Women's Heroes

THERE are three great writers, geniuses, who are sweepingly severe in their judgment of women. The quiet irony of Euripides and the savage satire of Juvenal, which fairly eats into the mind as acid into steel, do not exceed in their degree the imperturbable, cold contempt of Milton. Indeed, the Olympian disdain of the great Puritan holds in it more potency, perhaps, than does the fine scorn of the Greek, or the furious hatred of the Latin. And though this judgment of genius may have been colored by unfortunate personal experience, yet it does not take from the fact that the judgment stands as recorded ; nor is it less significant that all charges and specifications brought against womankind by her accusers great and small may be summed up in one word — Inconstancy. It is woman’s ineradicable inconstancy which has always wrought mischief.

declares Milton, and he furthermore adds that the defect lies as much with woman’s head as with her heart, that nature, to counterbalance physical perfection in woman, has sent her forth with “ judgment scant ” and mind but half made up.

In the writings of women, however, — though there are of course no women writers great in any sense in which these geniuses are great, — condemnation so unqualified is never found. Men are never condemned as such; for woman’s judgment leans to mercy’s side. The life individual, the closeness of the affections which, as society is now organized, make the affections mean so much more to women than to men, likewise make women never unmindful of the truth that they are always daughters, if not sisters, mothers, and wives.

Women have been accused of writing with one eye on the paper and the other on some individual. But if this be true, that individual is seldom flesh and blood reality, and still seldomer some Frankenstein of experimental horror. It is rather a lovely evocation of the fancy, a being enskyed and sainted. For it is a psychological truth that while personal preference and experience widely differ, yet there is, among women’s heroes, a curious typical likeness. So that whether women be married or single, bond or free ; whether their experience of life be large or limited ; whether they be of great talents or none ; whether they aim to depict men as they are or men as they would like men to be, — this same general resemblance among women’s heroes holds good.

Turning from the world of Reality where things are as they are to the world of Romance where things are as they ought to be, — accounting Romance, if one will, as the compensation which life sets over against Reality, — it is worth while to consider closely the rare gallery of women’s heroes. These gentlemen may not all be beautiful, but they are all interesting, at least to women, and all have that family likeness which makes them so significant. And if in the Elysian Fields of immortality, from beds of amaranth and moly, the fine creations of fancy ask no questions, — they nevertheless suggest questions to us. Are women’s heroes representative ? If so, do they represent what women are, or rather what women desire ? Are women’s heroes instinctive unconscious reflections of women ; or are they instinctively and unconsciously complementary to women? Do they stand for what women are, or for what women lack ? In her heroes has the creature feminine more effectively depicted herself than any masculine hand — save one — has been able to limn her ? These questions are evoked by that essential similarity which all these heroes wear.

For, while women themselves may have ample wit and humor they never, even by a happy accident, bestow them on their heroes. In novels by women, when humor and wit have any play at all, they are relegated to side issues, to minor characters. George Eliot had a vein of excellent humor, but she never shares it with her heroes, and she had surely worked it out before coming to the hero of her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Mrs. Poyser is a witty woman, though her wit is of the strenuous, personal kind which gives a fillip o’er the head rather than an illuminative flash ; but the hero, Adam Bede, is as ponderous mentally as he is physically. Jane Austen, too, had a choice humor and a delicate, butterfly wit, yet Darcy, Wentworth, Edmund — all her men who may be accounted heroes — are as solemn as Minerva’s owl. Miss Edgeworth, with her rare, far-sighted sagacity, though she allows here and there to a secondary character some humor, yet has no hero who is distinctively humorous and witty. And the plentiful lack of wit and humor in the heroes of our present woman writers is a marked characteristic — to be conveniently Irish — of these sober-minded gentlemen.

Why is it, then, that women do not allow wit and humor to their heroes ? Is it because, as a rule, women are essentially non-humorous ? Or, seeing that wit and humor are the eyes of wisdom, and that to be witty and wise and to love as women dream of love is well-nigh impossible, do women, by an unerring instinct, refrain from giving to their heroes what would add to their charm as men but would detract from their power as lovers ? Faith, I cannot tell. Yet it must be a pretty reason which shall account for this general absence of wit and humor in women’s heroes.

This brings us to another trait common to these worthies. Who knows not that man’s best loving falls far short of woman’s dream of love ? Yet there are no women writers, from least to greatest, whose heroes in respect to love and constancy are not unconquerable. So, whatever else women’s heroes may have, or may lack, they are all determined lovers. They are all of an adamantine constancy which will outlast the fellest combinations of circumstance, the longest flight of years, the worst of smallpox. How constitutionally superior this is to nature and to every-day reality we all know ; yet we all insist on having it so set down. Women are born idealists and theorists, and with this regard, and in respect to love and loving, women’s heroes have something pathetic. But as lovers their common likeness is overwhelming, and is done with a naïvetï as great as it is charming. Through Time’s defacing mask these lovers see the beauty that once was, or is to be. They realize something of the ideal of the finest of all fine lovers, and do indeed

The highest genius being dual-natured will show the man and woman in it, coefficients if not coequals; and women must, perhaps, wear something of doublet and hose in their disposition, and men something of farthingale and ruff in theirs, before either can do their respective heroes and heroines full justice. For men’s heroines and women’s heroes have this in common, that when it comes to depicting them the colors on the palette are mixed with some brave, idealizing pigment which is apt to destroy individuality and life likeness, even if it does leave behind what alone makes art worthy and the picture lasting — Beauty.

Judging, however, from the realistic point of view, in most fiction by women the secondary characters are best — best because done with a dispassionateness which gives them vividness and force. It is one of the tests of a really fine novel when the hero and heroine stand in the front rank of delineative power. From a woman’s hand as fine an instance of this as we have is the portrayal of Paul Emmanuel by Charlotte Brontë. Paul may not be generally attractive, but he is the fitting counterpart of Lucy Snowe, the one man who (the angle of the affections being always equal to the angle of the imagination) would have attracted her; and we are made to feel and see, as the genuine outgrowth of character, the inevitableness of their attachment. But above all, Paul’s individuality as a man is never sacrificed to his affection as a lover; he is a man first, and a lover afterwards, and herein lies the better part of the author’s rare triumph. For art is not the imitation of nature, but the persuasion of the intellect. And hence the failure, in the main, of the servile realist on the one hand, and of the labored romanticist and psychologist on the other; for the one would fain copy unfigleafed nature, and the others would fain transcribe unfleshed emotions and mind. It is true that we none of us know just what this so glibly talked of nature really is ; but we all have some conception of it. It matters not, then, whether the method be realistic or romantic provided the effect is convincing. For no matter how, or with what, he works, this power to convince is one of the incommunicable secrets of the artist.

The difficulty with most women’s heroes is, however, that they do not convince. Not that women do not portray admirably men in general; they both can and do. It is in their heroes only that women overstep the modesty of nature and, by overweighting the emotional faculty in them as lovers, come so tamely off.

With men’s heroines the case is different. These fair ladies convince, in so far as they go. For in a bird’s-eye view of literature one cannot fail to see how few are the varieties of the creature feminine. Literature is a something of men’s creating, and it is a rough and ready judgment, but not an untrue one, to say that, as represented in literature, women may be divided into two classes : woman, the charmer and deceiver; and woman, the server. On the one hand we have the Helens, Circes, Beatrix Esmonds, Becky Sharps; and on the other, the Penelopes, Antigones, Griseldas, Custances, and Amelias.

But women’s heroes do, for the most part, resolve themselves into but one class, that of the Lover, an idealized creature whose like was never seen save in Antony’s description of the crocodile : —

“ It is shaped like itself; it is as broad as it has breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourisheth it [feminine fancy, probably] ; and, the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.”

All the old stories turn not so much upon man’s inhumanity to man as upon man’s inconstancy to woman, and woman’s to man. But the ratio is as three to one. As against Helen and her French leave-taking of Menelaus, we have Theseus and Ariadne, Jason and Medea, Æneas and Dido; so that if the primitive tu quoque argument ever be worth while, here it lies all ready to my lady’s hand.

But this brings us back to the beginning. Why does the creature charged with being preëminently inconstant so value constancy that she overlooks all else save this noble grace of steadfastness ? If the light by which we see is in ourselves, so that we must take care how we perceive, then, judging by the degree and kind of women’s perception of this virtue, ought not they themselves to possess much of it ? But what becomes of the world-old charge ? And by this same token, man perceiving so much inconstancy must by masterly self-delusion attribute to woman what is his own chief defect. But this is doubtless delicate ground, even though Sir Proteus does lament, —

For Shakespeare, like women, would seem to set all store by constancy.

However may be explained the discrepancy between a time-honored theory concerning woman and women’s heroes, the fact remains that in the subtle art of fiction where so much comes into view which can be found nowhere else, women’s heroes rarely convince. And for the simple reason that women, laying all stress upon one quality only, make their heroes typical lovers rather than complex, seemingly actual men.

Ellen Duvall.