/lit/ - Literature

Frankly, we really underestimate the casual brutality commonplace in households those days. Outside of Wuthering Heights, those were just diamonds in the rough, relative to other men. They don't write the fixing because that would be incredibly boring to read.

>>22028736
I don’t just mean the domestic violence which is rife in Wuthering Heights and the Tenant of Wildfell call but even the love interest in Jane Eyre is an extremely controlling and manipulative groomer whose red flags are off the wall which she knows and loves him in spite of it, thinking he would like to keep her as a harem slave more than a wife. It’s like the protagonists of all their books are magnetized by the dark triad or something

>>22028728
>women rubbing the bean to dark triad abusechads
No way!!!

>>22028728
[Why do straight women have unrealistic fantasies of masculinity]?

Gee.

>>22028740
Yeah, that was the way things were. Rochester is a fucking feminist by contemporary standards.
Objectively, women are attracted to power and social status. Men, too, but in evolutionary terms, women's status is deeply tied to her physical form. Both genders nowadays have complex social codes that imply we can't trust these signals we're designed to focus on, like "don't stick your dick in crazy" and those social media posts detailing red flags. Back then, women were legal property of their husbands, and even the parish priest would often look the other way. Without the strong cultural norms around abusive behaviors that have only come around in the past few years, people in the past were making those kinds of bad decisions all the time. How many women thought their high school sweetheart would be a great father, but he's a drunk on her couch by the fourth kid and age 30? How many men lost everything because they trusted a woman who never intended to stick around once he lost his hair?
"Red flags" are a dangerous social concept, the idea that any individual trait is indicative of character in isolation, at least they way they're discussed nowadays, but you've taken the right lessons from them already. The Brontës were a bunch of shut-in virgin savants, they never had a chance to learn anything like that. That naïveté is why their books are so enthralling and pure and richly feminine, because they only know society in its most primitive form, the family, and they were incredibly privileged by wealth. For them, freedom was finding a nice man who talked to them like adults, and didn't rape and beat incessantly.

>>22028765
And then cucking him

>>22028765
They had a lot of trouble finding husbands precisely because their father couldn’t afford a good dowry for them. So not really extremely wealthy

>>22028853
They were a dying line of petty nobles, poor for them still meant servants and mansions. Their lives were more luxurious than maybe the majority of first-worlders in large cities today.

>>22028897
Eh? What are you talking about? Two of the sisters died of tuberculosis because the school they went to was is a low-end one that didn’t provide sufficient protection (which is why the dad brought them home), the basis for the death of Helen Burns was Charlotte’s sister. Charlotte had to work as a governess to get by

>>22029281
Don't be retarded next time.

>>22029281
Tuberculosis was epidemic in England at the time, and working as a governess was always a polite and well-respected position (making allowances for shitty employers in every field). I wouldn't ever argue they didn't have lives with challenges of their own, but those challenges were of a very specific social class whose posturing doomed itself, even if that position was no fault of the sisters. They lived in a bubble of moderate luxury, but were secluded more than others of that same class due to that lack of relative wealth, and that meant they lacked a lot of real understanding of interpersonal relationships.

>>22028757
> Implying the kind of women men are most attracted to are any better.

>>22030376
Tuberculosis in the novel is portrayed as caused in the school by carelessness and low funds and in real life they did in fact go to a low end school

Governess was respectable as a working class job like other household servants, but not something rich people did. She had to put up with a boy who would physically assault her which she wouldn’t do except the money was needed. A governess is someone wealth people hired, not hired themselves out as. Schools for orphans mostly churned out governesses, that’s in both her novel and Vanity Fair. A governess would typically marry a servant of butler tier or such

>>22030713
Well, yes, they didn't have germ theory yet. Of course they blamed it on relative destitution.
Butlery and governing were historically a step down from the monastery and cloister as a destination for the fuckups of the nobles. However, becoming a nun often required a donation on par with dowry, and we all know how little Charlotte would have wanted that life regardless. The nobles hired houseservants, but they did not trust the underclasses, still don't. As a result, illegitimate children often ended up in those roles, acting as safe proxies for the unwashed masses. The sole surviving daughter of a slowly-bankrupting household is in a similar position. Especially, governesses, as the primary tutors of most of those children, were often the spinster-maids of noble houses.
Nobility pretends that it's a cascade of wealth birthing wealth, but as a class they experience a huge amount of generational churn. It was very common for one of the heirs of a family to lose their fortune and end up in an echelon on par with merchants, and, later, the middle class. Those were the stocks who made up the management class of an estate (where the patriarch and family is the owner, and the cooks, cleaners, groundskeepers were the workers).

>>22031227
>Butlery and governing were historically a step down from the monastery and cloister as a destination for the fuckups of the nobles.
Am I reading this wrong? I'd assume that being left alone making beer in the middle of nowhere was more for retarded sons than administrating a shitty state. No matter how bad it was you had some amount of power and utility for the family there.

>>22031227
Most servants were illiterate. Nannies and governesses had to be able to read and write to teach the tykes. They were not considered like monks or priests. Her father was a priest but unless you had a fat parish that didn’t make you wealthy, hence why in the story the protagonists parents die in poverty despite one being a priest. She is sent to a charity school which trains her to be a governess. Orphans being put through school for such roles was common for girls whereas boys were apprenticed. Going to school itself was not considered prestigious for a girl as it suggested her family was too poor to afford a governess, as was the case here

>>22031261
Monks weren't left alone to make beer in the middle of nowhere, they essentially ran religious communes that provided sanctuary and allowed the clergy to offload the "burden of prayer". They only really accepted idiots when they came with a large donation, most of the duties were rote labor, but the "real work" was prayer and religious discussion.

>>22031795
I'd assume a handful of them were doing proper clerical work but more than half must have been just cleaning and gardening. There couldn't be that much to do in some of the places I've seen (I'm not sure if the population just moved to the cities and left them in their current state now that I think about it tho)

>>22031824
There wasn't, but they were discussing abstract ideals and reading regularly. Monasteries were where you sent fuckups because they didn't handle money and kept them out of public life without the shameful act of disinheritance, not because monasteries were work camps.

>>22031833
I'm sure quite of few ended up there for internal politics, and some others were autists obsessed with religion the same way some are obsessed with trains now and can't work in public transport. But I always assumed that educating others was seen as a more valuable asset, you are getting some level of control over the children of more powerful families.

>>22031842
The idea of being a servant of another house was held as much more shameful than devoting your life to God, is really the key. Nobles were never the smartest, they were/are always a fragile class of petty power-grabbers, appearances, especially of piety (see the chain of being), were always paramount.

>>22031861
That makes sense. Thanks for the insight.

>>22031861
They weren’t always fragile, during the Middle Ages they were often the heavy cavalry which meant they had to be extremely strong. Simply eating that much and wearing and maintaining everything such a soldier needed required one to have the property of a noble

>>22031929
it really depends on the era. You have times were most of the actual fighting was done by mercenaries and whole generations that didn't even get the chance to do shit (and eat shit)

>>22031929
Yeah, I meant more attitudinally than in terms of political power. Didn't think terfs were just casting themselves down for the honor of being worked in shit conditions.

>>22032038
>Didn't think terfs were just casting themselves down for the honor of being worked in shit conditions.
I think they do it for twitter cred and nothing more :^)