“BUT why not?” Mrs. Dodge said, leading the “Discussion” at the Woman’s
Saturday Club after the reading of Mrs. Cromwell’s essay, “Women as
Revealed in Some Phases of Modern Literature.” “Why shouldn’t something
of the actual life of such women as ourselves be the subject of a book?”
Mrs. Dodge inquired. “Mrs. Cromwell’s paper has pointed out to us that
in a novel a study of women must have a central theme, must focus upon a
central figure or ‘heroine,’ and must present her as a principal
participant in a centralized conflict or drama of some sort, in relation
to a limited group of other ‘characters.’ Now, so far as I can see, my
own life has no such centralizations, and I’m pretty sure Mrs.
Cromwell’s hasn’t, either, unless she is to be considered merely as a
mother; but she has other important relations in life besides her
relations to her three daughters, just as I have others besides that I
bear to my one daughter. In fact, I can’t find any central theme in Mrs.
Cromwell’s life or my own; I can’t find any centralized drama in her
life or mine, and I doubt if many of you can find such things in yours.
Our lives seem to be made up of apparently haphazard episodes, some
meaningless, others important, and although we do live principally with
our families and friends and neighbours, I find that people I hardly
know have sometimes walked casually into my life, and influenced it, and
then walked out of it as casually as they came in. All in all, I can’t
see in our actual lives the cohesion that Mrs. Cromwell says is the
demand of art. It appears to me that this very demand might tend to the
damage of realism, which I take to mean lifelikeness and to be the most
important demand of all. So I say: Why shouldn’t a book about women, or
about a type of women, take for its subject some of the actual thoughts
and doings of women like ourselves? Why should such a book be
centralized and bound down to a single theme, a single conflict, a
single heroine? The lives of most of us here consist principally of our
thoughts and doings in relation to our children, our neighbours, and the
people who casually walk into our lives and our children’s and
neighbours’ lives and out again. It seems to me a book about us should
be concerned with all of these almost as much as with ourselves.”
“You haven’t mentioned husbands,” Mrs. Cromwell suggested. “Wouldn’t
they——”
“They should be included,” Mrs. Dodge admitted. “But I would have
husbands and suitors represented in their proper proportion; that is to
say, only in the proportion that they affect _our_ thoughts and doings.
In challenging the rules for centralization that you have propounded,
Mrs. Cromwell, I do not propose that all rules of whatever nature should
be thrown over. One in particular I should hold most advisable.”
“What rule is it?” a member of the club inquired, for at this point Mrs.
Dodge paused and the expression of her mouth was somewhat grim.
“It is that a book about women should not be too long,” Mrs. Dodge
replied. “Especially if it should be by a man, he would be wise to use
brevity as a means of concealing what he doesn’t know. And besides,” she
added, more leniently, “by brevity, he might hope to placate us a
little. It might be his best form of apology.”