A PLEASING and constant topic of English writers is the
American girl. One of the later commentators says of her, "American
girls have shown they can receive, travel, and live without chaperons,
escorts, or husbands, and are fast developing a bright, clear,
intelligent, self-reliant, courageous, and refreshing variety of the
human race." And again, "Even if in future years the slender Yankee
belle is hidden behind the ampler beauty of the English matron, we may
still hear from her lips the wit and shrewdness, the acute accent, the
intelligent question, and the rapid repartee that proclaim her original
nationality." The "society" pictures in the papers and magazines
represent the dismay of the British matron with marriageable daughters
as she surveys the avatar of the American divinity and rival. The
essential differences of society in the two countries are at once
suggested, and the alarm of the watchful parent is justified.
The charm of Miss Austen's novels is their acknowledged fidelity of
portraiture of the society with which they deal. They are miniatures,
but the likeness is wrought with exquisite skill of detail, and as the
American reader reflects he perceives that the great object of the game
which they describe is eligible marriage. Indeed the motive of the novel
in general is love and marriage. We open the book, we are at once
introduced to Paul, and presently to Virginia, and we proceed over the
pages until we hear the approaching beat of the Wedding March, which in
fact we have heard from the first page, and we know that the end is at
hand. But in the English novel of society, although the theme be
marriage, it is not necessarily love. If that were essential, a host of
rival fair ones with golden locks would bring no pang to the maternal
bosom, because she would know that love will find out the one among the
thousand.
The passages that we have quoted apparently describe by contrast, which
is a fact which does not seem to have occurred to the writer. Doubtless
at heart he is loyal to the English girl, and does not admit even in
debate that her supremacy of maidenhood can be disputed. When he says
that American girls have shown that they can receive, travel, and live
without chaperons, escorts, or husbands, he seems to mean that they have
shown this distinctively as compared with other girls. When he adds that
they are fast developing a bright, clear, intelligent, self-reliant,
courageous, and refreshing variety of the human race, can he mean that
those words describe a new variety of girl, and that it is not perfectly
familiar in England? So in the other passage, when, supposing the
American girl transformed into the British matron, he remarks, with
evident admiration, "we may still hear from her lips the wit and
shrewdness, the acute accent, the intelligent question, and the rapid
repartee that proclaim her original nationality," would he have us
understand that these are not the characteristics of the British matron
of to-day? Or does he intimate only that the coming of the Americans
will but enlarge the number of these delightful ladies?
The writer certainly seems to describe by contrast, but he has wisely
left a little cloud in which to envelop his retreat in case of
emergency. Certainly we need not press him. Whatever he may think or say
of the English girl, he has spoken well and truly of her American
sister. His description applies to the girl who grows up amid the
average conditions of American life, the girl who is portrayed in her
more jejune condition in Henry James's Daisy Miller. The two chief
qualities of that young woman, as represented by the shrewd and subtle
artist, are self-respect and self-reliance. The perplexity of the
phenomenon to the foreign reader lies in the fact that she does what the
European girl without self-respect does.
A distinguished writer in New York, no longer living, once said to the
Easy Chair, with an air of consternation: "Do you know that the best
girls in New York go without escort to the matinées at the Academy?
Goodness knows what will be the end of it!" The good man was seriously
troubled. He seemed to apprehend that the young woman who could go to a
matinée without an escort would probably run off with a circus troupe,
and presently ride--in a very short skirt--bare-backed horses in the
ring. He evidently felt that the young women whom he had seen were in
grave danger of losing maidenly reserve, and that their conduct betrayed
a want of refinement of feeling. The secret of his alarm lay in the fact
that the social conventions of foreign society had acquired in his mind
the force of rules of morality. He shared the feelings of the delightful
lady who remarked that in her opinion it was immodest to go abroad
without gloves. Nothing is more common than this confusion of mind, and
one of the advantages of genuinely American society is that it
dissipates such illusions. The Lady Mavourneen, who was familiar with
the finest society both in France and England, said that the respect
shown to women in this country was so sincere and universal that she
should not hesitate to cross the continent alone. Why, then, should the
Easy Chair's friend have been troubled that young women went unattended
to the concert at the Academy? Every man there would have been their
instant defender against insult. But they went, and they were allowed to
go, because the insult was more improbable than fire, while the defence
was sure.
In what is called distinctively society in large cities there is a great
deal of the feeling evinced by the observer at the Academy. There is
abundant regard for misplaced conventions. Young women in Vienna and
Paris who go unattended are generally working-women or another class,
and as working-women are not respected by Lovelace and Lothario, they
are exposed to insult. To avoid the chance of insult, therefore, a young
woman must have an escort in a partially civilized city like Paris or
Vienna. But no presumption lies against any woman in America. Her
self-respect and self-reliance are unquestioned, and American women,
old and young, are perpetually passing in railway trains by day and
night from one part of the country to another, unsuspected and
unsuspecting.
In a country where social classes are not permanent or rigidly defined,
as hitherto in America they have not been, the daughter as well as the
son of the house contemplates the possibility of self-support. In such a
country the harem view of the sphere and occupation of woman, however
modified, wholly disappears. The word "obey" gradually vanishes from the
marriage service, or is smoothed away by interpretation. The ideal of
woman changes, and, as we think in America, improves. All the excellent
qualities which the London writer attributes to the American girl spring
from this change, from social conditions which foster self-respect and
self-reliance. The demand of the suffrage, the rise of the woman's
college, the challenge to the great universities to lift up their gates
that woman may come in, show no decline of the feminine ideal of woman,
but its transformation from the fancy of a goddess or a toy into the
old Scriptural conception of the helpmeet.
The British matron, as she scrutinizes what she may hold to be an
invader of her realm, will not find that in any feminine quality or
grace, even to the most exquisite taste in dress, or delicate charm of
manner, or essential refinement of mind, Pocahontas defers to Boadicea.
Where the American imitates the English or any other, as when the
English girl affects the French, she must suffer from the inevitable
inferiority of all imitation. When her self-reliance is boisterous, or
without tact and fine perception, Daisy Miller will be as crude and
distasteful as Lady Clara Vere de Vere is heartless and cruel. But
Rosalind and Viola and Beatrice, and Tennyson's Eleanore and Adeline and
Margaret, meet in the American a sister of the same lineage as their
own, bred in an atmosphere most fortunate and fair.