At first sight it may seem as if one of Fanny Kemble's assertions--that
no woman can be a dramatist because of her inevitable ignorance of life
and of the experiences of existence from which she is debarred--is
disproved by the undeniable triumphs of women in acting, and by the
indisputable victories won by women in the field of prose fiction,
achieved in spite of these admitted limitations. But on a more careful
consideration it will appear that as an actress woman is called upon
only to embody and to interpret characters conceived by man with the aid
of his wider and deeper knowledge of life. And when we analyze the most
renowned of the novels by which women have attained fame, we discover
that the best of these deal exclusively with the narrower regions of
conduct, and with the more restricted areas of life with which she is
most familiar as a woman, and that when she seeks to go outside her
incomplete experience of existence she soon makes us aware of the gaps
in her equipment.
One of the strongest stories ever written by a woman is the 'Jane Eyre'
of Charlotte Bronte; and the inexperience of the forlorn and lonely
spinster is almost ludicrously made manifest in her portrayal of
Rochester, a superbly projected figure, not sustained by intimate
knowledge of the type to which he belongs. Charlotte Bronte knew Jane
Eyre inside and out; but she did not know even the outside of Rochester.
Because women are debarred with the most sedulous care from various
experiences of existence they can never know men as men can know women.
This is the basis for the shrewd remark that in dealing with affairs of
the heart men novelists rarely tell all they know, whereas women
novelists are often tempted to tell more than they know. Even women like
George Eliot and George Sand, who have more or less broken out of
bounds, are still more or less confined to their individual associations
with the other sex; and they lack the inexhaustible fund of information
about life which is the common property of men.
Women have most satisfactorily displayed their special endowment for
fiction not in what must be called the dramatic novel, not in
soul-searching studies like the 'Scarlet Letter' and 'Anna Karenine,'
but rather in less solidly supported inquiries into the interrelation of
character and social convention, as in 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Castle
Rackrent.' It would be unfair to assert that Maria Edgeworth and Jane
Austen are superficial; yet it is not unfair to say that they do not
explore deeply, and that they do not deal with what Stevenson called the
great passionate crises of existence, "when duty and inclination come
nobly to the grapple." This is the essential struggle of the drama; and
the authoress of 'Jane Eyre' sought to present it boldly, even if she
was handicapped by insufficient information; and this essential struggle
was what Charlotte Bronte herself missed in Jane Austen: "The passions
are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance
with that stormy sisterhood. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves
flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, tho
hidden, what the blood rushes thru, what is the unseen seat of life, and
the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores."
Jane Austen spent her great gift on the carving of cherry-stones,
laboring with exquisite art to lift into temporary importance the
eternally unimportant; and Charlotte Bronte, in her ampler endeavor, was
ever hampered by inadequacy of knowledge. George Eliot, with wider
opportunity than either of these predecessors, profited by both of them
and borrowed their processes in turn; she was broader than they were,
and bolder in her attack on life; her effort is more strenuously
intellectual than theirs, and therefore a little fatiguing, and this is
perhaps why her vogue seems now to be evaporating slowly. And when all
is said, no one of these clever story-tellers really attains to an
altitude of accomplishment where she can fairly be considered as a
competitor of the mighty masters of prose fiction. No woman novelist is
to be ranked among the supreme leaders, worthy to stand by the side of
Cervantes and Fielding, Balzac and Tolstoi. The merits of the women
novelists are many and they are beyond cavil; but no one of them has yet
been able to handle a large theme powerfully and to interpret life with
the unhasting and unresting strength which is the distinguishing mark of
the mightier masters of fiction.