Every Instance Of "I Wish I Were A MAN. That Would Solve All My Problems" In The Works of The Brontës

Charlotte is the clear winner, by a country mile, but all of them do it. And it’s not just “wouldn’t SOCIETY be better if we treated women like men,” although of course there’s plenty of that too, but just a lot of good old-fashioned “I’d be able to get my boyfriend to love me if we were BOTH GUYS” and “it would be a lot easier to relate to women, especially French ones, if I were a MAN right now.”

You don’t get this as much with contemporaries like Shelley and Austen, who nevertheless have plenty to say about women’s education and sexist double standards, but usually don’t feel the need to include “why weren’t I born a BOY with a TRICORN hat and a wonderful name like SPLENDID FREDERICK” by way of justification. Also, some of the problems these character think “being a boy” would solve would demonstrably not be improved at all. Food for thought!

Villette

“I’ve been caught displaying feelings at work! God, I wish I were a man”:

At last, to relieve him, the professors, and myself, I stammered out:

“Gentlemen, you had better let me go; you will get no good of me; as you say, I am an idiot.”

I wish I could have spoken with calm and dignity, or I wish my sense had sufficed to make me hold my tongue; that traitor tongue tripped, faltered. Beholding the judges cast on M. Emanuel a hard look of triumph, and hearing the distressed tremor of my own voice, out I burst in a fit of choking tears. The emotion was far more of anger than grief; had I been a man and strong, I could have challenged that pair on the spot—but it was emotion, and I would rather have been scourged than betrayed it.

“I’ve caught a woman snooping! God, I wish I were a man”:

I will not deny that it was with a secret glee I watched her. Had I been a gentleman I believe Madame would have found favour in my eyes, she was so handy, neat, thorough in all she did: some people’s movements provoke the soul by their loose awkwardness, hers—satisfied by their trim compactness. I stood, in short, fascinated; but it was necessary to make an effort to break this spell, a retreat must be beaten.

“My crush thinks we could have melted into each other if I were a man! God, I wish I were a man”:

“I agree with you, Lucy: you and I do often agree in opinion, in taste, I think; or at least in judgment.”

“Do we?” I said, somewhat doubtfully.

“I believe if you had been a boy, Lucy, instead of a girl—my mother’s god-son instead of her god-daughter, we should have been good friends: our opinions would have melted into each other.”

Trying, then, to keep down the unreasonable pain which thrilled my heart, on thus being made to feel that while Graham could devote to others the most grave and earnest, the manliest interest, he had no more than light raillery for Lucy, the friend of lang syne, I inquired calmly,—“On what points are we so closely in accordance?”

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Jane Eyre

“If I were a man I wouldn’t be hot, but I wouldn’t care that I wasn’t hot, because I’m too powerful and active to be hot, which is of course hot”:

“Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!” exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. “Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa’s park gates: nor to go even so far without mama’s permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman—her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:—Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device, were I a man.”

“Things would be so much easier if I were your sister. Or, and this is just an idea, a man”:

“A part of me you must become,” he answered steadily; “otherwise the whole bargain is void. How can I, a man not yet thirty, take out with me to India a girl of nineteen, unless she be married to me?”

“Very well,” I said shortly; “under the circumstances, quite as well as if I were either your real sister, or a man and a clergyman like yourself.”

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The Professor

“I wish I were a woman so I could decide whether this woman-faced man is beautiful”:

“As to his good looks, I should have liked to have a woman’s opinion on that subject; it seemed to me that his face might produce the same effect on a lady that a very piquant and interesting, though scarcely pretty, female face would on a man. I have mentioned his dark locks—they were brushed sideways above a white and sufficiently expansive forehead; his cheek had a rather hectic freshness; his features might have done well on canvas, but indifferently in marble: they were plastic; character had set a stamp upon each; expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses she wrought, giving him now the mien of a morose bull, and anon that of an arch and mischievous girl; more frequently, the two semblances were blent, and a queer, composite countenance they made.”

Listen. You’ll get plenty of nineteenth-century authors with interesting, cruel things to say about female character’s looks. But if you want a nineteenth-century author to say a young woman is so frail, so smart, so tiny, so unhealthy, that she’s basically a boy already, you want a Brontë:

“The list was headed, as usual, by the name of Sylvie, that plain, quiet little girl I have described before as being at once the best and ugliest pupil in the establishment; the second place had fallen to the lot of a certain Léonie Ledru, a diminutive, sharp-featured, and parchment-skinned creature of quick wits, frail conscience, and indurated feelings; a lawyer-like thing, of whom I used to say that, had she been a boy, she would have made a model of an unprincipled, clever attorney.”

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Shirley

There’s often an element of fairy-tale-like wish-fulfillment to these fantasies: Society made the mistake of giving me a boy’s name, or a boy’s haircut, or the wrong shoe, and now I’m wonderfully contaminated with masculinity, and there’s no point trying to go back and undo it, so you might as well just go all the way and let me be a boy. Let Me Be A Boy, Please, I’m Ever So Good At It, Please:

“I have been obliged to see him. There was business to transact. Business! Really the word makes me conscious I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an esquire! Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man's name; I hold a man's position. It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood; and when I see such people as that stately Anglo-Belgian—that Gérard Moore—before me, gravely talking to me of business, really I feel quite gentlemanlike. You must choose me for your churchwarden, Mr. Helstone, the next time you elect new ones. They ought to make me a magistrate and a captain of yeomanry.”

“I wish we were both boys doing math together at war…it would be like eating candy in the sunshine, with no problems”:

Repaying him by an admiring and grateful smile, rather shed at his feet than lifted to his face, she would leave the mill reluctantly to go back to the cottage, and then, while she completed the exercise, or worked out the sum (for Mdlle. Moore taught her arithmetic too), she would wish nature had made her a boy instead of a girl, that she might ask Robert to let her be his clerk, and sit with him in the counting-house, instead of sitting with Hortense in the parlour.

“I should like an occupation; and if I were a boy, it would not be so difficult to find one. I see such an easy, pleasant way of learning a business, and making my way in life."

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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“I’m honestly flattered that people think I’m a girl!!! That’s how I know I’ve done a good job writing female characters. And incidentally there should be no difference between men and women. Being a woman is great, probably. But I’m not a woman and you can’t make me”:

“One word more, and I have done. Respecting the author’s identity, I would have it to be distinctly understood that Acton Bell is neither Currer nor Ellis Bell, and therefore let not his faults be attributed to them. As to whether the name be real or fictitious, it cannot greatly signify to those who know him only by his works. As little, I should think, can it matter whether the writer so designated is a man, or a woman, as one or two of my critics profess to have discovered. I take the imputation in good part, as a compliment to the just delineation of my female characters; and though I am bound to attribute much of the severity of my censors to this suspicion, I make no effort to refute it, because, in my own mind, I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.”

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