop these traits that allow them to better connect to other people? As Dorothy Dinnerstein explains in such historic depth in The Mermaid and the Minotaur, the imbalance that so pains both sexes could diminish, and so could violence, both public and private. We might realize, as Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, that “the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed from all false feeling and aversion, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.”
Whatever is best for our collective future, we will only discover it by looking with clear eyes at what made love possible in our individual pasts. Here is a story of mine—in the hope of eliciting yours:
When we first met in the late 1960s, he was a quiet presence in a noisy group arguing about the merits of a political campaign. I remember thinking that he looked like a large friendly tree, inclining slightly toward us as he listened intently, with an occasional response when the wind of our talk rustled in his branches.
Later, as our group of political organizers and reporters toured the Southern inner city where this man had been born and to which he had returned as a doctor, I could feel the suspicion in a storefront clinic: Was I, the only person of the wrong color for this neighborhood, just one more reporter come to record poverty and do nothing and leave? After a while, he said quietly in an apparent non sequitur, “She can’t help what color she is, you know.” The conversation went right on like water flowing over a rock, but the suspicion dissolved.
As our tired group went to dinner at the end of the day, I noted again that, unique among us, he seemed to feel no need to talk, to entertain, to show off what he knew. Some of the local activists began to relax into reminiscing about the great musicians who had been born in this neighborhood, perhaps eaten at these very tables, and both this man and I began remembering favorite lyrics. I realized that we were moved by the same things—and I could feel him sensing this, too. We continued our group conversation, but now, we were really talking to each other.
For the rest of that summer, he came for weekends to my city, I went to his, or we met in between. We walked the hot streets that everyone else was trying to get out of, went to movies, enjoyed free concerts, and ate every possible kind of ethnic food. It felt as if we had always known each other, yet also as if we were just exploring and exploding into a new part of ourselves. Sometimes, we stayed in all weekend talking, making love, listening to the new music tapes we brought each other, watching old movies, and ordering food so we never had to go out. Sometimes, we explored new places to dance, buy old books, or shop for clothes. Always there were just the two of us. Somehow, we felt complete on our own. Once when an older white man in a movie line struck up a conversation with us, he punched my friend in the stomach and asked about “pro ball” (assuming any tall black man must be an athlete), then made a sexual comment to me (assuming any white woman with a black man must be fair game). Later, we talked and laughed about the linkage between those stereotypes. Being together made it possible to laugh.
In spite of our different lives, we discovered just how much we shared: from mothers who got tears in their eyes when they talked about Roosevelt to feeling like outsiders and optimists at the same time. I could see he hadn’t known a woman before who was in movement work, too—his wife had left him for a better prospect when he gave up his prosperous medical practice to set up free clinics—and this made him surprised and appreciative when I could help with speeches or strategizing. For my part, I hadn’t known a man before who was so comfortable with what were usually female experiences. I was touched when he heard what I said and its emotional subtext, delighted that he enjoyed shopping for groceries or sprucing up a room, and amazed to discover that he noticed the little peripheral things that many men miss.
After meeting his parents, I could see where these companionable gifts had come from. As the oldest child looking after younger ones, he had learned to iron clothes, braid hair, cook very well, and always temper his strength with gentleness. In his parents, I could see the source of his inner strength. They were two deep-rooted trees, too. They had taught him to feel neither higher nor lower than anyone—but as good as anyone; to feel sorry for those who thought some people were born better or worse than others; and to know that he was worthy of the best. The suit they bought him for his grade-school graduation and could ill afford, for instance, was literally the best in the store. It was an object lesson he never forgot: even if you could afford almost nothing, you still deserved the best.
After he met my mother and understood my childhood, I think he also sensed why I had come to be “the man of the family” very young. Though we just enjoyed each other without examining why at the time, I can see now that I was more of a companion for him because of the “masculine” in me, and he made me feel at ease and understood because of the “feminine” in him.
We went on in this way for several years. Then our friendship went through a gradual process of change. I traveled too much; he had too little respite from his work. He was frighteningly ill for a while, and, as I realized later, taking care of him pressed such a painful and familiar nerve in me after the years of caretaking for my mother that I responded to him in the same way: I was right there and responsible, but turned off emotionally—a familiar form of automatic pilot. And then there was a more lasting phenomenon: we worried about such similar things that we each began to need someone with perspective to get us out of deep grooves in our minds.
After a year or so of painful times of which the above is only a summary, we entered into a new era of being each other’s chosen family. We both have other partners, which is a private part of our lives, but on all the other basics, we talk. There are many moves I wouldn’t make, from political decisions to major life changes, without his advice—and many that he wouldn’t undertake without mine. I realize as I write this that in these last twenty years, there hasn’t been a week in which we haven’t checked in, asked for an opinion, calmed our mutual paranoia that something has happened to the other, shared a joke, commiserated about some injustice, brought the other a present from some far-off place, celebrated a birthday, recommended a book, helped with a speech or an article, taught each other a new dance step, or shared a cup of tea.
I know he is right there with unconditional love and loyalty—and he knows I am, too. Neither of us can imagine growing old without the other. With health and luck, we’ll never have to.
Perhaps what characterizes romance is its separateness from other deep feelings—for a friend or a child, for the ocean or a sheltering tree. What marks love is: It’s all the same.
We have far better chances for love than in the Brontës’ day—yet our consciousness of them lags far behind.
For instance: We still think of love as “happily ever after.” That was a myth even in the nineteenth century, when, as Margaret Mead pointed out, marriage worked better because people only lived to be fifty. (Charlotte Brontë herself died at thirty-nine of toxemia during her first pregnancy.) Though an average life span is now thirty years longer in many countries of the world, we haven’t really accepted the idea of loving different people at different times, in different ways. It’s possible to raise children with a loved partner and then move amicably on to a new stage of life, to love someone and yet live apart, to forge new relationships at every phase of life, even at the very end—in short, to enjoy many different kinds of love, in a way that doesn’t hurt but only enriches.
For instance: Many more women now have the freedom that comes with self-support, not just a few with the unlikely inheritance of Jane Eyre; yet many still assume a man must be older, taller, earn more, weigh more, be the “right” race, class, and religion, better educated, and so on. In other words, we are still looking for forms of security, strength, and social approval that we no longer need—and thus missing love.
For instance: Many women and men who considered themselves heterosexual have found themselves deeply in love with someone of the same sex, and many who considered themselves exclusively gay or lesbian have discovered the reverse. It seems that sexuality is not a label but a continuum. Even Heathcliff’s cry, “I cannot live without my life!” was given new meaning by the late writer and peace activist Barbara Deming, who used it to express her right to live openly as a lesbian. Black women in Boston then used it to protest their lack of safety in the streets. If we follow the feeling of love, for ourselves and others, it leads us to many new meanings.
For instance: We are more free to explore sensuality and sexuality as part of the pleasurable language of love. “Pleasure—which includes erotic joy but is not limited to it,” as Marilyn French wrote, “is the opposite of power, because it is the one quality that cannot be coerced.”20 Pleasure is an expression of the true self.
We need nothing less than a remything of love. I think this poem by Alice Walker—my favorite love poem—is a good beginning: 21
I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen.
[[Footnotes]]
* Emily Brontë may have had in mind a racial distance greater than that between the gently bred Catherine and a “dark-skinned gypsy,” as Heathcliff was described. Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff points out in her unpublished essay, “Caliban’s Daughter,” that Liverpool was a center of the slave trade, where discarded Africans, perhaps also children fathered by slave traders, lived in the streets. Catherine’s father brought home this boy who was “dark as if it came from the devil” and speaking “some gibberish that nobody could understand” only after he had unsuccessfully “enquired for its owner.” Later, when Heathcliff runs away to become rich enough to marry Catherine, what trade other than slave ships could have earned him such a fortune in three years? And if that self-betrayal was the source of his wealth, no wonder he was in such pain when he returned to find that even this blood money couldn’t give him Catherine. Perhaps Emily Brontë, wandering over moors she must have known were part of a slave trader’s estate, was drawing parallels between a Heathcliff who could be bought (and forced to sell others) and a Catherine who could be sold in marriage. Or perhaps as an outsider by sex who had written imaginary stories about Africa as a child, she was simply finding within herself the emotions of an outsider by race—just as Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer in England, had done almost two hundred years earlier.
*For a view of this story as it might have looked through the mad wife’s eyes, see the Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea.