Yes Miss Sandy.
Had I been the eldest daughter, the proper way to address me would be by my surname, but since I'm the youngest, this is fine and appropriate. Besides, it's much more preferable over Auntie Sandy.
Very good. The spiritual lessons are ones you can delineate to me better than I can appreciate myself. Sometimes the message is well aren't you simply grateful for existing. What more do you want? So why aren't you constantly giving thanks to the Lord? As if anything else would be selfish. It serves other people's aims keeping some people down. In fact the original bibles of the Holy Roman Empire seemed to take lessons from wherever with an aim of a political stability in the region more than any concern for personal spiritual wellbeing. Almost as if know your place was the key message. Now none of that negates faith or belief or attention to ones spiritual well being. Taking extreme answers never is. The Victorian mindset is so rigid in these areas. The ability to bear up to almost to a scouring of the soul clean. I can actually see why such rigour will produce strength of character but it's ina "if it don't kill me it makes me stronger". People will have fallen by the wayside to disease and poor care. Then it not surprising the strong survive to perpetuate the message. The weak aren't so lucky. Anyway it's a bonus that Bronte can insert these spiritual layers so masterfully.
I've been reading and re-reading this. I believe you are delineating quite nicely. Power corrupts in religion just as readily as it does in governments and industry, but playing the God card is it's own psychological nightmare. It heaps guilt onto a victim's shoulders. Look at Helen, who's more pure than anyone you or I could meet and yet she believes her deficits define her. That makes me very sad. It's the ones who are trying the hardest, who are most susceptible to that idea of, "anything else would be selfish."
Alright, let me go back a little, since it's so very thrilling. An awakening!
...another discovery dawned on me, namely, that in the interval I had undergone a transforming process; that my mind had put off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple--or rather that she had taken with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity--and that now I was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions... now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils... I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer...and then reality sets in,
...it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: "Then," I cried, half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!" ...There is something in that," I soliloquised... "I know there is, because it does not sound too sweet; it is not like such words as Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment: delightful sounds truly; but no more than sounds for me; and so hollow and fleeting that it is mere waste of time to listen to them. But Servitude! That must be
matter of fact. Any one may serve:Jane, ever practical, even with her passionate heart, she knows she cannot go back to where she'd been "hibernating/cocooning," but she doesn't have the wherewithal to go -- full on freedom! So, she takes the next step, which is a really big one for someone who hasn't had any experience in the world.
The beauty of this is, that she is awake and aware and moving forward, without knowing what is ahead. Very brave! And, something even more beautiful -- What has been awakened cannot be put to sleep again. She is changed and she is becoming... Her story is unfolding.
Okay, back to Rochester. What do you think of him so far?