I’ve had a minor epiphany a few nights ago when I’ve finally understood what it means to be independently wealthy. There are some many words and terms whose meaning we never truly know and subtleties make all the difference (that’s where GRE and other standardized tests get us, but that’s a whole other tangent). I’ve never given it much thought but assumed it was when you get an inheritance. The epiphany happened when two books I was reading converged in the most unlikely manner; The Millionaire Next Door and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The former is a long term study on the habits and the makeup of typical US millionaires and the latter is, well, Jane Eyre. Jane is a governess and is a dependent. One of her co-servants is earning a larger salary by doing incrementally taxing labor. Her hopes are to earn enough so that she may be independent, which in this case means living a life sustained solely on the income she’s earned. The millionaire case study subjects achieve the exact same outcome by steadily earning, on average, modest salaries over the years but living well below their means. They accumulate their wealth and live off the interest earned. Their taxation is on but a small portion of their income (which comprises of their salary and the interest) and they are able to sustain their lifestyle even if a part of their income (i.e. salary) is suddenly taken out of the equation. They are independently wealthy because they don’t depend on their employer for their short term (and long term, if they’re lucky) livelihood.

I’ve never thought about it this way and it shifted my thoughts to the rise of the middle class, whose very core is apparently threatened, or so we hear at election time. I sometimes like to inhabit the old New York societies of Edith Wharton but obviously wouldn’t survive there well. Jane Eyre is my first foray into that era from the standpoint of a “dependent.” The roughly dual-class society had its major flaws. The wealthy inherited fortunes and their dependents earned salaries, generation over generation. The wealthy didn’t rely on personal merits to survive while their dependents had to offer skills for sustainability. In unfortunate matters of Lily Bart (House of Mirth), who came from the former class and dipped into dependency by relying on looks and wealthy society’s good will and charity. Her only option was to marry rich or continue to “sing for her supper.” She was torn between her desire for luxury and a relationship based on love and respect sans wealth. She, of course, came to a tragic Whartonian end. Reading this book in my early 20s chilled me as I was starting to learn to stand on my own two feet outside my parents’ home. I wondered what it would have been like to live the life in a dual class society without luck of good genes on my side.

Oh, but what a contrast between Lily’s character and Jane’s. It’s like comparing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Pushkin’s Tatiana in Onegin. Karenina sacrificed her wealth, virtue, and life while Tatiana, though perhaps more naïve, becomes arguably one of the strongest female voices in literature written from a male point of view. Jane flees the promise of protection only wealth and marriage, albeit in less than ideal circumstances, could bring to a woman of her position and creates a modest life with a small salary which crosses into the “independent” realm. She is set up in her own living quarters and, while she depends on her teaching salary, she doesn’t have to rely on the wealthy class and thus has no dependency for room and board. I don’t think I’ve learned more from a fictional character (though being lost in the footnotes for hours, I wonder how fictional), than I have from Jane. A deeper study of the universal truths of the human core I haven’t encountered in a long time.

Industrial revolution, the rise of trade, democratization of education, and other historical factors made decisions that Jane and Lily had to make almost obsolete. The middle class (into which a large portion of society is segmented) is now in charge of their destinies, superficially at least. Oh, but how easy it is to mortgage our futures and our independence! The Millionaire Next Door features case study after case study of people earning enormous salaries and living paycheck to paycheck. The ones that look rich almost certainly aren’t. Not examining the very virtues and human weakness so understood by Pushkin, Bronte and Wharton, we approach dual class society closer than we’d ever imagine.