(VARIUM ET MUTABILE SEMPER FEMINA)
IT is impossible to resist the New Woman, mainly, perhaps, on account
of her moral fascination; but somewhat is due in this behalf to a
certain perspective which, reaching into the enchantment of remote
times, connects her with a picturesque succession of New Women.
The question might be raised to decide, even at this late hour, between
Eve and Lilith; which of them was the progressive, representative
female?
There have been notable personages, all along the line of the
centuries, who have added grace or disgrace to their sex by vigorous
assertion of new-womanhood. From the Hebrew woman who drove the nail
into her enemy’s head, along down by way of the Greek philosopher’s
wife, to Queen Elizabeth, as thoroughly authentic records seem to
establish, an unbroken strain of man-harrying amazons march through
history. And side by side with it another procession is composed of the
intellectual prodigies of various female types who have assaulted the
masculine stronghold of science and art, from the days of Sappho to
this good hour.
Charles Baudelaire, in one of his “Fleurs du Mal,” longs for the day of
giantesses, and tuning his harp to the major key of desire, sings with
superb gallantry to the beat of an enormous plectrum:—
“Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux
J’eusse aimé vivre auprès d’une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d’une reine un chat voluptueux.”
Of course a poet is sure to use strong language which goes better with
some grains of salt; but there is no doubt touching the following
sketch of a New Woman:—
“J’eusse aimé . . . . . .
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,
Lasse, la font s’étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d’une montagne.”
To be a very large woman’s little cat might not satisfy the highest
aspiration of a manly man, even among _fin de siècle_ poets; and to
be as a mere village in her bosom’s mountain shadow is not open to
consideration in the most degenerate masculine mind of our epoch.
Still Baudelaire’s verses, being neither humor nor satire, adumbrate
a possible outcome of civilization, were the New Woman to take a
giantesque turn. She might be supremely pleased with having man purring
at her toes, or hopelessly asleep in her shadow.
Some uneasiness on the subject undoubtedly exists in certain male
imaginations. Not long ago I said to a friend of mine that I was
willing for women to vote on equal terms with men; that I considered
their enfranchisement a matter for them to settle; if they in committee
of the whole should declare for this thing, let them have it as a
matter of course. My friend bridled. “Yes, let them have it,” he cried;
“let them run the government woman-fashion for a while. There’s no
danger in the experiment. When we get tired of them, we can take empty
guns and scare them quite out of the country. Indeed it would be fun.”
To avoid a hot political discussion I fell into his humor and
suggested that the New Woman was waxing athletic; that her muscles
were changing; she was even beginning to throw a stone by the true
arm-wheel motion, as boys and men do. And I drew his attention to the
young ladies on bicycles gliding past. Then there were the fencing
schools, too, and the woman’s shooting galleries, where girls were
taught military doings. What did he imagine might come of permitting
this progress toward physical equality? Mayhap, on some dire day, a
second Jeanne d’Arc would call to the New Woman, as did the other to
chivalric man, and lead the way to wonders of conquest, instead of
being scared by empty guns.
“Jeanne d’Arc was, indeed, a typical New Woman,” he snarled; “she led
on to Rouen.” He pronounced it _ruin_. “And you will please remember
her successor at Lyons.” This was his Parthian arrow; he shot it back
over his shoulder, in hasty retreat meantime, and it stuck and rankled
in my critical curiosity. I cudgelled memory to recollect who could be
this _lyonnaise_ so tantalizingly enmisted in allusion; one is not to
be censured for being taken aback; Lyons is a small city, little but
old, and a long ways off; moreover mine adversary had left me no date.
You can trust a provincial, however, when it comes to a matter of
provincial history. A short day’s rummaging served my turn. Louise
Labé presented herself to me in a new light, a striking figure seen
through three and a third centuries of feminine aspiration, struggle,
and change. As in the case of Sappho, the woman was beset by coarse
defamers, men who made a sort of middle comedies at her expense,
and doubtless she behaved measurably in accordance with the social
influences of her time and place; but she was a New Woman, notably
independent, original, and strong.
During the course of a fascinating study in which I reviewed everything
at hand having relation to the life of this remarkable and much
maligned woman, the world-old attitude of the Literary Libertine was
projected afresh. The man who, in the name of gallantry, writes shame
on the record of beauty, genius, and strength, merely because they
chance to be the possession of a woman, stood before me in full stature.
Louise Labé, known as _La Belle Cordière_, was born at Lyons in the
year 1526. Her real name, before her marriage with Ennemond Perrin,
was probably Charlin; but she wrote over the signature of Louise Labé,
and her poetry immortalized it. I do not feel like recommending any
of her writings. They are historically and artistically interesting;
but one finds them out-paganing the pagans in some most objectionable
essentials. What attracts me in her behalf is a certain rudimentary
foresay uttered by her, not so much in her literature as through her
life, a foresay comprehending the modern feminine aspiration. Nor would
I be understood to mean that I admire her attitude or her aim; many
qualifications would be necessary; but she is attractive because she is
a significant figure.
Her father was a _cordier_, or a ship-supply merchant, or both; at all
events, he was rich and gave his daughter a most liberal education.
Lyons at that time was a literary centre, one of those spots in the
south of France made intellectually fertile by the residuary influence
of Italian and Spanish residents of earlier days. Like Avignon, it was
a singing station on the bank of the melodious Rhone, contributing its
odes and ballads and chansons to the medley which went gayly on down
through the hills to the Mediterranean at Les Bouches.
When Louise was sixteen, that is to say in the year 1542, Francis
I. laid siege to Perpignan, which precisely a hundred years later
became permanently a city of France. The siege was a dismal failure;
but some daring deeds were done in its behalf. For hard fighting
and distinguished personal valor honored those dying days of old
chivalry. A striking figure, a youthful Captain Loys, all armored and
lance-bearing, came into view at Perpignan.
This was Louise Labé, in her rôle of New Woman, an apparition sure
to storm the hearts of men if not the salients of Perpignan. As she
herself sings, she was seen—
“En armes fière aller,
Porter la lance et bois faire aller,
Le devoir faire en l’estour furieux,
Piquer, volter le cheval glorieux.”
Cervantes might sneer in vain at this rich new bloom of knighthood.
What would Sidney or Bayard have counted for at sixteen beside her in
the burning imagination of the Midi? One of our American poets, a woman
who sings of divine right, truly says—
“There is no sex in courage and in pain.”
Louise Labé had courage of the first order. Helmet and breastplate,
steel boot and clinking spur decorated an embodied defiance when she
rode down to the beleaguered stronghold. Captain Loys represented a
revolt of girlhood against the sugar-coated sex-slavery of the times.
My cynical friend had some good ground for citing _La Belle Cordière_
as an example of disaster. Her campaign came to nothing; she returned
to Lyons, married a rich rope-man, and went into the business of
writing erotic verse. But why do so many women, and over and over
again, commit this blighting mistake in the course of their battle for
liberty? Must the New Woman inevitably get herself entangled in the
meshes of the illicit? I think not. Good mothers, faithful wives, and
healthy-minded sweethearts are not to be crowded out of the army of
progress and reform; they are in to stay; but the Louise Labés are also
a persistent element, and unfortunately the noisiest and apparently
most influential, especially in the field of literature.
Woman must come to her own; she must have full freedom; would that
to-morrow were the day of it; but not if she is to be like the wife in
the “Heavenly Twins,” not if she must take pattern by a “Yellow Aster”
heroine, a “Key-Notes” woman, a “Daughter of Music,” or any of the
still worse models set up by the latest female propagandists of social
and domestic reform. These writers of polemical fiction favoring the
new order of social license are at present more in evidence than the
rest of them. Man, brutal Man, would be quite justified in appealing
to his superior muscle to prevent the arrival of this New Woman, or to
hale her to prison, as an enemy of the race, should she prove clever
enough to break through the masculine guard. One laughs, nevertheless,
thinking how justly and effectively these decadent women might retort
by wondering what manner of government and civilization we should have
were the Tolstois, the Hardys, the Maupassants, the George Moores,
the Zolas, the Ibsens, and the Hall Caines given the law-making and
law-executing powers! A beautiful suggestion. I can think of no
political absurdity so deep, no domestic calamity so comprehensively
terrible. Perhaps our bluff American senator was inspired when he
objected to “them literary fellers” being recognized as political
possibilities, and I can fully realize the untainted unction with
which the English judge sent a certain be-sunflowered æsthete to hard
prison labor upon a recent occasion. The general principle is that an
unsexed woman and an emasculate man ought to be considered as outlaws.
When Captain Loys rode down to Perpignan on her glorious war-horse,
she doubtless sang many an amazonian battle-song foretasting from afar
the triumph of the New Woman when she should mount to the bastion
coping and fling out the banner of France. Some months later, riding
homeward up the fertile valley of the Rhone, she changed her tune to a
plaintive, backward-going wail for a lost lover who had proved untrue.
Farewell to Roussillon, to dreams of military glory, to all the fierce
throbs of war—and good-by to the stalwart, fickle soldier who broke her
heart!
It is Captain Loys no longer; the lance lies back yonder somewhere
under the curtain of Perpignan’s fort; the helmet is too heavy; the
steel boots have tired the dainty feet, and the embossed shield is gone
from the girl’s left arm. Pretty Louise Labé sits sidewise on a palfrey
pacing gently up to Lyons; she is going home to marry, forlorn and
loveless, an easy-going and rich _cordier_ with a luxurious home and
a garden by the Rhone. The New Woman has tried to be a man, and a man
has, by the ancient test, shown her the folly of it.
To a lusty youth a thing of that sort is filliped aside and forgotten;
the girl lays it deep in her heart. He and she have met; he goes on his
way whistling a troubadour catch, she loses faith in every soul under
heaven; and likely enough the worst that passed between them was a
tender word or two, possibly a kiss. You see God built us for different
tasks; and the true New Woman knows it; she would like to be rid of the
Labés. Yet somehow these Yellow Book Girls make all the noise, lead the
van and get most of the attention.
“There is our weak point,” said a noble woman to me; she is one of the
fine, strong spirits in the work of lifting her sex to true freedom;
“there is our chief obstacle. The divorced women, or ‘grass widows,’
the drunkards’ wives, and the disappointed old maids, are assuming
leadership, taking it by vulgar force. This sets the men against us
and gives them that irresistible weapon, ridicule. The women we most
need for leaders and followers are the happy wives and mothers. We
want the women who have not lost faith in men, marriage, and maternity,
the three great M’s. Not that we have no sympathy with our unfortunate
and unhappy sisters; but the woman with a grievance, a moan of woe in
her throat, and a score to settle with Fate, is not a vote-maker. She
irritates the men, and they tell her that she should have had better
luck. She seems to forget that it is from the men that our boom must
come, and that they will never grant it while our dyspeptics are to
the fore. Who, indeed, cares a straw for what an unsuccessful person
screams to possess?”
Now, this good woman may have been too hard upon the class she was
talking at, I dare say she was; but there was excellent political
wisdom in her words. The Louise Labés are naturally somewhat jaundiced
and hysterical; when the adventures of Captain Loys are over the next
thing is a career against Fate and the limits of sex. But it is to
those who already have plenty and to spare that fortune tumbles down
her largest gifts, not to the empty-handed and greedy-eyed failures who
have nothing but a song of dole to sing.
Louise Labé went the common road of the irresponsible New Woman in
literature, the road so very popular to-day, which is paved with erotic
poetry and the fiction of free love and marital infidelity, beginning
her new life by posing as a victim bound in loveless marriage-chains on
the altar of monstrous social injustice. Her poetry was super-Sapphic
and addressed to the other man, not her husband, a man who presumably
was above the trade of a _cordier_, and therefore irresistible to the
low-born poetess.
We must distinctly agree with Sainte-Beuve, who chivalrously acquits
Louise Labé of actual personal dishonor. This thing of dressing
up a literary effigy and labelling it with the lyrical egotism as
self-expression is an old poetic ruse, a fiction of the Muses.
Louise was good enough for her time and place. She imagined herself
a sociologist, and somehow got it in mind that the only purpose of
sociology is by hook or crook to get rid of the sanctity of the
marriage relation. Indeed, if we may judge the New Woman, from
Louise’s time to now, by her poems and fictions, we must inevitably
conclude that she would define sociology as the science of making the
social evil appear harmlessly attractive; or that, like some of our
contemporaries, she would travel all the way to Russia to get the
pattern of Tolstoi’s trousers, having in mind a stunning new bicycle
suit, or a lecture upon dress-reform. She is not humorous; but she
makes a good deal of fun for the men.
After all it may be that the New Woman is a recurring decimal, as
the arithmeticians would say, appearing at certain intervals with a
constantly shifting value to civilization. If she persists in being
rather ornamental than useful, taken as a noun of multitude, we are all
the more her debtor on the side of romance, which—
“Loves to nod and sing,”
and which, if it cannot always get “sweetness and light” to charm
itself withal, gladly accepts sweetness and chic instead. Half way
between a grotesque gargoyle and a dainty flower-ornament of our
social and domestic structure, there is, perhaps, a mean at which the
New Woman is aiming; at all events she means to be decorative, as she
always has been, and down the ages ahead of us she will doubtless
continue to charm, amuse, and marry man, proving herself to him a great
luxury, but notably expensive.