I read--on a recent railway journey--a popular magazine. Its leading
story was labeled as a "story for girls." In it the traditional
gentleman of reduced fortunes continued to still further deplete the
family-resources by speculation, and the three daughters who figure in
most such stories went through the regular paces, so to speak.
One taught music; one painted well and sold her bits of canvas for ten
dollars each; but the third girl had no talent except that of a cheerful
temperament and the ability to drape curtains and arrange furniture
attractively. These girls talked over the fact, that they were now
reduced to their last ten dollars and the pantry was empty, father ill,
and mother--not counted. They joked a little, wept a few tears, and
prayed devoutly. Then the talentless one received an invitation in the
very nick of time to visit the richest lady in town (a cripple with a
grand house). She went, she saw, and, of course, she conquered--earned
money by giving artistic touches to the houses of all the rich people in
town, and eight months later married the nephew of the opulent cripple.
No more mention is made of the empty pantry, the sick father, and the
two talented girls whose labor did not previously keep the wolf from
the door. But it is only fair to suppose that the new husband was to
be henceforth the head of the entire establishment--surely a warning to
most young men contemplating matrimony under such trying circumstances.
All is supposed to move on well, however, and every hapless girl who
reads such a story, is led to believe that _she_ is the household fairy
who will meet the prince and somehow (not stated) redeem her father's
family from want and despair. For it is the object of such stories to
convey the impression that everything is quite comfortable and settled
after the wedding. The young girl who reads these stories looks out upon
life through the absurd spectacle thus furnished her. She sees nothing
as it is. Such little plans as she can make, are based upon wholly
incorrect data. Her whole existence is unconsciously made to bend to the
idea of matrimony as a means of salvation for herself and such persons
as may be in any way objects of care to her.
Indeed, what are commonly known as "safe stories for girls," are made up
of just such rubbish, which if it were only rubbish, might be tolerated;
but the harm all this sort of thing does can hardly be estimated. I
do not now refer to the harm of a more vicious sort that is sometimes
spoken of as the result of story reading. I am not considering the
deliberately scheming nor the consciously self-sacrificing girl who
struts her day on the stage and in fiction marries to save the farm or
her father or any one else. I am thinking of the every-day girl, who
is simply led to see life exactly as it is likely _not_ to be, and is
therefore disarmed at the outset. She is filled with all sorts of
dreamy ideas of rescue by prayer or by means of some suddenly
developed--previously undreamed-of--rich relation or lover or, I had
almost said--fairy. And why not? Literature used to bristle with these
intangible aids to the helpless or stranded author. The name is changed
now, it is true, but the fairy business goes bravely on at the old
stand, and the young are fed with views of life, and of what they will
be called upon to meet, which are none the less harmful and visionary
because of the changed nomenclature.
A gentleman of middle age said to me not long ago: "I grew up with the
idea that people were like those I met in books. I went out into life
with that belief. I measured myself by those standards, and I have spent
much time in my later years re-adjusting myself to fit the facts. It
placed me at a great disadvantage. I saw people and deeds as they were
not--as they are never likely to be in this world--and I could not
believe that my own case was not wholly exceptional. I began to look at
myself as quite out of the ordinary. My experiences were such as belied
my reading, and it was a very long time and after serious struggle,
that I discovered that it was my false standards, derived from reading
popular fiction, that had deceived me and that, after all, life had to
be met upon very different lines from the ones laid down by the ordinary
writers of fiction. I really believe I was unfitted for life as I found
it, more by the fictions of fiction than by any other one influence."
Another gentleman--a writer of renown--said to me: "We may not 'hold the
mirror up to nature' as nature is. The critics will not have it. We must
hold it up to what we are led to think nature _ought_ to be."
Now that would be all very well, no doubt, if the picture were labeled
to fit the facts. If it were distinctly understood by the reader that
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the outcome of real life would be
wholly different, that the right man would not turn up, in the nick of
time, to point out to the defenseless widow that there was a flaw in
the deed; if the reader was warned that honest effort often precedes
failure; that virtue and vice not only may, but do, walk hand in hand
down many a life-long path and sometimes get the boundary lines quite
obliterated between them; if he understood that in life the biggest
scoundrel often wears the most benign countenance and does not go about
with a leer and a scowl that labels him, all might be well.
A prominent woman, an authority on social topics, who is also a writer,
a short time ago announced to her audience of ladies who gave the
smiling response of a thoughtless yes, that "no one ever committed a
despicable act with the head erect and the chest well out." "A dishonest
man, a criminal, a mean woman," she said, always carry themselves so and
so!
If that were true--if it bore only the relationship of probability to
truth--courts of law to determine upon questions of guilt or innocence,
would be quite unnecessary. A photograph and an anatomical expert would
do the business. The doing of a wrong act would become impossible to a
gymnast, and the graceful "bareback lady" in the circus would be farther
removed from all meanness of soul than any other woman living.
Yet some such idea--stated a little less absurdly--runs through fiction,
the drama, and poetry.
Ferdinand Ward or Carlyle Harris would figure in orthodox fiction with
" furtive eyes," "a hunted look," and with very hard and repellant
features, indeed; yet those who knew them well never discovered any such
expressions. Jesse James would look like a ruffian and treat his old
mother like a brute. But in life he was a mild, quiet, fair-appearing
man who adored his mother, and was shot in the back (while tenderly
wiping the dust from her picture) by a despicable wretch who was living
upon his bounty at the time and accepted a bribe to murder him. Young
girls do not need to be warned against "mother Frouchards." No girl of
fair sense would require such warning; but the plausible, good-looking,
and often nobly-acting man or woman who lapses from rectitude in
one path while carefully treading the straight and narrow way in all
earnestness and with honest intent in others are the ones for whom the
fictions of fiction leave us unprepared.
In short the people who do not exist--the villain who is consistently
and invariably villainous, the woman who is an angel, the people who
never make mistakes, or who are able and wise enough to rectify them
nobly, and all the endless brood are familiar enough. We know all of
them, and are prepared for them when we meet them--which we never do.
But for the real people we are not prepared. For the exigencies of life
that come; for the decisions and judgments we are called upon to make,
the fictions of fiction have contributed to disarm us. We are hampered.
There is no precedent. We feel ourselves imposed upon; we are face to
face, so we believe--with a condition that no one ever met before. We
are dazed; we wait for the orthodox denouement. It does not come. We
pray. There is no angel visitant who cools our fevered brow with gentle
wings and lulls our fears with promise of help from other than human
agencies--which promises are straightway fulfilled, of course, in
fiction. We sit down and wait but no rich relation dies and leaves us a
legacy, nor does the prince appear and wed us. Nothing is orthodox, but
we have lost much valuable time, and strength, and hope in waiting for
it to be so. We have failed to adjust ourselves to life as it is. We do
not measure ourselves nor others by standards that have a par value. We
are discouraged and we are at sea.
A short time ago I read a story of the late war. The burden of it was
that, if a soldier had been brave and loyal, he could also be depended
upon to be honest. I happened to read the story while under the same
roof with an old soldier who was at that time a judge on the bench. He
had served faithfully while in the army; he was brave and he, no doubt,
deserved the honorable discharge he received, and yet while he sat on
the bench, he applied for a pension on the ground of incurable
disease "contracted in active service." While those papers were being
investigated and one doctor was examining him for his pension, he also
applied and was examined for life insurance as a perfectly sound man and
healthy risk, _and he got both_.
The fact is, human nature is very much mixed. Good and bad is
not divided by classes but is pretty well distributed in the same
individual. Weakness and strength, wisdom and ignorance, impulse and
reason, play their part in the same life with all the other attributes,
passions, and conditions, and the literature which makes any individual
the personification of good or of evil leads astray its confiding
readers. Woman has been represented in literature as emotion culminating
in self-sacrifice and matrimony. That was all. And even unto this day
many persons can conceive of her in no other light. The idea has always
been productive of infinite misery to woman whose whole book of life was
read by these pages only, as well as to man who had carefully to spell
out the other pages in the characters of wife or daughter when it was
too late for him to learn new lessons, or to develop a taste for an
unknown language.
Man has been known as pure reason touched with chivalry and devotion,
or else as a dangerous animal who preys upon his kind. There may be--IN
some other life or world--representatives of both of these classes,
but they are not the men with whom we live, and, therefore, whose
acquaintance it is desirable we should make as early as possible.
That a large family is a crown of glory to the parents and an
inestimable boon to the state, is an idea running through literature. Is
it a fact or is it one of the fictions of fiction which it were well to
stimulate and galvanize into life less persistently? What is the answer
from reform schools and penal institutions, filled by ignorance and
passion held in bondage by poverty; from cemeteries where mothers and
babies of the poor and ill-nurtured are strewn like leaves; from,
the homes of the educated and well to do where small families are the
rule--large ones the deplored exception? What is the logical reply
in countries whose sociological students sigh over the struggle for
existence and a scarcity of supplies; "over population" and desperate
emigration? Misery and vice bearing strict proportion to density of
population and poverty, surely offer a hint that at least one of the
fictions of fiction has gone far to do a serious injury to man.
But the fiction of fictions which has done more real harm to the human
race than any other, perhaps, is the one which dominates it--the idea
that woman was created for the benefit and pleasure of man, while man
exists for and because of himself.
Fiction has utilized even her hours of leisure and amusement to sap the
self-respect of womanhood while it helped very greatly to brutalize and
lower man by keeping--in this insidious form--the thought ever before
him that woman is a function only and not a person, and that even in
this limited sphere she is and should be proud to be man's subject. "He
for God only, she for God in him."
It is true that since the advent of women writers fiction has shown
a tendency to modify, to a limited extent, this previously universal
dictum, but the thought still dominates literature greatly to the
detriment of morals and of the dignity of both men and women.
"The woman who has no history is the woman to be envied," says
literature--and yet people do not envy her any more than they do the man
of like inconspicuous position. No one wishes that she might go down to
history, if one may so express it, as history less. No one points with
pride to Jane Smith as his illustrious ancestor any more than if Jane
had chanced to be John. To have been a Mary Somerville, or an Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, or a George Eliot, most historyless women would be
willing to change places even now, and as for "those who come after,"
can there be a question as to which would give more pride or pleasure
to man or woman, to say--"I am the son, or the brother, or the niece of
Mrs. Browning," or to say, "Jane Smith, of Amityville, is my most famous
relative?"
I have my suspicions that even * Mr. Fitzgerald would waver in favor of
Elizabeth in case both women were his cousins. In public, at least, he
would mention Jane less frequently and with less of a touch of pride.
Personally he might like her quite as well. That is aside from the
question. I have no doubt that he might like John Smith as well as
Shakespeare, personally, too, and John may have led a happier life than
William, but is a man with no history to be envied for that reason? The
application is obvious.
One of the most insidious fictions of fiction, which it seems to me
is harmful, is the theory that the good are so because they resist
temptation, while the bad are vicious because they yield easily--make a
poor fight.
Leaving out heredity and its tremendous power, it is likely that you
would have yielded under as strong pressure as it took to carry your
neighbor down. I say as strong pressure--not the _same_ pressure--for
your tastes not being the same, your temptations will take different
forms. **
* Fitzgerald "thanked God" when Mrs. Browning died. See
reply by Robert Browning in Athenaeum.
** "Our lives progress on the lines of least resistance."
--Van Dbr Waukr, M. D.
If you had been born of similar parents and on Cherry Hill; if you had
been one of a family of ten; if you had been stunted in mind and in body
by want of nourishment; if you had been given little or no education;
if you had helped to get bread for the family almost from the time you
could remember; your record in the police court would not differ very
greatly from that of those about you. In nine cases out of ten you would
be where you sent that convict last year. Your pretty daughter would be
the associate of toughs. She might be pure--in the sense in which the
word is applied to women--but she would have a mind muddy and foul with
the murk and odors of a life fit only for swine. She would marry a
brute who honestly believes that so soon as the words of a priest or a
magistrate are said over them, she belongs to him to abuse if he sees
fit, to impose upon, lie to, or to let down into the valley of death
for his pleasure whenever he sees fit, and quite without regard to her
opinions or desires in the matter. She would be an old and broken woman
at thirty, ugly, misshapen, and hopeless, with hungry-faced children
about her, whose next meal would be a piece of bread, whose next word
would be too foul to repeat, whose next act would disgrace a wolf.
In turn they would perpetuate their kind in much the same fashion, and
some of your grandchildren would be in the poor-house, some in
prison, some in houses of ill-repute, and perchance some doing honest
work--sweeping the streets or making shirts for forty cents a dozen for
the patrons of a literature that goes on promoting the theory that the
chief duty of the poor is to irresponsibly bring more children into the
world--to work for them as cheaply as possible. To the end that they may
restrict their own families to smaller limits and--by means of cheaper
labor caused largely by over population from below--clothe their loved
ones in purple and build untaxed temples of worship, where poverty
and crime is taught to believe in that other fiction of fictions--the
"providence" that places us where we deserve to be and where a loving
God wishes us to be content.
Indeed, this supernatural finger in literature has gone farther,
perhaps, to place and keep fiction where it is, as a misleading picture
of life and reality, than has any other influence. It has dominated
talent and either starved or broken the pen of genius. "Oh, if I might
be allowed to draw a man as he is!" exclaims Thackeray, as he leaves the
office of his publisher, with downcast eyes and bowed head. He goes home
and "cuts out most of his facts," and returns the manuscript which is
acceptable now, because it is _not_ true to life!
Because it is now fiction based upon other fiction and has eliminated
from it the elements of probability which might have been educative or
stimulating or prophetic. Now, Thackeray was not a man who would have
mistaken preachments for novels if he had been left to his own judgment;
neither would he have painted vice with a hand that made it attractive,
but he chafed under the dictum that he must not hold the mirror up to
the face of nature, but must adjust it carefully so as to reflect a
steel engraving of a water color from a copy of the "old masters."
It might be well if silver dollars grew on trees and if each person
could step out and gather them at his pleasure; but since they do
not, what good purpose could it serve if fiction were to iterate and
reiterate that such is the case, until people believed that it was their
trees which were at fault and not their fiction?
It might be a good idea, too, if babies were born with a knowledge of
Latin and Mathematics, but to convince young people that such is the
case and that they are pitiful exceptions to a general rule, is to place
them at a humiliating disadvantage from the outset.
It is one of the most firmly rooted of these fictions of fiction, that
such tales as I have mentioned above are "good reading--safe, clean
literature" for girls. Nothing could be farther from the facts. Indeed,
the outcry about girls not being allowed to read this or that, because
it deals with some topic "unfit" for the girls' ears, is another fiction
of fiction which robs the girl of her most important armor--the armor of
truth and the ability to adjust it to life.
A famous man once said in my presence--"The theory that to keep a girl
pure you must keep her ignorant of life--of real life--is based upon
a belief degrading to her and false as to facts. Some people appear to
believe that if they keep girls entirely ignorant of all truth, they
will necessarily become devotees of truth, and if you could succeed in
finding a girl who is a perfect idiot, you would find one who is also a
perfect angel."
"We are a variegated lot at best and worst," said a lady to me the other
day, when discussing the character of a man who is in the public eye, "I
know a different side of his character. The side I know I like. The side
the public knows is so different." But in fiction he would be all one
way. He would be a scamp and know it, or he would be a saint--and know
that too. The fact is he is neither; and we _are_ a variegated set at
best and worst. Why not out with it in fiction and be armed and equipped
for character and life as it is?
There is a school of critics who will say this is not the province of
fiction. Fiction is to entertain, not to instruct. With this I do not
agree--only in part. But accepting the standard for the moment, I am
sure that a picture of life as it is, is far more entertaining than is
that shadowy and vague photograph of ghosts taken by moonlight, which
"safe stories for the young" generally present.
But to enumerate the fictions of fiction would be to undertake an
arduous task--to comment upon them all would be impossible.
How much remorse--how many heartbreaks--have been caused by the one
of these which may be indicated briefly in a sentence thus--"Stolen
pleasures are always the sweetest."
"She sullied _his_ honor," "He avenged his sullied honor," and all the
brood of ideas that follows in this line have built up theories and
caused more useless bloodshed and sorrow than most others. No wife
can stain the honor of her husband. He, only, can do that, and it is
interesting to note the fact that he who struts through fiction with a
broken heart and a drawn sword "avenging" said honor (in the sense
in which the word is used), seldom had any to avenge, having quite
effectively divested himself of it before his wife had the chance.
"She begged him to make an honest woman of her." What fiction of fiction
(and, alas, of law) could be more degrading to womanhood--and hence
to humanity--than the thought here presented? The whole chain of ideas
linked here is vicious and vicious only. Why sustain the fiction that a
woman can be elevated by making her the permanent victim of one who has
already abused her confidence, and now holds himself--because of his own
perfidy--as in a position to confer honor upon his victim? He who is not
possessed of honor cannot confer it upon another. "The purity of family
life" is another fiction of fiction which never did and never can exist,
while based upon a double standard of morals. That there ever was or
ever will be a "union of souls" in a family where a double standard
holds sway, or that women are truthful or frank with men upon whom they
are dependent, are fictions which it were time to face and controvert
with facts. Dependence and frankness never co-existed in this world in
an adult brain--whether it were the dependence of the serf or of the
wife or daughter, the result is ever the same. The elements of character
which tend to self-respect and hence to open and truthful natures, are
not possible in a dependent--or in a social or political inferior. Do
the peasants tell the lord exactly what they think of him, or do they
tell him what they know he wishes them to think?
Did the black men, while yet slaves, give to the master their own
unbiased opinion of the institution of slavery? Not with any degree of
frequency. The application is obvious.
Another of the fictions of fiction upon which the vicious build, and
which has disarmed thousands before the battle, is the insistency with
which the idea is presented that a man (or woman) who is honestly and
truly and conscientiously religious, is therefore necessarily moral or
honorable; that he is a hypocrite in his religion if he is a knave in
his life. Observation and history and logic are all against the theory.
Some of the most exaltedly religious men have been the most wholly
immoral. It was honest religion that burned Servetus and Bruno. They
were not hypocrites who hunted witches. It is not hypocrisy that draws
its skirts aside from a "fallen" sister, and immorally marries her
companion in illicit love to purity and innocence. Do you know any
religious father (or many mothers) in this world who would refuse to
allow their son, whom they know to be of bad character, to marry a girl
who is as pure and spotless and suspicion-less as a flower? "She will
reform him," they say. "It will be good for him to marry such a girl."
And how will it be for her? Does the religious man or woman not take
this view of morals? Has right and wrong, sex? Is honor and truthfulness
toward others limited in application? Have you a right to deceive
certain people for the pleasure or benefit of other people? If so where
is the boundary line? Would the girl marry you or your son if she knew
the exact truth--if she were to see with her own and not with your
eyes--_all_ of your life? Would you be willing to take her with you, or
for her to go unknown to you, through all the experiences of your past
and present? No? Would you be willing to marry her if she had exactly
your record? No? You truly believe then that she is worthy of less than
you are? Honor does not demand as much of you for her as it does of her
for you? You would think she had a right--you would not resent it if
her life had been exactly what yours was and is, and if she had deceived
you? Is that which is coarse or low for women not so for men? Why is
it that men will not submit to, if it comes from women, that which they
impose upon women whom they "adore" and "truly respect?"
Would women accept this sort of respect and adoration if they were not
dependents? Does literature throw a true or a fictitious light on such
questions as these?
To whose advantage is it to sustain such fictitious standard of morals,
of justice, of love, of right, of manliness, of honor, of womanly
dignity and worth? To whose advantage is it to teach by all the arts of
fiction that contentment with one's lot--whatever the lot may be--is a
virtue? Yet it is one of the fictions of fiction that the contented man
or woman is the admirable person. All progress proves the contrary. To
whose advantage is it to insist that virtue is always rewarded--vice
punished? We know it is not true. Is it not bad enough to have been
virtuous and still have failed, without having also the stigma which
this failure implies under such a code? We all know that vicious success
is common--that often vice and success are partners for life and that
in death they are not divided; that the wicked flourish like a green
bay-tree--why blink it in fiction? Why add suspicion to failure
and misfortune, and gloss success with the added glory that it is
necessarily the result of virtue? To those who know how false the theory
is, it is a bad lesson--to those who do not know it, it is a disarmament
against imposition.
Some of the fictions of fiction have their droll side in their nâive
contradictions of each other. These examples occur to me:
"Women are timid and secretive." "They can't keep a secret." "They are
the custodians of virtue." "They are the 'frailer' sex." "Frailty, thy
name is woman." "With the passionate purity of woman."
"Abstract justice is an attribute of the masculine mind." "Man's
inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn."
"No class was ever able to be just to--to do justly by another
class--hence the need of popular representation." "Women should take no
part in politics."
"Women are harder upon women than men are." "He disgraced his honored
name by actually marrying his paramour."
"We are happy if we are good."
"He was one of the best and therefore one of the saddest of men."
But why multiply examples. Many--and different ones--will occur to
every thinking mind, while illustrations of the particular fictions of
fiction, which have gone farthest to cripple you or your neighbor, will
present themselves without more suggestions.