Many years ago, I was reading about the life of Charlotte Bronte, one of my favourite novelists, because of the amazing emotional intensity of her writing, the simmering rage, beneath all that elegant prose, of a bright, intelligent woman forced to submit to the oppressive traditions of her times.

There was something in a letter she had written to a friend which filled me with so many contradictory feelings—shock, anger, shame, pity, empathy—that I read it many times and now know it by heart. I have referred to it several times in my writing as well as in my lectures on the theme of woman’s role in society and her internal struggles, whether in the Victorian era of Charlotte Bronte, or today when she has supposedly come a long way in her fight for equality.

Charlotte Bronte wrote in the letter:

You stretched out your hand for an egg and Fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation; close your fingers firmly upon the gift, let it sting through the flesh of your palm. Never mind, for long after your arm has quivered with the pain and torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learnt the greatest lesson of all: how to endure without a sob.

The advice has the soaring magisteriality of a Biblical injunction, because of its echoes of Christ’s words rebuking those who have no confidence in divine providence: ‘If you ask for an egg, will your father give you a stone? If you ask for a fish, will he give you a scorpion?’ Charlotte Bronte seems to be saying, ‘Yes, that’s exactly the trouble! Fate is precisely that perverse and malicious, giving you the opposite of what you’ve asked for, something to destroy you, as if the mere act of asking deserves the ultimate punishment.’

I can see her face as she wrote the letter—twisted in angry despair.

And yet amidst the despair, there is fierce hope. For she is saying: all is not lost, if you keep squeezing the scorpion despite the excruciating pain, it will die eventually and you will be the real victor. You will not only have killed the enemy but frustrated the purpose of the real enemy, who sent it in the first place—Fate (or whatever name it happens to have, such as ‘God’, ’society’, ‘tradition’, ‘authority’,'the dominant sex’) If learning how to rise stoically to meet the oppressor, if learning how to ‘endure without a sob’, is all that the oppressed woman can do, she may as well turn it into an act of pride, strength, nobility and grace.

I can see Charlotte Bronte’s face, as she ended that letter, with its taut smile of a hard-won triumph.

For a while, her advice to women made me feel very uneasy. It also provoked angry thoughts. What, receive the deadly scorpion as a ‘gift’? No, throw it back. Better still, nurture it to make it a bigger, stronger scorpion before throwing it back. Best of all, befriend the scorpion, let it take on the guise of innocence so that it can execute an even greater revenge on your behalf and thus serve you better.

I had long ago decided that these were very unworthy thoughts, fit to be dismissed as soon as they arose. For all of us, men and women, old and young, rich and poor, famous and unknown, go through life with a common burden—that tiresome human baggage of moral flaws and failings, that make us both potential victims and perpetrators, both scorpion receivers and scorpion givers. Maybe what we should do, as soon as we sight the scorpion, whether it is being received or being given, is to de-fang it.

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A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...