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wanted more in return than she originally had asked for (and he
originally had agreed to give). "He was not grateful enough. She felt
herself slighted and somebody else favored."
This explanation of Jane's change in feeling is not plausible,
even on the basis of Rose's own description of the course of the Car–
lyles' life. Jane was a bright and ambitious woman who was deter–
mined not to sacrifice her independence, talents or freedom to the
wifely role. Carlyle's courtship was long and hard, and she finally
denied her ambitions in the expectation (accurate, as it happens)
that he, with her support, would someday become a great man. She
made a typical female investment in a male future, and she
predicted that the result of this wager would be ample reward for her
self-annihilation. When the rewards came, they turned out to be in–
sufficient; she did not gain the full happiness she had expected. This
is not a matter of mates differing in their interpretation of marriage
and its rules. Jane was disappointed by a reality which did not con–
form to her expectations; the same thing happened, in fact, to
Thomas as well. Rose exaggerates the power of shared private fic–
tions to resist reality, and what is worse, she exaggerates their value.
The importance of public fictions for private lives is recognized
in Nina Auerbach's
Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
(Harvard University Press, 1982), which challenges the view that
Victorian patriarchalism marked a high point in the repression of
women. Auerbach believes that whatever the constraints Victorian
social and legal forms placed upon women, they gained great free–
dom by their participation in a Victorian mythic world. In this realm
of the imagination, which Auerbach has discerned by perceiving a
Gestalt in the disassociated "fragments" of myths found in popular
articles, in high culture, and in pictorial materials, "a disobedient
woman in her many guises" - as rebel against the family, the state,
and God - is crowned 'as heir of the ages and demonic saviour of the
race.'" The myth of the saving woman, she implies, was a potent
counterforce against those forces pushing her toward subjection. In
the image of woman as victim and queen, domestic angel and
demonic outcast, old maid and fallen woman, what appear to be re–
strictive social categories are infused with the energy of the uncanny,
giving these particular classes of women the power to create and
transform their own character and selfhood (and ultimately that of
others as well). Women were given a form of divine power formerly
reserved only for supernatural beings, the power to transfigure all
humanity.
