Tea at Trianon: Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, March 28, 2016

Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart

From The New York Times:

No sooner has Jane Eyre discovered that her dear master is a married man than she gives him up. “I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.” She will not be Mr. Rochester’s mistress; she nearly becomes a missionary. But the works of the Lord are great: The wife dies. Jane nurses Mr. Rochester back to health. More important, she saves his soul. All his life, he had been an “irreligious dog,” but Jane’s example has swelled his heart “with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth.” And so the novel ends with an acknowledgment that the couple’s happiness falls short of the bliss they will know in heaven. The last sentence of “Jane Eyre” isn’t “Reader, I married him” (I always forget this) but “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus.”

What fault could the sternest Victorian moralists have found with any of that? But to the novel’s first critics, Jane was too independent and assertive, “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit.” Her longing for Rochester was “coarse” (that is, sexual), and as the reviewer for The Christian Remembrancer averred, the book “burns with moral Jacobinism.” Jane is always “murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor,” and so — since God decides who is born a weaver and who a viscount — the novel was thought to be criticizing “God’s appointment,” a kind of blasphemy. Never mind that Queen Victoria stayed up late reading it to Prince Albert. “Jane Eyre” was an “immoral,” even a “dangerous” book, and whoever was behind the authorial pseudonym “Currer Bell” was in possession of a sordid mind. (Read more.)