"But Fatima said, 'To the keyhole let's creep,
"There can be no harm just in one little peep!
"We are women--besides, there are none to behold us!
"If he wished us to leave it, he shouldn't have told us!'"
It is these inexcusable lines which have caused the Feminist party to
boycott (and perhaps rightly) any opera-house in which this drama is given,
urging that they contain an insult which can be wiped out only with blood
or ballots. I sympathize with this feeling, yet, as I said before, there
are extenuating circumstances. Wagner was born a hundred years ago. In his
time the hand of woman, though white, was flabby and inert from years of
darning, patching, stirring the pot, buttoning and unbuttoning, feeding and
spanking man's perennial progeny. He had no conception how that frail hand
would be steadied and strengthened by dropping the ballot into the box; how
curiosity, vanity, parasitic coquetry, lack of logic, overweening interest
in millinery and inability to balance a check-book--how these weaknesses
would vanish under the inspiring influences of municipal politics;
therefore I feel disposed to forgive him, and to attribute to him, not
absolute and deliberate insult, so much as a kind of patronizing
persiflage. In this case, however, feminists will say that the great Wagner
undoubtedly and regrettably overreached himself.
Here is just a hint of the theme; a paltry, parasitic, mid-Victorian
motive.