Helen: You are underestimating the power of the “bad boy” and the attraction he holds for a “good woman”. Consider Jane Eyre, fully aware that the object of her desire is a dissolute man of the world with a lascivious temper. For all her rigteousness and clear thinking, she succumbs to his appeal from the get go. Fortunately for her, he turns out to be a reformable rake. And she takes the prize of taming that feral virility into a uxorious husband. Her very own shorn Samson. Bronte was accused of having created the ultimate female fantasy, and so she has. Of course the real life woman hardly ever gets to play Jane to a worthy Rochester. (There are some real life stories which might match Bronte’s fiction but so rare they are that I can only remember two examples). Most bad boys are quite unreformable and tend to revert to their old ways as soon as their willing “prey” is securely theirs. But what Bronte explains and shows is how overwhelming and irresistible that attraction is. I guess every woman who falls into that trap expects her powers to be such as to stare down whatever keeps the bad boy from being house trained. It’s the eternal triumph of “the triumph of imagination over intelligence” (as Wilde the wise said).
