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• 1 media/gettyimages-494584561-612x612.jpg media/979951001-cropped-landscape-2560x1440.jpeg 2020-12-02T07:41:03-08:00 "Self-dependence" 16 Immersing Ourselves in Craik's Complicated Family Relations image_header 2020-12-15T13:53:59-08:00 1858 51.5074° N, 0.1278° W mid-nineteenth century

  In order to understand Dina Mulok Craik's self-dependence, we need to dig into her life and draw the appropriate connections. Craik's considers self-dependence to be one of the most important factors to live our whole lives totally. She writes, “Dependence is, in itself, an easy and pleasant thing: dependence upon one we love being perhaps the very sweetest thing in the world. To resign one’s self totally and contentedly into the hands of another; to have no longer any need of asserting one’s rights or one’s personality, knowing that both are as precious to that other as they ever were to ourselves” (Craik 18). 
  
  One of the most important motivations for her self-dependence is her family history. Throughout her life, she had very little family support. She had to become self-dependent and had to make a living for herself because she had no one to rely on.  Her father's abuse towards her and her mother affected her choices as a writer and translated into her career choices and creative inspiration.  And yet, she was criticized at the time for the sentimental aspects of her work.  Henry James calls her work "kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental" (Karen Bourrier).  Karen Bourrier's research reminds us Craik was dealing with an abusive father in the Victorian Era, where woman's complicated emotions and experiences weren't taken seriously.
   

  "The difficulty of Craik's childhood suggests that her later valorization of principles of self-help and perseverance were in part a reaction to the vicissitudes of her father's erratic temperament" (Bourrier 206).

  
  
  Craik's education also plays a strong factor. Since she was well educated and had exposure to progressive thoughts, she was able to establish herself as a strong and self dependent woman.
  
  "It never strikes them that the doctrine of female dependence extends beyond themselves, whom it suits so easily, and to whom it saves so much trouble ; that either every woman, be she servant or mistress, sempstress or fine lady, should receive the “ protection” suitable to her degree; or that each ought to be educated into equal self-dependence.” (Craik 26).  This talks about the importance of not treating self-dependence as something that is bound by class or family. She talks about how some  “anxious mothers, who would not for worlds be guilty of the indecorum of sending their daughters unchaperoned to the theatre or a ball — and very right, too ! — yet send out some other woman’s young daughter, at eleven P. M., to the stand for a cab, or to the public house for a supply of beer” (Craik 26).