A Working Week's Stoic Reflection With The Female Stoic

It’s easy for us to think if only we lived in a different time, a different place, we could achieve so much more. We often craft fantasies of how our life would be so much better elsewhere. The Bronte sisters lived in a small parsonage house, with a tiny kitchen and a shared living room/dining room where they sat around a table writing. They were challenged both financially and with reduced life expectancy. But their commitment to creating the fictional worlds they lived in, surpassed this and carried on in a disciplined way, every day.

Stoicism teaches that unhappiness stems not from events themselves, but from our subjective judgments about them. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the protagonist focuses on her virtue rather than the behaviour of her abusive husband, as she come to understand judging his behaviour will not help her in her endeavour to stoically survive. As stoics, we seek to apply objective judgment,in order to achieve greater piece of mind.

Studies show we prefer people with similar interests, attitudes, and backgrounds, as these partnerships feel comfortable and reduce long-term conflict. But sometimes we are attracted to the very opposite, creating issues ahead. As Stoics we choose to become aware of the choices we make, before we make them. And we choose to create distance between the interactions we have, and our judgement of those interactions.

When Anne Shirley first came to Green Gables, her identity was very much wrapped in being a helpless orphan. But over time, gradually, she learned there was so much more to her than that. The Stoic perspective on attachment focuses on non-attachment to external, uncontrollable things: possessions, bad memories, outcomes, or people—to achieve inner peace and prevent suffering. Stoics encourage valuing things, but without dependency or clinging, recognizing all external things are temporary and can be lost.

In Little Women (Chapter 11), Mrs. March leaves her daughters to manage the house alone for a week to teach them the importance of work and to cure their boredom and laziness. Rather than react to their lack of expediency, she creates a distance between herself and her expectation. This way she protects her inner peace. The girls quickly learn their lesson! We can see here as stoics, dependency and expectation lead to misery.