Author’s Note: The below entry is something of an intense thought exercise! If you’d prefer to bypass that, allow me to wish you an early happy New Year and to offer you a gift link to my most recent essay, a New York Times Magazine Letter of Recommendation on Jon Klassen’s brilliant children’s books. The essay focuses on his skillful juxtaposition of tenderness and brutality and ends with a few reflections on what, to my mind, it means to parent a young child right now.
Lately I’ve been thinking about an oft-quoted line from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, spoken by the titular narrator: “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
[You might reasonably assume that Jane is thinking about Rochester at this point in her narration—and to be sure, she’s probably always thinking about him—but this particular line refers to her eagerness to make amends with St. John after refusing his astonishingly unsexy and altogether unpleasant marriage proposal. The context is not especially important to what will follow, but then again, context always matters to me, so I couldn’t help but lay it out.]
I’ve always assumed that I agree with Jane. At least, I do in theory. If happiness and dignity must exist in mutual opposition, then the former seems like the more satisfying pursuit. Can they coexist, though? I’ve often thought that the answer entirely depends on one’s disposition. And of course, it depends on how one is defining dignity. In my twenties, I made a few pivotal romantic decisions that to many probably seemed supremely undignified, while I would argue that, in fact, they were crucial acts of self-dignity that made the rest of my life (so far) possible. The quality of possessing dignity—that is to say, respecting oneself—does not necessarily manifest as dignified—or composed, mannered—behavior.
Jane doesn’t care about being dignified, but she absolutely cares about possessing dignity. Her estrangement from Rochester, which she presently believes to be permanent, is an excruciating exercise in personal dignity. So too is her refusal of St. John Rivers. “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife,” St. John tells her, blowing future readers’ minds with the profundity of his charm and tact. “It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love.” Jane, for her part, does not submit — not to St. John’s theology, and not to his estimation of her. [Maybe the context was relevant after all.]
I’m muddling my way through this bit of text because I’ve arrived at a couple of recent realizations:
I’m not sure who I thought I was kidding for all these years. I place a great deal of importance upon being dignified. Too much, in fact.
I fear I have a tendency of conflating dignity (foremost, an internal quality) with the act of being dignified (foremost, an outward performance). Undoubtedly this conflation intensifies the importance I’ve bestowed upon being dignified.
Was I always this way, to some extent? I’m not sure, and frankly, it would be boring for all of us if I were to attempt to answer that question. But in any case, I am like this now. And to be clear, I don’t want to pathologize it — there’s no inherent virtue in vulnerability. Most personal qualities aren’t laden with any kind of moral nuance; we either possess them or we don’t.
Moreover, it makes a certain amount of sense that I would grow more protective over the details of my personal life after becoming a parent. My son deserves privacy. And while I can’t know what he’ll one day think about having a mother who is a writer—and while I won’t censor myself to the detriment of my work—I can give him empathetic consideration as a future reader.
And yet, increasingly, I’ve found myself struggling to be vulnerable when I’d prefer to be—where I know I can be, safely—because it nonetheless feels like a perilous sort of exposure, and a relinquishing of control. Somewhere, deep in my lizard brain, is a nagging fear that love will ultimately make me a chump. It’s a feral kind of feeling, and maybe it, too, is not entirely unreasonable, in light of current affairs. The more I struggle to bear witness to this suffering world, grimly aware of my powerlessness in the face of so much horror, the more I claw for a set of reins. How could one not tense and bristle like a wounded animal when nothing about the world we live in seems certain or safe? (I must, however, acknowledge the privilege of my safety compared to so many right now, namely the Palestinians under Israeli siege. Political and existential horror have combined to make me a little paranoid.)
I’m not going to arrive at any answers tonight, but I think best through writing, so I thought I might as well take to the page and see what progress I make. I confess it’s also a little experiment: I wasn’t sure, when I began writing, whether I’d actually publish this post.
But it’s almost a new year, and maybe this is my resolution: To regard dignity as a healthy complement to trust and intimacy — and accordingly, to dismantle my learned misconception of it as incompatible with the vulnerability I feel in the presence of those I love. To prize happiness, which is never promised and always a gift, above the hollow satisfaction of being—or seeming—dignified.