“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
Charlotte Bronte, Jayne Eyre
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absense sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill
Sonnet 57 William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
That god forbid that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O, let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison'd absence of your liberty;
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each cheque,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell;
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.
Sonnet 58 William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
"A woman dictates before marriage in order
that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A study of Provincial Life
“To submit isn’t to be forced. It’s to yield to a force greater than your own,
in order to become part of the whole.”
Dianna Hardy, Cry of the Wolf
“He called to her primal side; the ancient
aspect of her animal self that wanted to submit. It wanted to submit to him; to sacrifice all of who she
was at the altar of his maleness and lay herself bare for his taking.”
Dianna Hardy, Releasig the Wolf
“Immodest creature, you do not want a woman
who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless –
one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to
her."
(Letter, 17 June 1837)”
(Letter, 17 June 1837)”
George Sand, The Intimate Journal
