The Thornfield Women

You’ve heard this story. Haven’t you?

I have loved and lied to many women. I have watched them, white limbed and soft with slumbering, while I carve that fast-fading beauty deep into sheets of paper. I fasten their fates and memory to the words I have chosen and trap them there, silenced as my own Pygmalion creation, a lover they will come to loathe. I will send them mad, promiscuous, wild, cruel and monstrous at a stroke of ink scrawled at midnight. That is why I write of my women. This is true ownership, more than any bestial want, the ownership of what they are and will forever be to history. Years from now, long after the carcasses that carry the great minds of our age rot deep in the ground, you will know the women I have loved and hated as I wish you to.

My name is Edward Rochester, and these sheets are the skeletons of my women.

You want to know the mad one. Shall I enthral you with the white of her eyes, mad like a mare in the bristling of a coming storm? Those fingernails blooming with the blood taken from the eye sockets of strangers? Shall I speak of her hulking calves that drag themselves with bruised knees against her entrapment? Of course, that’s what Jane believed. And poor Marie, too. That is what the world believed, when told. Women believe the worst sins of those who compete for the heart of the one they love…