NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMAN
The serious research that some contemporary French students are devoting to our English literature is one of the most valuable by-products of the Entente. We have had of recent years remarkable French monographs on Wordsworth, on Cowper, on Crabbe, on Hazlitt, which are fully as authoritative as any of our native commentaries. And, turning over the new volumes at a French bookseller’s the other day, I came across another Gallic tribute of this kind, with a rather lengthy title, “La Femme Anglaise au XIXᵉ siècle et son évolution d’après le roman anglais contemporain,†by Mme. Léonie Villard. Mme. Villard seems to have read all our modern English novels, from Richardson’s “Pamela†down to the latest piece of propagandism of Mr. H. G. Wells. Of course mere literary curiosity could never have carried any human being through all that; Mme. Villard is an ardent “feminist,†and, like her sisters, capable of miraculous physical endurance for the “cause.†A mere man may “devour whole libraries,†but it takes a fair feminist to swallow the huge mass of English fiction.
Reading exclusively from a single point of view, Mme. Villard seems to have sometimes sacrificed her critical sense to her principles. Thus, as a type of the nineteenth-century “old maid,†so neglected, so ill-used by society, she selects Miss Rachel Wardle! Dickens, generally “so pitiful to the weak, so generous to the oppressed and the conquered,†had no pity for her. But upon us it is incumbent to pity and understand and find excuses for her. “At any rate, her desire to be loved and, above all, to experience in other surroundings a freer and less humiliating life should have nothing surprising for us.†Isn’t this rather a solemn way of describing the lady’s amours with Mr. Tupman and Mr. Jingle? Is it really the fault of society if an amorous old dame will be silly? And is she not to be laughed at if she happen to fall into the category “old maid� Mrs. Bardell was amorous too. So was Mr. Tupman. Dickens laughs at these also—but then they were not old maids, they didn’t illustrate a “feminine case.†Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She reminded some people of Harriet Martineau. But Dickens had deformed the type (who was intelligent and was not the mother of a family) so as to present the “new woman†in the least favourable light. He “has fixed for half a century the type of the intellectual or enfranchised woman, as conceived by those who trust the judgment of others rather than their own direct observation.†The question, surely, is not whether Mrs. Jellyby was unlike Harriet Martineau,but whether in herself she was a sufficiently comic personage. Most readers of Dickens find her so. What injustice is there in this to the real “new woman,†whom, as Mme. Villard has shown, she didnotresemble? As a matter of fact, when Dickens had a mind to draw a real “strong-minded†woman he drew her most sympathetically. Is there any of his women more delightful than Miss Trotwood? “To-day,†says Mme. Villard, “she appears to us an unconscious feminist whose feminism misses its mark, since it can find no field of action amid narrow, provincial, routine surroundings.†Poor Miss Trotwood!
We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.†But who were unkindest to Miss Wardle? Her nieces, members of her own sex. Who created the typical “old maid†and terrible bore, Miss Bates? Another “old maid,†Jane Austen. The fact is, old maids like other human beings have their foibles. Are these never to be put into a book? Feminism seems to make its disciples terribly serious. Miss La Creevy is Dickens’s example of thefemme artiste. See, says Mme. Villard, how types of “independent women†are caricatured! She cannot laugh at Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig, because they testify to the social contempt attaching to the nursing profession at their date! Has it never occurred to her that novels are sometimes written merely asnovels and not asdossiersin a “case†for the “evolution†of woman?
After all, however, there are plenty of serious novelists who do supply good evidence—more particularly the quasi-propagandists like Mrs. Gaskell (when she chose) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (sometimes), and (nearly always) Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Mme. Villard makes effective play with these. She has no difficulty, for instance, in showing the immense economic advance of the woman-worker during the last century, though even here her eye seems too exclusively fixed on her own sex. True, women were the chief victims of the old “factory†and “sweating†systems, but the amelioration of their condition, if I am not mistaken, came only as part of the general amelioration in the condition of “labour,†without sex-distinction.
It is when she comes to the sentimental side of her subject, the relation of woman to man whether in marriage or “free love,†that Mme. Villard finds her material a little too much for her. Naturally, for our novelists and playwrights can never let the too fascinating subject alone and seem to go on saying the same things about it over and over again—con variazioni. You have, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, so far back as 1850, dealing with the same theme as Mr. Stanley Houghton dealt with in “Hindle Wakes†(1910)—the refusal of the seduced woman to accept the regularization of her position by marriage. Then there are the free-lovers “onprinciple,†who end by conceding marriage to social prejudice—like Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica. There must be English novels where the “free lovers†maintain their principle triumphantly to the end, though I haven’t read them; but I seem to remember several in the French language. It is all very confusing. Perhaps—I only say perhaps—those are wisest who leave “principle†in these matters to the heroes and heroines of the novelists and are content to live ordinary lives in an ordinary jog-trot way, without too much thinking about it. There is this comfort for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that whatever “evolution†of woman there may have been in the nineteenth century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be. I can find it as easy to-day to be in love with Emma and Elizabeth and Anne—I needn’t mention their surnames—who are more than a century old, bless them, as with (not to compromise myself with any contemporary English heroine) M. Barrès’s Bérénice, or with one of M. Marcel Proust’s “Jeunes filles en Fleurs.â€