Part 5 (1/2)
But the poorer or less worthy cla.s.s 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 s.e.x--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, n.o.ble or ign.o.ble as the cause may be, comes into another cla.s.s 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 a.s.sume.
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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te to correspond, but about whom the home superst.i.tion 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 gla.s.s 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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 compa.s.s 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 circ.u.mlocution 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 circ.u.mstances--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 pa.s.s under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pa.s.s 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 censors.h.i.+p 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.
In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.
It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic service so painfully apparent among the better cla.s.s of working women is due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit.
For, when we come to a.n.a.lyse it, what does it really signify to us how our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let their garments damage our goods? Fas.h.i.+on is almost always ridiculous, and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything else; and if the kitchen apes the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old ”who will guard the guardian?” Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference will the interferer submit?
There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain men's fiercer pa.s.sions, and force them to be gentle and considerate, women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence, not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth must be given as is demanded--which, so far as humanity has gone hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would call their attention to the difference there is between influence and interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two lives. We a.s.sure her that she would get her own way in large matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and have only reference to themselves.
PLAIN GIRLS.
It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural philosophers, fas.h.i.+onable and unfas.h.i.+onable mothers, meet one another on the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the kitchen and housekeeper's-room.
It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all lead up to the marriage of the princ.i.p.al young lady. Sometimes, as in the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man, public opinion as unhesitatingly a.s.serts of woman; and a text that it is not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.
Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the mysterious designs of Providence a.s.sure us with confidence that all this is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly, but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of humanity in the abstract.
One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been made for them.
It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to give himself up to the wors.h.i.+p of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial instinct might enable us to wors.h.i.+p her as a mother, but even the n.o.blest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever auth.o.r.ess of ”Jane Eyre” nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through their deep eyes and from their ma.s.sive foreheads, seemed for a while, on paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.
The only difficulty was to get the male s.e.x to follow out in practice what they so completely admired in Miss Bronte's three-volume novels.