Rehbein once observed to Goethe "that the women who had distinguished
themselves in literature, poetry especially, were almost universally
women who had been disappointed in their best affections, and sought in
this direction of the intellect a sort of compensation. When women are
married, and have children to take care of, they do not often think of
writing poetry."
This is not very politely or delicately expressed; but we must not
therefore shrink from it, for it involves some important considerations.
It is most certain that among the women who have been distinguished in
literature, three-fourths have been either by nature, or fate, or the
law of society, placed in a painful or a false position; it is also most
certain that in these days when society is becoming every day more
artificial and more complex, and marriage, as the gentlemen assure us,
more and more expensive, hazardous, and inexpedient, women _must_ find
means to fill up the void of existence. Men, our natural protectors, our
lawgivers, our masters, throw us upon our own resources; the qualities
which they pretend to admire in us,--the overflowing, the clinging
affections of a warm heart--the household devotion,--the submissive wish
to please, that feels "every vanity in fondness lost,"--the tender
shrinking sensitiveness which Adam thought so charming in his Eve,--to
cultivate these, to make them, by artificial means, the staple of the
womanly character, is it not to cultivate a taste for sunshine and
roses, in those we send to pass their lives in the arctic zone? We have
gone away from nature, and we must--if we can--substitute another
nature. Art, literature, and science remain to us. Religion, which
formerly opened the doors of nunneries and convents to forlorn women,
now mingling her beautiful and soothing influence with resources which
the prejudices of the world have yet left open to us, teaches us another
lesson, that only in utility, such as is left to us,--only in the
assiduous employment of such faculties as we are permitted to exercise,
can we find health and peace, and compensation for the wasted or
repressed impulses and energies more proper to our sex--more
natural--perhaps more pleasing to God; but trusting in His mercy, and
using the means He has given, we must do the best we can for ourselves
and for our sisterhood. The cruel prejudices which would have shut us
out from nobler consolation and occupations have ceased in great part,
and will soon be remembered only as the rude, coarse barbarism of a
by-gone age. Let us then have no more caricatures of methodistical,
card-playing, and acrimonious old maids. Let us hear no more of scandal,
parrots, cats, and lap-dogs--or worse!--these never-failing subjects of
derision with the vulgar and the frivolous, but the source of a thousand
compassionate and melancholy feelings in those who can reflect! In the
name of humanity and womanhood, let us have no more of them! Coleridge,
who has said and written the most beautiful, the most tender, the most
reverential things of women--who understands better than any man, any
poet, what I will call the metaphysics of love--Coleridge has asserted
that the perfection of a woman's character is to be _characterless_.
"Every man," said he, "would like to have an Ophelia or a Desdemona for
his wife." No doubt; the sentiment is truly a masculine one: and what
was _their_ fate? What would now be the fate of such unresisting and
confiding angels? Is this the age of Arcadia? Do we live among Paladins
and Sir Charles Grandisons, and are our weakness, and our innocence, and
our ignorance, safe-guards--or snares? Do we indeed find our account in
being
"Fine by defect, and beautifully weak?"
No; women need in these times _character_ beyond everything else; the
qualities which will enable us to endure and to resist evil; the
self-governed, the cultivated, active mind, to protect and to maintain
ourselves. How many wretched women marry for a maintenance! How many
wretched women sell themselves to dishonour for bread!--and there is
small difference, if any, in the infamy and the misery! How many
unmarried women live in heart-wearing dependence;--if poor, in solitary
penury, loveless, joyless, unendeared;--if rich, in aimless, pitiful
trifling! How many, strange to say, marry for the independence they dare
not otherwise claim! But the more paths opened to us, the less fear that
we should go astray.
Surely, it is dangerous, it is wicked, in these days, to follow the old
saw, to bring up women to be "happy wives and mothers;" that is to say,
to let all their accomplishments, their sentiments, their views of life,
take one direction, as if for women there existed only one destiny--one
hope, one blessing, one object, one passion in existence. Some people
say it ought to be so, but we know that it is _not_ so; we know that
hundreds, that thousands of women are not happy wives and mothers--are
never either wives or mothers at all. The cultivation of the moral
strength and the active energies of a woman's mind, together with the
intellectual faculties and tastes, will not make a woman a less good,
less happy wife and mother, and will enable her to find content and
independence when denied love and happiness.
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