Free What Do Women Want? by Erica Jong Page B

Without forgetting our hard-won rage, without forgetting how many puritanical voices would still like to censor our sexuality, we are starting to be free to explore the whole world of feeling in our writings—and not to be trapped forever in the phase of discovering buried anger. Anger is a strong propellant to creation, but it is hardly the only propellant. Stronger even than anger is emotional curiosity, the vehicle through which we enter into other states of being, other lives, other historical periods, other galaxies.
    Curiosity is braver than rage. Exploration is a nobler calling than combat. The unknown beckons to us, singing its siren song and making our hearts pound with fear and desire. I see us entering a world where women writers no longer censor themselves for fear of criticism, but I rarely see the critics catching up. Sometimes I think the response to women’s books is still back in the age of Virility, even while a new generation of young women writers forges ahead without restraints. Literature as well as life is in the midst of an unfinished revolution. The explorers have set out to sea without life preservers. But pirates are still coming after them to board their decks and try to sink their ships. And some of these pirates, I must sadly say, are other women.

6
    JANE EYRE’S UNBROKEN WILL
    Altogether the autobiography of Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition.
    —ELIZABETH RIGBY
     
     
     
    When a book is beloved by readers and hated by contemporary critics, we should suspect that a revolution in consciousness is in progress. This was certainly the case with Jane Eyre. The pseudonymous author, Currer Bell, was blamed for committing the “highest moral offence a novel writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of a reader.” The book was said to be mischievous and vulgar, pandering to the public’s taste for “illegitimate romance.” As for the character of the heroine, “Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit . . . she has inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature—the sin of pride.”
    These criticisms were put forth by a woman reviewer, Elizabeth Rigby, in the Quarterly Review in 1848, the year after the novel was published, when it was already a roaring success. The same critic took pains to dispute the rumor that “Currer Bell” was a woman, explaining that the descriptions of cookery and fashion could not have come from a female pen. She also argued that the book would do more harm than good to governesses, and for good measure, she condemned Jane Eyre as one “whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.”
    Such character assassinations would be too absurd to quote if they did not foreshadow the charges against every important novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that depicted a woman as a complex human being rather than a stereotype. More than that, they foreshadow contemporary assaults on women’s anger, rebellion, and nonconformity—whether exemplified in fiction or in life. For Jane is nothing if not a rebel. She will not lie even if lies would smooth her progress. From the moment we meet her, she is struggling against the injustice of her lot and she refuses to be convinced that humility is her only option. In many ways, she is the first modern heroine in fiction.
    The perennial popularity of Jane Eyre with readers is surely based on Jane’s indomitable spirit. Given every reason to feel crushed, discouraged, beaten, Jane’s will remains unbroken. Neither beautiful nor rich nor supplied with a cosseting family, Jane seems to be possessed of the greatest treasure a woman can have: self-respect. That alone makes her an inspiring heroine. No one can take away her inner esteem. It is apparent from the very start