IS THE NEW WOMAN NEW?(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 prodigiesof 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 puissanteConcevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueuxJ’eusse aimé vivre auprès d’une jeune géante,Comme aux pieds d’une reine un chat voluptueux.”
“Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissanteConcevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueuxJ’eusse aimé vivre auprès d’une jeune géante,Comme aux pieds d’une reine un chat voluptueux.”
“Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueuxJ’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.”
“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.”
“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 amongfin de sièclepoets; and to be as a merevillage 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 itruin. “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 thislyonnaiseso 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 asLa 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 acordier, 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.”
“En armes fière aller,Porter la lance et bois faire aller,Le devoir faire en l’estour furieux,Piquer, volter le cheval glorieux.”
“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 citingLa Belle Cordièreas 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 realizethe 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 richcordierwith 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 arethe 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 acordier, 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.