"You were made for labor, not for love"
I have been thinking about this thing St. John says to Jane in Jane Eyre. Of course, in his eyes it is a compliment, as he is a person that despises the feelings of the heart and worships the power of the will; it makes Jane what he thinks would be the perfect wife for him: someone that can work as hard as he does, not someone he can feel love for.
But I have been thinking of this in a broader social term, as categories in which women were (and sometimes still are) placed: some women, depending on the categories of the time, are made for love: they are cute and pretty, or they are "accomplished", or... and then there are the ones made for labor: the ones that are perhaps a little strange, not pretty, etc. I know it may sound strange, but consider: aren't there any women around you that are socially assumed to be ones that will never get into a relationship, for no apparent grave reason? Aren't there any women that wherever they go, if they are single, people comment how they cannot understand why aren't they married?
I'm going somewhere with this XD
So, my first connection was Jo March from Little Women. I know that since the 2019 movie came out everyone seems to be obsessed with Jo's speech in that movie about "being sick of the idea that all that women are made for is marriage and children", but the reality is that neither in the movie nor the book does anyone expect Jo to marry. Sure, Laurie asks her, but he is securing a mother for himself, as Jo has been for him for years already. Jo is always carrying most of the emotional labor of their relationship (i.e. when she has to stop him from running away in book 1).
Jo in the book is a woman that is labeled in her place and time as made for labor, not for love.
She belongs to a genteel family, even if they are poor (lets remember that Meg's marriage to John Brooke is considered her marrying down. The Marches belong to the social station of the Moffats, the Gardiners and the Carrols, with whom we are shown that Jo cannot fit in), but she lacks all the graces and accomplishments a woman of her social station needs to be attractive as a marriage prospect:
She's clumsy (not in a cutesy way: she breaks things, stains and burns clothes, and has a general masculine air about her), she's blunt, she's weird and awkward in front of strangers, she's "ugly": she's very tall and solid and has sharp facial features; her one beauty is her hair. She has no "feminine accomplishments": she does not play, or paint, or sing, or do pretty needlework (though she's a very capable sewist).
The only guy that proposes to her proposes to her in order to acquire a mother for himself, not a wife; and this is, once again, focused as a form of labor, of emotional labor.
Jo is made for labor, not for love.
And the beauty of the story and how LMA chooses to solve it, is that there is a man that sees her as she is, and sees the things that make her for labor as things that also make her for love. Fritz Bhaer loves Jo's mind, her simplicity, her honesty, and all the things that make her the way she is. Taking him out of the equation is reinforcing the dichotomy: you are either made for labor or made for love, instead of solving it.
And this ties in with another couple, that for some reason I link to Jo and Fritz (I wrote a post about this and the "pair of spares" trope but cannot find it anywhere, THANKS TUMBLR): Faramir and Eowyn from LotR.
Eowyn is made for labor, not for love.
She's a princess, yes, but everyone around her see her as made for labor; uncle, brother, people, she is the caretaker, the one appealed to to fill voids of work, to keep spirits high. She has assumed and internalized this, and you can even read her infatuation with Aragorn in these terms: she is a warrior princess fit for the helpmate of a warrior king.
In that light, suddenly, Faramir's comment that he understands, and understands her love for Aragorn as the love of a young soldier for a great captain, high and puissant, makes a lot of sense; in wanting the love of Aragorn, who she doesn't really know personally (as Aragorn himself reminds Eomer: she loves a shadow and a thought) she reinforces this idea that her worth lies in her ability for labor.
Faramir's understanding her and admiring the qualities that make her for labor doesn't preclude him from seeing her as made for love; in fact, there is an insistence in narration and dialogue here that Faramir sees Eowyn first and foremost as an object of love: when they meet, his seeing her raises feelings of "pity", "loveliness", "grave tenderness"; in turn, Eowyn sees a man that she conceives as a great warrior, "stern and gentle"; he tells her he finds her "beautiful", "lovely", and "sorrowful"; Eowyn's reaction is a shocked refusal: "I am a shieldmaiden and my hand is ungentle" labor. The same goes the following day: she is not comfortable being addressed this way.
And then comes the other talk they have, after the battle of the Black Gate is won. It begins again with Faramir speaking in the tune of love "Eowyn, do you not love me, or will you not?" and he has to insist twice, to try and get her to his own tune; that he understands the way in which she loved Aragorn --coded in labor-- AND that he doesn't love her because he thinks she was only made for love, out of pity: he'd love her still even if she were the queen of Gondor, acknowledging that she could have, that she could have both labor and love.
And Eowyn understood her own heart; she can now have both labor and love, she can have a garden, and Faramir will be there to build that garden with her.
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