The Melancholy of Woman's Pages

CONTEMPORANEOUS with hoopskirts and coalscuttle bonnets was a form of literature obviously, though not explicitly, for ladies, whose very keynote was woe. As a child, I hailed as a treasure every “ Gem ” and “ Annual ” and “ Book of Beauty” which, with tarnished gilding and delicate pictures grown somewhat discolored by time, lingered in the delightfully heterogeneous library of which I had the freedom. With a swelling lump in my small throat, and a gathering mist before my innocent young eyes, many and many a time I have followed the fortunes of hapless Zuleikas and fond, ill-fated Mustaphas, sad Brazilian brides, and luckless Indian lovers, forsaken village maids and swains done to death by false, false loves; of the Widowed, the Orphaned, the Homeless, the Heart-Broken; have arrived by ways innumerable at the simple tombstone inscribed with the single word, Helena (or Jane, or Isabel, or Maria, as the case might be), which was so favorite a goal of the Early Victorian romance. It was all very sad, but, in provincial reporter parlance, very enjoyable.

Needless to say, this elegant melancholy is as obsolete as the coalscuttle bonnet and the hoopskirt; and with distinctly less chance, I think, of recall to favor.

The very keynote, indeed, of the Woman’s Page is optimism. Its unvarying motto is, Everything is lovely— or may be. Are you unhappily married ? Simply make yourself entrancing through the careful following of certain easy, infallible rules, and lo, a new honeymoon, and happiness ever after! Are you a maid forlorn, plain of face and awkward of manner ? Grow beautiful and engaging by means of the formula obligingly furnished, and Prince Charming will come. Are the pitiless years leaving their marks upon you ? Erase the wrinkles as they come by dexterous rubbings and smoothings, and unfading youth is yours. Are you beyond the pale of Society ? Acquire ease, grace, distinction, savoir faire, by home study, and all doors will open wide to welcome you.

There are recipes for everything, from domestic bliss to cleansing compounds, from success in life to salad dressings. My good is sought in a thousand ways; in gentle exhortations to be up and doing in every possible direction; in succinct columns of Don’ts; in pithy paragraphs of Useful Information; in exploitations of the fashions; in Health Talks and Beauty Hints. My good, I say; for there is in it all something so pointedly personal, it is so obviously addressed to my wants and my interests as a woman, that it is not to be evaded or put by. A pseudo-conscience calls me to its perusal from masterly leader or thrilling news-story; from high politics or current history. And I yield, — not without sulkiness.

I yield because it deals with my concerns, — and because it deals with my concerns, I yield sulkily. Not, I protest, that there is any especial sting of personal application in the Don ’ts, or otherwhere, — not that I am bred so dull I cannot learn the manifold lessons in manners, morals, domestic science, fashion, beautification, and the art of happiness. But the personal is a dogging shadow which has no right to enter with me into the world of print, and many a nugget of genuinely useful information it would take to bury the memory of that impertinence.

I would not go so far, be it said with emphasis, as wholly to deny the benefit of type to such matter as makes up the content of Woman’s Pages. I would by no means object to the harmless necessary Recipe Book and Fashion Paper, which have their definite times and uses; nor to the Woman’s Magazine,—for you may love it or leave it alone. I once knew an old woman who would demur against too strenuous objection to snakes. “If you don’t say nothing to the snake,” she would say, “ the snake ain’t going to say nothing to you,” — an aphorism which, taken in a “soft and flexible sense, ” has more than once in my experience made for tolerance.

But the Woman’s Page, I repeat, pursues me, weighs me, and finds me wanting, without my invitation, — with a concurrence upon my part merely forced and reluctant. Quite against my will, I am spurred to the performance of imperative duties galore unmentioned in the Decalogue, duties of physical culture and hygiene, of charmcraft and economy. It is without my real privity and consent that I am prodded with precept and stirred to teasing ambition, that I am moved to the painful storing of bits of alleged useful information, and am made uneasily aware of the latest collar and the newest style of hairdressing, — destined to change ere I can make them mine.

There is an element of resentment in the oppression of spirits which I have called the Melancholy of Woman’s Pages, and with it all a haunting, inarticulate sense of the pathos of womanhood.