writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls
with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love
adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best
of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to
which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect
beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she
is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is
_retrousse_; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm
that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in
her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over
the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring
kind which eclipses all others.
Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the
beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears
their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive
glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul
have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first
triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre
certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years
every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature,
generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances,
who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by
pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant
womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with
tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that
Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and
more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of
the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only
the world could be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in
favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the
"rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more
freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the
difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually
fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused
for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.
Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that
beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in _Adam
Bede_, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is
described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author
of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty
cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or
some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of _Adam
Bede_ is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and
considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust
and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample
justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The
heroines of _Romola_ and _Felix Holt_ prove distinctly that she does.
But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When
one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty
faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.
A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's
novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal,
and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband.
Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to
prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that
moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all
about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the
happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the
errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy,
he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he
cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is
the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him,
from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the
folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and
Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of
spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology
which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to
intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine
points of view. The _argumentum ad sexum_, if not a logical, is often no
doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they
can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any
considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no
other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion
in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more
strictly secular kind.
There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought
to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In
feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken
supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous,
easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates
heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers
for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered
towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the
heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind
and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than
usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of
grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at
critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him,
she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has
always been hopelessly in love with her--and for whom she entertains,
unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard--to intervene in the
nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.
In a story called _Sowing the Wind_, which has recently been published,
the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the
title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to
very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and
lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he
treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman.
He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and
out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine
slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she
preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought
worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly
defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to
adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character
stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings
him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally
peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful
animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all
about her.
Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through
three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have
something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's
mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is
the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last
St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged--a fate which is
partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual
indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It
is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives
so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before
us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and
society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence
of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the
assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not
ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have--a vote for the borough, or
perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a
fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as
good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to
despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is
proper to do so.
The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in
novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even
the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely
pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of
impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a
drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of
meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write
novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much
as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for
when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose.
Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have
generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been
thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when
circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little
world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.
A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced,
as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental
capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies,
and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to
pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic
duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except
from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy.
The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when
they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage
of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in
the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious
poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done
so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to
console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by
building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of
romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.
In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper
what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if
only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and
discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she
conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the
triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious
circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot.
The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit
and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious
dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of
phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths
of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the
reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They
know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of
revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr,
whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her
decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are
performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they
believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible
circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of
action.
This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us
have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with
young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that
is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want
to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out,
when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed
towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been
entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight
upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her
wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with
equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose,
and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to
herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the
heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves
free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers,
whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an
idealized portrait of themselves.
But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape
from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the
case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without,
but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them
which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or
the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty
years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or
entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are
afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be
always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of
universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they
will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified
adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most
successful efforts of feminine art.
INTERFERENCE.
About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which
is another matter--tyranny being active while interference is negative;
the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of
the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in
view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like
to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out
of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within
the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people
spend their lives in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes
into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting
their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any
way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women
make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.
To be sure there are some men--small, fussy, finicking fellows, with
whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as
troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and
most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine
characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them
into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in
any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a
right to control--say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's
too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and
knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they
stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this
kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into
another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of
interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and
with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what
we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of
all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these
check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young,
are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of
bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while
mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental
purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to
become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic
interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative
they assume.
Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to
forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering
with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in
intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only
a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that
passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the
artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets
the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one
segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine
weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to
interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible
excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what
she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore
does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds
herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she
redeems the pledge with energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble
digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet
of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with
his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always
disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache
to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or,
"How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!"
"What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how
wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep
without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her
husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her
own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself
justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought
to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to
understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others,
and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs
and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian
fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in
about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out
without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is
at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they
must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these
have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of
vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by
many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and
incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them
good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They
like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly
comradeship among each other; and most women--but not all--would rather
have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being
more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.
The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man
of broad humor--one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution
about an agricultural implement. The wife of such a man is generally one
of the ultra-refined kind, according to the odd law of compensation
which regulates so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to
stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an
example most frequently to be found in middle life, and where there are
children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is
generally "papa!"--said with reproach or resentment, according to
circumstances--which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention
of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing
that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has
sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but
can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as
they are alone, the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only
husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his
life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with
such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant
laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but
what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel;
possibly a good-natured _peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the
continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If
the man is a man of free speech and broad humor by nature and liking, he
will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves
untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.
Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
direction, not discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the
occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the
minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding
maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as
vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game
of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one,
without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every
enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma
for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters,
too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all
those who are intimate where there are large families of unmarried girls
must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating "Amies!"
and "Oh Lucies!" and "Hush Roses!" by which some seek to act as
household police over the others, are patent to all who use their
senses.