Thursday
My faculty book group has been discussing Jane Eyre, which provides some of the impetus for today’s post. Add in Donald Trump’s recent creepy remarks that he is a “protector” of women, along with a friend’s observation (based upon personal experience) that America’s experience with Trump felt like an abusive relationship, and we can cast Trump as Rochester and Jane as Kamala Harris.
To this I add one more element, a student’s response about how Jane Eyre would have helped her escape her own abusive relationship if she had read it as a teen. (I recount this in my book.) All of which leads me to recommend Jane Eyre as useful election year reading.
Let’s start with Trump. This past Monday he patronizingly informed women that, with him as president, “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
Trump also assured women that, because they will be “healthy, happy, confident and free,” they will “no longer be thinking about abortion.”
These remarks, of course, are coming from a man who, as blogger Jeff Tiedrich usefully points out, is an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” consorted with notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who would barge into Miss U.S. dressing rooms while teenage contestants were half naked, and who boasts about having singled-handedly killed Roe v. Wade. With protectors like this, who needs enemies?
Rochester is no Trump (other than in his attempt to have multiple wives), but his protection offers to Jane are similarly creepy, setting her teeth on edge. First, even before she knows he is already married, he shows himself to be controlling. Against her wishes, he insists on dressing her in finery and bedecking her in jewels and, when she pushes back, makes a remark about a Turkish harem, talking about her in the third person as though she were a plaything:
He chuckled; he rubbed his hands. “Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!” he exclaimed. “Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!”
Then, after his marriage secret is revealed, there is this unnerving interchange. If Jane were to go mad, he says, he would never treat her the way he has treated his mad wife:
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.
This existence is disturbingly similar to the life that he is in fact proposing for her. When Jane tells him that she must leave him and “begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes,” he informs her what she really means:
You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester—both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life.
Or as Trump put it on Truth Social, “I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!”
In my book I write about how a former student (I call her Theresa) recognized all the signs of an abusive relationship in the Jane-Rochester relationship. Before the wedding, Jane has been ignoring many of the warning signals because she idolizes her employer:
My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.
Theresa wrote that she recognized herself in Jane, which is how she herself ended up in trouble. Longing for a grand passion, she surrendered all sense of herself, counting on her partner to think for her and take care of her.
Jane, however, finds herself in a moment that Theresa said is one of “the shining moments in literature.” After Jane first rationalizes to herself that she is a nobody and that no one will notice what she does—”Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”—her higher self replies, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Theresa saw Jane as a heroine who can teach one “how to survive not only on human compassion but on hard work and emotional strength.” Trapped “in a circumstance as universal as a bad relationship,” Jane finds “the will power to save herself.” Theresa resolved that, should she ever have a daughter, she would introduce her to Bronte’s novel.
It’s worth noting that Jane has to fight against a second abusive relationship before the book ends, this time with the mesmerizing and strong-willed St. John Rivers. Against him too she is able to find her footing.
Thinking about the Harris-Trump election through the Jane-Rochester lens leaves me with two thoughts. First, can Trump’s often bewildering popularity with certain women—more white women voted for him than they did for either Clinton or Biden—be explained in part by the seductive lure of a predator? I think especially of Christian women who have made of him an idol, standing between them and “every thought of heaven.” They are as willing to dispense with Jesus’s teachings as Rochester is with marriage laws.
Second, the exhilaration that has accompanied the rise of Harris may be similar to stepping out of an abusive relationship. For years, we have been hunkering down, hoping that if we placated the man he wouldn’t hurt us. Now, thanks to the example of this loud and proud woman running for president, we’re squaring our shoulders and walking out the door. We care for ourselves and we’re not going back.
To be sure, if Trump’s enablers allow him to reenter our lives, we’re going to have to deal with him all over again. The prospect is so terrifying that women all over the country, along with many men, are doing all they can to stop him. Harris’s “when we fight, we win” is providing wind for our sails.
