In dealing with this problem of the inferior place hitherto occupied
by woman in literature and art, let me admit, frankly and at once,
that I have none of the qualifications of a critic. Of the technique
of any branch of creative art I know practically nothing; nor can I
say that I have any great measure of curiosity concerning it. I must
confess to being one of that large mass of unenlightened persons who
judge of works of art simply and solely by the effect such works of
art produce upon themselves, who, where they are stirred to pleasure,
to reverence, or to laughter, are content to enjoy, to be reverent,
or to laugh, without too close inquiry as to the means whereby their
emotions are produced, with still less inquiry as to whether such
means be legitimate or the reverse. I speak, therefore, not from the
standpoint of the instructed critic, but from that of the public, more
or less impressionable, more or less uneducated, upon whom the artist
works; and it follows that when I speak of woman’s inferiority to man
in creative art I mean, not her inferiority in technique (whereon I am
not competent to express opinion), but her incapacity to arouse in the
ordinary human being such emotions of wonder, delight, and sorrow as
men who have the requisite skill in creative art have power to arouse.
I have thought it necessary to explain thus much lest my point of
view be misunderstood, and I be credited with an attempt to usurp the
functions of the trained critic.
Speaking, then, as one of the common herd—the public—I ask myself
why it is that as a rule woman’s art leaves me cold, woman’s
literature unconvinced, dissatisfied, and even irritated? And the
only answer I can find is that they are artificial; that they are not
a representation of life or beauty seen by a woman’s eyes, but an
attempt to render life or beauty as man desires that a woman should
see and render it. The attempt is unconscious, no doubt; but it is
there—thwarting, destroying, and annulling.
Perhaps it is necessary to be a woman oneself in order to understand
how weak, false, and insincere is the customary feminine attempt at
creative art. I do not think that a man can understand how bad most of
our work in art and literature really is, for the simple reason that
he cannot see the lie in it. He believes, for instance, that we are
such creatures as we represent ourselves to be in most of the books we
write; we only try to believe it. Wherein is all the difference between
a blunder and a lie. We cannot even draw ourselves, our passions and
emotions—because we are accustomed to look at ourselves, our passions
and emotions, not with our own eyes, but through the spectacles with
which he has provided us. When we come to portray our own hearts, it
would seem that they are almost as much of a mystery to ourselves
as they are to him; but then we are not striving to portray our own
hearts, but to describe beings who shall be something like what we have
been taught women ought to be (and to account for their actions by
motives which we have been told ought to actuate them). Because we have
been told that we are creatures existing only for love and maternity,
we draw creatures existing only for love and maternity—and call them
women. It is perfectly natural that men should draw such creatures;
they could not very well draw anything else, for they see them like
that. Their portraits are honest, if lop-sided; ours are lop-sided
without being honest—the result of an attempt to see ourselves through
another’s eyes.
The point of view is everything. An artist is not to be blamed for
his natural limitations, for his inability to see beyond his range of
vision; but I am inclined to think that he ought to be execrated when
he proceeds to stunt his powers by imposing unnatural limitations on
himself. A man afflicted with a colour-blindness which leads him to
turn out a portrait of me resplendent in beetroot hair and eyes of a
vivid green cannot help himself. As he sees me, so he paints me; the
effect may be curious, but the thing itself is sincere. But that is no
reason why artists endowed with normal vision should bind themselves
down to slavish imitation of his peculiar colour-scheme. In the same
way a person who is convinced that woman is a form of animated doll
whereof the mechanism, when pressed on the right spot, squeaks out
the two ejaculations of, “I love you,” and “Oh, my dear baby,” has
a perfect right to describe her in those terms; but no woman has the
right so to describe herself.
For countless generations the thoughts, the energies, and aspirations
of woman have been concentrated upon love and maternity; yet how many
are the works of art in which she has immortalized either passion which
have endured because they were stamped with the impress of her own
individuality and experience? For all that love is her whole existence,
no woman has ever sung of love as man has sung of it, has painted it,
has embodied it in drama. And of her attitude towards maternity what
has she told us in her art? Practically nothing that is illuminating,
that is not obvious, that has not been already said for her—usually
much better than she herself can say it. As a matter of fact, her
description of her emotions when she is in love or bears children is
not, as a rule, a first-hand description; it is a more or less careful,
more or less intelligent copy of the masculine conception of her
emotions under those particular circumstances. Thus the business-like
aspect of love in woman, the social or commercial necessity for sexual
intercourse is usually ignored by an imitative feminine art—because it
is lacking in man, and is, therefore, not really grasped by him. When
he becomes aware of it he dislikes it—and draws a Becky Sharp (who has
the secret sympathy of every woman not an heiress in her own right—if
also the openly-expressed contempt).
Women who have treated of maternity in books or pictures have usually
handled it in exactly the same spirit in which it is commonly handled
by men—from what may be termed the conventional or Raphaelesque point
of view. That is to say, they treat it from the superficial point
of view of the outsider, the person who has no actual experience of
the subject; yet even the most acid and confirmed of spinsters has
an inside view of maternity unattainable by the most sympathetic and
intuitive of men—since it has once been a possibility in her life.
Yet from woman’s art and woman’s literature what does one learn of the
essential difference between the masculine and feminine fashion of
regarding that closest of all relations—the relation of mother and
child?
I do not feel that I myself am qualified to define and describe that
difference. It will have to be defined and described by a woman who has
had experience of maternity; but at least I know that the difference
exists. Men are capable of being both reverent and ribald on the
subject of maternity; I have never met a woman who was either. (I have,
of course, met one or two women who adopted the reverent pose; but in
all such cases which have come within my experience it has been an
undoubted pose, a more or less unconscious imitation of the reverent
attitude in the men—usually husbands—with whom they came in contact.)
For us the bearing of children is a matter far too serious to be
treated with ribaldry; while as regards the lack of extreme reverence,
it seems to me that it is impossible for any human being to revere—in
the proper sense of the word—the performance by him or herself of a
physical function. No doubt it will be objected that maternity has not
only a physical aspect; to which I can only reply that it appears to
be the purely physical aspect thereof which calls forth reverence and
admiration in man. The typical duties of a mother to her children are
often performed, as efficiently and as tenderly as any mother could
perform them, by an aunt or a nurse; but they have never, when so
performed, called forth the flood of idealism and admiration which has
been lavished upon the purely physical relationship of mother and child
as typified by a woman suckling her offspring. The sight of a mother so
engaged has meant inspiration to a good many men; I may be wrong, but I
do not imagine that it will ever mean real inspiration to any woman.
My own opinion—which I put forth in all diffidence, as one of
the uninitiated—is, that while women, left to themselves, have
considerably less reverence than men have for the physical aspect
of maternity, they have a good deal more respect for its other
aspects. Thus I have several times asked women whom I knew from the
circumstances of their lives to have been exposed to temptation whether
the thought that they might some day bear a child had not been a
conscious and not merely an instinctive factor in their resistance
to temptation and the restraint they had put upon their passions and
emotions; and the reply has usually been in the affirmative. I do not
know whether such a deliberate attitude towards the responsibilities
of motherhood is general, but it seems to me essentially feminine,
implying, as it does, the consciousness that it is not enough to bear
a child, but that the child must be born of a clean body and come in
contact with a clean mind—that the actual bringing of a new life into
the world is only a small part of motherhood. It is the circumstances
under which the child is born and the circumstances under which it is
reared to which women attach infinitely more importance than men are
apt to do; but, of course, where child-bearing is compulsory—and until
very lately it has been practically compulsory upon all classes of
wives—such an instinct does not get free play.
A good many times in my life I have heard the practice of passing
the death sentence for the common crime of infanticide discussed by
women, sometimes in an assemblage convened for the purpose, but more
often where the subject has come up by chance. And I have always been
struck by the attitude of the women who have discussed it—an attitude
which, judged by the conventional or Raphaelesque standard, might
be described as typically unfeminine and unmaternal—since their
sympathies were invariably and unreservedly on the side of the erring
mother, and I cannot remember having heard a single woman’s voice
raised in defence of the right to its life of the unwanted child. On
the contrary, mothers of families, devoted to their own children and
discharging their duties to them in a manner beyond reproach, have, in
my hearing, not only pitied, but justified, the unfortunate creatures
who, goaded by fear of shame and want of money, destroy the little life
they themselves have given. That attitude seems to me to show that
women recognize the comparative slightness of the mere physical tie,
and that to them it is the other factors in the relationship of mother
and child which really count—factors which have practically no chance
of being brought into play in the case of the unwanted child.
It is eminently characteristic of the servile, and therefore imitative,
quality of women’s literature that the unwanted child—other than
the illegitimate—has played practically no part in it. As long
as child-bearing was an involuntary consequence of a compulsory
trade—as, to a great extent, it still is—there must have been
innumerable women who, year after year, bore children whom they did
not desire to bear; who suffered the discomforts of pregnancy and the
pangs of childbirth not that they might rejoice when a man was born
into the world, but that a fresh and unwelcome burden might be added to
their lives. And how unwelcome was that burden in many cases is proved
by the voluntary and deliberate restriction of the modern family! Yet
no woman, so far as I know, has ever taken up pen to write with truth
and insight of this, the really tragic element in the life of countless
wives—simply because man, not understanding, has never treated of
it, because, in his ignorance, he has laid it down that woman finds
instinctive and unending joy in the involuntary reproduction of her
kind. One sees the advantage of such a comfortable belief to a husband
disinclined to self-control.