There is the widow of the Wadman kind, who has outlived her grief and
is not disinclined to a repetition of the matrimonial experiment, if
asked humbly by an experimenter after her own heart. But she must be
asked humbly that she may grant in a pretty, tender, womanly way--if
not quite so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly in her degree, and
with that peculiar fascination which nothing but the combination of
experience and modesty can give. The widow of the Wadman kind is no
creature of prey, neither shark nor hawk; at the worst she is but a
cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise in the world, the
tenderest little call to indicate her whereabouts, and to show that
she is lonely and feels a-cold. She sits close, waiting to be found,
and does not ramp and dash about like the hawk sisterhood; neither
does she pretend that she is unwilling to be found, still less deny
that a soft warm nest, well lined and snugly sheltered, is better than
a lonely branch stretching out comfortless and bare into the bleak
wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get what she wants, with the
advantage of being voluntarily chosen and not unwillingly submitted
to.
This is the kind of woman who is always mildly but thoroughly
happy in her married life; unless indeed her husband should be a
brute, which heaven forefend. She lives in peace and bland contentment
while the fates permit, and when he dies she buries him decently and
laments him decorously; but she thinks it folly to spend her life in
weeping by the side of his cold grave, when her tears can do no good
to either of them. Rather she thinks it a proof of her love for him,
and the evidence of how true was her happiness, that she should elect
to give him a successor. Her blessed experience in the past has made
her trustful of the future; and because she has found one man faithful
she thinks that all are Abdiels. As a rule, this type of woman does
find men pleasant; and by her own nature she ensures domestic
happiness. She is always tenderly, and never passionately, in love,
even with the husband she has loved the best. She gives in to no
excesses to the right nor to the left. Her temperament is of that
serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue others nor wear out its
possessor. Without ambition or the power to fling herself into any
absorbing occupation, she lives only to please and be pleased at home;
and if she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters lovingly and proud
that she is fettered, she is nothing. As some women are born mothers
and others are born nuns, so is the Wadman woman a born wife, and
shines in no other character nor capacity. But in this she excels; and
knowing this, she sticks to her _rôle_, how frequently so ever
the protagonist may be changed.
There are widows, however, who have no thought nor desire for
remaining anything but widows--who have gained the worth of the world
in their condition, 'Jeune, riche, et veuve--quel bonheur!' says the
French wife, eyeing 'mon mari' askance. Can the most exacting woman
ask for more? And truly such a one is in the most enviable position
possible to a woman, supposing always that she has not lost in her
husband the man she loved. If she has lost only the man who sat by
right at the same hearth with herself--perhaps the man who quarrelled
with her across the ashes--she has lost her burden and gained her
release.
The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a woman who never takes the
world into her confidence, and who bears in absolute silence what she
has not the power to cast from her. Perhaps her husband has been a man
of note, a man of learning, of elevated station, a political or a
philanthropic power. She alone knew the fretfulness, the petty
tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the man of large repute
whom his generation conspired to honour, and whose public life was a
mark for the future to date by. When he died the press wrote his
eulogy and his elegy; but his widow, when she put on her weeds, sang
softly in her own heart a pæan to the great King of Freedom, and
whispered to herself Laudamus with a sigh of unutterable relief.
To such a woman widowhood has no sentimental regrets. She has come
into possession of the goods for which perhaps she sold herself; she
is young enough to enjoy the present and to project a future; she has
the free choice of a maid and the free action of a matron, as no other
woman has. She may be courted and she need not be chaperoned, nor yet
forced to accept. Experience has mellowed and enriched her; for though
the asperities of her former condition were sharp while they lasted,
they have not permanently roughened nor embittered her. Then the sense
of relief gladdens, while the sense of propriety subdues, her; and the
delicate mixture of outside melancholy, tempered with internal warmth,
is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to resist that gentle
sadness which does not preclude the sweetest sympathy with pleasures
in which she may not join--with happiness which is, alas! denied her.
It gives an air of such profound unselfishness; it asks so mutely, so
bewitchingly, for consolation!
Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty young widow in the
funereal black of her first grief, sitting apart with a patient smile
and eyes cast meekly down, as one not of the world though in it. Her
loss is too recent to admit of any thought of reparation; and yet what
man does not think of that time of reparation? and if she be more than
usually charming in person and well dowered in purse, what man does
not think of himself as the best repairer she could take? Then, as
time goes on and she glides gracefully into the era of mitigated
grief, how beautiful is her whole manner, how tasteful her attire! The
most exquisite colours of the prismatic scale look garish beside her
dainty tints, and the untempered mirth of happy girls is coarse beside
her subdued admission of moral sunshine. Greys as tender as a dove's
breast; regal purples which have a glow behind their gloom; stately
silks of sombre black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or
brightened with the 'dark light' of sparkling jet--all speak of
passing time and the gradual blooming of the spring after the sadness
of the winter; all symbolize the flowers which are growing on the sod
that covers the dear departed; all hint at a melting of the funereal
gloom into the starlight of a possible bridal. She begins too to take
pleasure in the old familiar things of life. She steals into a quiet
back seat at the Opera; she just walks through a quadrille; she sees
no harm in a fête or flower-show, if properly companioned. Winter does
not last for ever; and a life-long mourning is a wearisome prospect.
So she goes through her degrees in accurate order, and comes out at
the end radiant.
For when the faint shadows cast by the era of mitigated grief fade
away, she is the widow _par excellence_--the blooming widow, young,
rich, gay, free; with the world on her side, her fortune in her hand,
the ball at her foot. She is the freest woman alive; freer even than
any old maid to be found. Freedom, indeed, comes to the old maid
when too late to enjoy it; at least in certain directions; for while
she is young she is necessarily in bondage, and when parents and
guardians leave her at liberty, the world and Mrs. Grundy take up the
reins and hold them pretty tight. But the widow is as thoroughly
emancipated from the conventional bonds which confine the free action
of a maid as she is from those which fetter the wife; and only she
herself knows what she has lost and gained. She bore her yoke well
while it pressed on her. It galled her but she did not wince; only
when it was removed, did she become fully conscious of how great had
been the burden, from her sense of infinite relief through her
freedom. The world never knew that she had passed under the harrow;
probably therefore it wonders at her cheerfulness, with the dear
departed scarce two years dead; and some say how sweetly resigned she
is, and others how unfeeling. She is neither. She is simply free after
having lived in bondage; and she is glad in consequence. But she is
dangerous. In fact, she is the most dangerous of all women to men's
peace of mind. She does not want to marry again--does not mean to
marry again for many years to come, if ever; granted; but this does
not say that she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's
society. And being without serious intentions herself, she does not
reflect that she may possibly mislead and deceive others who have no
such cause as she has to beware of the pleasant folly of love and its
results.
In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman, able to cultivate
the dearest friendships with men and fearlessly using her power, she
entangles many a poor fellow's heart which she never wished to engage
more than platonically, and crushes hopes which she had not the
slightest intention to raise. Why cannot men be her friends? she asks,
with a pretty, pleading look--a tender kind of despair at the
wrong-headedness of the stronger sex. But, tender as she is, she does
not easily yield even when she loves. The freedom she has gone through
so much to gain she does not rashly throw away; and if ever the day
comes when she gives it up into the keeping of another--and for all
her protestations it comes sometimes--the man to whom she succumbs may
congratulate himself on a victory more flattering to his vanity, and
more complete in its surrender of advantages, than he could have
gained over any other woman. Belle or heiress, of higher rank or of
greater fame than himself, no unmarried woman could have made such a
sacrifice in her marriage as did this widow of means and good looks,
when she laid her freedom, her joyous present and potential future, in
his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well that he is never
reproached for that sacrifice--if his wife never looks back
regretfully to the time when she was a widow--if there are no longing
glances forward to possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs at the
difficulty of retracing a step when made. On the whole, if a woman can
live without love, or with nothing stronger than a tender
sentimental friendship, widowhood is the most blissful state she can
attain. But if she be of a loving nature and fond of home, finding her
own happiness in the happiness of others and indifferent to
freedom--thinking, indeed, that feminine freedom is only another word
for desolation--she will be miserable until she has doubled her
experience and carried on the old into the new.
_DOLLS._
The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children; and a nursery
without some of these silent simulacra for the amusement of the little
maids is a very lifeless affair. But outside the nursery door dolls
are stupid things enough; and, whether improvised of wisped-up bundles
of rags or made of the costliest kind of composition, they are at the
best mere pretences for the pastime of babies, not living creatures to
be loved nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they are
pretty in their own way, and some are made to simulate human actions
quite cleverly; and one of their charms with children is that they can
be treated like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation. They
can be scolded for being naughty; put to bed in broad daylight for a
punishment; seated in the corner with their impassive faces turned to
the wall, just as the little ones themselves are dealt with; the doll
all the time smiling exactly as it smiled before, its round blue beads
staring just as they stared before; neither scolding nor cornering
making more impression on its sawdust soul than do little missy's sobs
and tears when nurse is cross and dolly is her only friend. But
the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of
companionship and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of
itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of
material. The doll proper is a simple structure of wax or wood, 'its
knees and elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a complex
machine of flesh and blood. But, saving such structural differences,
these women are as essentially dolls as those in the bazaar which open
and shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by a wire, and
squeak when you pinch them in the middle. There are women who seem
born into the world only as the playthings and make-believes of human
life. As impassive as the waxen creatures in the nursery, no
remonstrance touches them and no experience teaches them. Their final
cause seems to be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-room
order, and to be the occasions by which their friends and companions
are taught patience and self-denial. And they perfectly fulfil their
destiny; which may be so much carried to their credit. A doll woman is
hopelessly useless and can do nothing with her brains or her hands. In
distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as
her round smooth face will permit; but she has not a helping
suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put forth.
When a man has married a doll wife he has assigned himself to absolute
loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in
any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can
tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his
thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's
point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to
understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very
essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both
for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of passion, the
bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them;
and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and
her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she
knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs
over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears.
Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself,
he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like
the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his
toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her
habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a
burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and
repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and
necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or
inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are
groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them
sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a
plastic manner!
The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally.
If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed,
according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical
and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general,
however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as
well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of
those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no
possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape.
Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses;
and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help
herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless
heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her
eyes without making an effort to protect them.
As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps more unsatisfactory than
in any other character. She gives up her nursery into the absolute
keeping of her nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to
interfere. This again, is not from want of affection, but from want of
capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart, if only half-vitalized
like the rest of her being; and she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she
has not force enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow; her worst
offence being a passive kind of selfishness, not from greed but from
inactivity, by which she is made simply useless for the general good.
As for her children, she understands neither their moral nature nor
their physical wants; and beyond a universal 'Oh, naughty!' if the
little ones express their lives in the rampant manner proper to young
things, or as a universal 'Oh, let them have it!' if there is a howl
over what is forbidden or unwise, she has no idea of discipline or
management. If they teaze her, they are sent away; if they are
naughty, they are whipped by papa or nurse; if they are ill, the
doctor is summoned and they have medicine as he directs; but none of
the finer and more intimate relations usual between mother and child
exist in the home of the doll mother. The children are the property of
the nurse only; unless indeed the father happens to be a specially
affectionate and a specially domestic man, and then he does the work
of the mother--at the best clumsily, but at the worst better than the
doll could have done it.
Very shocking and revolting are all the more tragic facts of human
life to the smooth-skinned easy-going doll. When it comes to her own
turn to bear pain, she wonders how a good God can permit her to
suffer. Had she brains enough to think, the great mystery of pain
would make her atheistical in her angry surprise that she should be so
hardly dealt with. As dolls have a constitutional immunity from
suffering, her first initiation into even a minor amount of
anguish is generally a tremendous affair; and though it may be pain of
a quite natural and universal character, she is none the less
indignant and astonished at her portion. She invariably thinks herself
worse treated than her sisters, and cannot be made to understand that
others suffer as much as, and more than, herself. As she has always
shrunk from witnessing trouble of any kind, and as what she may have
seen has passed over her mind without leaving any impression, she
comes to her own sorrows totally inexperienced; and one of the most
pitiable sights in the world is that of a poor doll woman writhing in
the grasp of physical agony, and broken down or rendered insanely
impatient by what other women can bear without a murmur.
When she is in the presence of the moral tragedies of life, she is as
lost and bewildered as she is with the physical. All sin and crime are
to her odd and inexplicable. She cannot pity the sinner, because she
cannot understand the temptation; and she cannot condemn from any
lofty standpoint, because she has not mind enough to see the full
meaning of iniquity. It is simply something out of the ordinary run of
her life, and the doll naturally dislikes disturbance, whether of
habit or of thought. Yet if a noted criminal came and sat down by her,
she would probably whisper to her next friend, 'How shocking!' but she
would simper when he spoke, and perhaps in her heart feel flattered by
the attention of even so doubtful a notoriety. If she be a doll
with a bias towards naughtiness, the utmost limit to which she can go
is a mild kind of curiosity about the outsides of things--the mere
husk and rind of the forbidden fruit--such as wondering how such and
such people look who have done such dreadful things; and what they
felt the next morning; and how could they ever come to think of such
horrors! She would be more interested in hearing about the dress and
hair and eyes of the female plaintiff or defendant in a famous cause
than many other women would be; but she would not give herself the
trouble to read the evidence, and she would take all her opinions
secondhand. But whether the colour of the lady's gown was brown or
blue, and whether she wore her hair wisped or plaited, would be
matters in which she would take as intense an interest as is possible
to her.
The utmost limit to which enthusiasm can be carried with her is in the
matter of dress and fashion; and the only subject that thoroughly
arouses her is the last new colour, or the latest eccentricity of
costume. Talk to her of books, and she will go to sleep; even novels,
her sole reading, she forgets half an hour after she has turned the
last page; while of any other kind of literature she is as profoundly
ignorant as she is of mathematics; but she can discuss the mysteries
of fashion with something like animation, these being to her what the
wire is to the eyes of the dolls in the bazaar. Else she has no power
of conversation. At the head of her own table she sits like a
pretty waxen dummy, and can only simper out a few commonplaces, or
simper without the commonplaces, satisfied if she is well appointed
and looks lovely, and if her husband seems tolerably contented with
the dinner. She is more in her element at a ball, where she is only
asked to dance and not wanted to talk; but her ball-room days do not
last for ever, and when they are over she has no available retreat.
If a rich doll woman is a mistake, a poor one who has been rich is
about the greatest infliction that can be laid on a suffering
household. Not all the teaching of experience can make wax and glue
into flesh and blood, and nothing can train the human doll into a
dignified or a capable womanhood. She still dresses in faded
finery--which she calls keeping up appearances; and still has
pretensions which no 'inexorable logic of facts' can destroy. She
spends her money on sweets and ribbons and ignores the family need for
meat and calico; and she sits by the fireside dozing over a trashy
novel, while her children are in rags and her house is given over to
disorder. But then she has a craze for the word 'lady-like,' and
thinks it synonymous with ignorance and helplessness. She abhors the
masculine-minded woman who helps her--sister, cousin, daughter--so far
as she can abhor anything; but she is glad to lean on her strength,
despite this abhorrence, and, while grumbling at her masculinity, does
not disdain to take advantage of her power. The doll is only passively
disagreeable though; and for all that she carps under her breath,
will remain in any position in which she is placed. She will not act,
but she will let you act unhindered; which is something gained when
you have to deal with fools.
This quiescence of hers passes with the world for plasticity and
amiability; it is neither; it is simply indolence and want of
originating force. While she is young, she is nice enough to those who
care only for a pretty face and a character founded on negatives; but
when a man's pride of life has gone, and he has come into the phase of
weakness, or under the harrow of affliction, or into the valley of the
shadow of death, then she becomes in sorrowful truth the chain and
bullet which make him a galley-slave for the remainder of his days,
and which sign him to drudgery and despair.
As an old woman the doll has not one charm. She has learned none of
that handiness, come to none of that grand maternal power of helping
others, which should accompany maturity and age and has still to be
thought for and protected, to the exclusion of the younger and
naturally more helpless, as when she was young herself, and beautiful
and fascinating, and men thought it a privilege to suffer for her
sake. Nine times out of ten she has lost her temper as well as her
complexion, and has become peevish and unreasonable. She gets fat and
rouges; but she will not consent to get old. She takes to false hair,
dyes, padded stays, arsenic or 'anti-fat,' and to artful contrivances
of every description; but alas! there is no 'dolly's hospital' for her
as there used to be for her battered old prototype in the nursery
lumber-closet; and, whether she likes it or not, she has to succumb to
the inevitable decree, and to become faded, worn out, unlovely, till
the final _coup de grâce_ is given and the poor doll is no more. Poor,
weak, frivolous doll! it requires some faith to believe
that she is of any good whatsoever in this overladen life of ours; but
doubtless she has her final uses, though it would puzzle a Sanhedrim
of wise men to discover them. Perhaps in the great readjustment of the
future she may have her place and her work assigned to her in some
inter-stellar Phalansterie; when the meaning of her helpless earthly
existence shall be made manifest and its absurd uselessness atoned for
by some kind of celestial 'charing.'
_CHARMING WOMEN._