By the time we see Rose DeWitt Bukater having (very much having and not enjoying) her first meal on the Titanic, the cynicism revealed in her opening comments about the ship and in her attitude towards her mother and fiancé’s high society affectations has solidified into total disillusionment. When Bruce Ismay, the director of the company responsible for Titanic, tells about what he hoped to convey by the ship’s size and Rose makes a quip about his masculinity by referring to Freud, to which Molly Brown responds by calling her a ‘pistol’, Cal Hockley’s response to his fiancée’s spiritedness is simply: ‘I may have to start minding what she reads from now on’. In this short exchange, James Cameron gives us a perfect illustration of the mechanisms of an authoritarian personality’s mind when confronted with the autonomy of mind of another person. 

Rose’s comment is not polite by any means and would probably have been better staying in her head. But it is also evidence of her quick-wit and the perceptiveness that finds its source in being well-read: she knows what Freud has to say about the male preoccupation with size because she has probably read it, and when faced with a man with a preoccupation with size, can make the connection. It’s not necessarily that the connection is even provable, as Freud’s theories are not now regarded with the same solemnity as they were in 1912. It’s that through exposure to the ideas of others, through which she can examine, develop, and refine her own beliefs, she can engage with the world around her more critically and is therefore empowered to participate in it as an equal and not as a subordinate. This, of course, is the enemy of a husband who desires a will-less wife (or anybody who wants to control anybody for that matter) because a 20th century woman who can think for herself is in danger of coming to her own conclusions about things. This, coincidentally, is not too dissimilar from some people’s aversion to young women reading outside of the books approved by the male authorities in their lives and the discomfort with the study of literature in its many forms in the 21st century. 

By reading a book herself and not having the contents of the book relayed to her by a father or brother or uncle who may omit details that he thinks would influence her to think differently from him and rebel against all the structures he has worked to instate in her life, or summarised in reviews by publications that have vested interests in the book’s suppression, she, whoever she is, can see the author’s ideas for herself and assess them for herself. Things are rarely as black and white as some people may want you to believe and reading widely, not just more, brings this reality to the fore, making us more nuanced thinkers. The more you read, the more you will start to see just how difficult it is to speak conclusively about most anything. You will become suspicious of anybody who asserts that they can accurately summarise movements spanning some decades – sometimes centuries – and with innumerous offshoots, in a single sentence from a pulpit or a small group. Contrary to what some groups may tell us, tentative language when it comes to representing the thoughts of another person is a good thing: it shows someone understands the breadth of what they are speaking about and is aware of the limits of their own knowledge. When someone begins a sentence ‘Feminists want’ or ‘Feminists believe’ (which ones for a start?) I’m already wondering what motivations they have for condensing a centuries long movement whose origins could be argued to be as early as the Classical period, with interests as varied as its participants, into a single declarative. The same goes for any other movement or ideology. The practical implications of identifying as a Christian are no easier to summarise than the practical implications of a person’s identifying as a Marxist or a feminist. They might be in theory (although even this has proved difficult on various theological grounds) but the spectrum of Christianity, the diversity of thought about the prerequisites needed to identify as a Christian and what the definition precludes, reveal that in practice it is not as straightforward as ‘one who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ’. 

There is an age in a person’s life where parental involvement to the point of media censorship becomes inappropriate. Rose felt infantilised by her relationship to Cal, who chose her food for her as well as threatened to control what she could read, because she was infantilised by him. It is infantilising to curate the books accessible to a seventeen or eighteen year old as though they are a toddler in danger of eating their own socks if left unattended. It becomes something else entirely when said person is nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and all the books they desire to read must be vetted before they can open them. If this control is done skilfully as a child is growing, with a healthy dose of fearmongering, which in itself is never far from misrepresentation about what ‘those people’ believe and do (they even let their children tell them what to wear and eat!) then as an older child and near-adult they won’t need to pass the book to the parent to approve or disapprove because they will know how to do the vetting themselves in that very thorough manner of ‘if this group endorses it, it’s evil; if it’s popular, it’s evil’. Anybody can be radicalised if the conditions are right and this doesn’t always come from outside of our own homes.  

It’s not an invalid criticism of evangelical Christianity to say that in some groups, suppression of thought is a central feature, in which cases a child’s ‘faith’ may emerge not from coming to know Jesus themselves in spite of the falsehoods around them, but from a lack of any other option. ‘Faith’ born in these environments will be faith that professes Jesus is Lord but denies it with its actions because the Holy Spirit is absent from that person and there hasn’t been any regeneration. This is how we get churches with people looking the part through serving in various ways, being involved in Christian missions, praying ‘fervently’, and attending all midweek meetings but full of pride and animosity towards those different from themselves. 

I would encourage anybody, and especially Christian girls and young women to read widely and to be very wary of anybody trying to tell you not to. Read what interests you primarily, whatever the genre and whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. But also read what doesn’t necessarily interest you that much, and crucially, if possible, read the source materials of the things you hear people telling you about. Misrepresentation is so rife because it’s the best way to influence the thinking of somebody who cannot verify what they are being told through lack of access to the source. If you can read something for yourself, you might find that what someone is telling you a group believes is not what they believe at all, or is ever so slightly different from what you have been told they believe. Read what first, second, and third wave feminists were asking for through their various manifestos, memoirs, pamphlets and essays, or what they were gesturing towards in their imaginative works before you accept that what the people in your life have told you they were asking for is true. Read works by and about people who identify with one thing or another and compare their words with the words of those writing or speaking about them to see how they match up. Read the accounts of people who have lived lives different from yours to gain their insights into what that life looks like. Just read widely and see how your thinking transforms, even if your values and views remain the same.

There are people who will want you to believe that man-made conventions are the word of God — they are not — and that your conformity to their beliefs and practices and those of the wider group they identify with is obedience to God — it is not necessarily. What Rose is ultimately running from in Titanic is a life that is hostile to her thinking independently, which is the manifestation of her autonomy. The thing that propels her to abandon the life dictated for her once and for all after resigning herself to it is her observation of a little girl having tea with her mother at the table across from hers in the parlour. Rose watches as the mother corrects her daughter’s posture and the little girl, decked in the upper-class signifiers of the day (white-gloved hands and a hat with an age-appropriate fascinator) obeys and then rather meticulously places a napkin on her lap. In that scene, in a Benjamin Button kind of way, Rose sees exactly what lies ahead of her if she accepts the dictates of her class, dictates which tell her that the only way to live as a woman is to turn a blind eye to her fiancé’s abusive tendencies, marry him, give him babies, and have only group participation in parlour-gossiping and demeaning other women to derive meaning from. It is a life of being told what to do and how to do it by man and not God, and being told that they are one and the same. 

The people who tell you what a biblical life looks like are getting their ideas from somewhere too and it is not always the Bible. It was through studying the writings of church fathers that I was able to recognise just how much the conservative evangelical view of women that permeates conversations on what some consider “women’s issues” (modesty, chastity (rather than purity) and ideas of what is ‘proper’ for women to do for enjoyment, if such a thing is permitted) come more from the remnants of Tertullian and Augustine’s ideas than the Bible itself. Had I rejected that theology module offered to me by my university’s School of Arts out of fear of adverse ideas, I might have gone my whole life believing that the Bible speaks on a given issue in a manner that it doesn’t and cannot be said to without egregious eisegesis. By opening yourself up to hearing from people with various viewpoints, you will come to see things like this more and more. You are not rebelling or failing to submit to a non-existent husband by desiring to verify what sources who claim to speak for God are saying. You are redeeming your claim to the humanity given to all humans by God. A person who is uncomfortable with you daring to do this might be uncomfortable with the reality that you, as a woman, are also a human and not theirs or anyone else’s bauble. They might be a Cal Hockley, or the values he and his society represent.