Charlotte Bronte
May. 22nd, 2005 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushnerWhen I was a child, a kind aunt gave me Charlotte Bronte: Girl with a Pen for my birthday, and I was fascinated. I proceeded to read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights a lot. But I've never read Villette til now (I'm about halfway through, so no spoilers, please!), and in it I've found the following passage, which follows on the narrator's being unjustly reproved by a young doctor:
"I might have cleared myself on the spot, but would not. I did not speak. . . . Suffering him, then, to think what he chose, and accuse me of what he would, I resumed some work I had dropped . . . . There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored."
This perverse sentiment is utterly alien to me, but I have observed it in some of my close acquaintance, and am fascinated to see it here so clearly expresssed.
"I might have cleared myself on the spot, but would not. I did not speak. . . . Suffering him, then, to think what he chose, and accuse me of what he would, I resumed some work I had dropped . . . . There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored."
This perverse sentiment is utterly alien to me, but I have observed it in some of my close acquaintance, and am fascinated to see it here so clearly expresssed.