We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

II

There is a strangely feeble pulsation in these three books, the voice is hushed, the colours broken. In reading them we seem to sit as on a rainy day in a finely furnished, richly perfumed drawing-room, before an open fire-place with a red glass screen, in which the flame flickers and is magnified, producing an effect that is wonderfully sleepifying and unreal. Yet in the midst of all this luxury we can hear the pattering of the rain outside, and our souls shiver as the artificial home comforts glide further and further away, and we are left surrounded by cold and emptiness....

The reason is that the women who live in this home have no warmth to give, their charms are restless and unsatisfying, their vanity is cruel and insatiable, they need men as they need the mirrors in their dressing-rooms, in order that they may be surrounded by them and able to see their own images reflected from every possible point of view.

The new element in these French writers consists in their having simultaneously discovered and appropriated this type, a type which is international, but which, in its psycho-physiological development can only be properly studied through the medium of a French author’s unprejudiced views, and only properly appreciated by the moral large-heartedness of a French public.

The women in these books are ladies, of whom it is said in society that they are “without reproach.” Their conduct is blameless, they never forget themselves. They keep within the bounds of innocent flirtation, and have developed the same to the dimensions of a science which renders them almost irresistible; they are intelligent coquettes, and they are more, they are creative coquettes, who turn themselves into works of art, and only as such do they wish to be admired and enjoyed; they are objets d’art which must not be touched or handled, and their cunning consists in endowing these works of art with an appearance of life, soul and passion. They, with their empty natures, are not satisfied with emptiness in the opposite sex.

They have a longing to replenish their own natures at the cost of others, and they cling like vampires to the men who have something to give, and who are able to vouchsafe to them the delight of seeing them suffer. For they never satisfy the wishes which they have awakened. They never forget themselves.

So far it is fortunate for the man who falls in love with them that they do not forget themselves, for however worthless their gifts may be, there is nothing so worthless as the gift of themselves. All the disappointments of which they are the cause are as nothing compared to the disappointment of the man when he clasps them in his arms. There is something strangely soulless and impersonal about them, his heart seems to beat against a lifeless body, no warmth encircles him, no electric stream proceeds from them, they give him no joy, nor do they experience any. These women who have so much mind, cleverness, intelligence and reflection, who are so beautiful, so fashionable, so superior—they have no nature. They are like those barren ears of corn that tower above the corn-field with their long stalks and slender pannicles, waving to and fro, and attracting attention to themselves, but in whose husks we find no seed. They are like those large empty nuts, which, when cracked, are found to contain nothing but a little mildew. And all the while they seek for that which is lacking in themselves, they like to talk about the weariness of life, the vanity of hope, the secret attractions of love; they tease and charm and beckon from afar, they let it be supposed that they have much to give, yet all their desire is to play with their idle delicate fingers upon the soul of man as upon an instrument of music. They want to strike a note to hear it sound and vibrate, and they make themselves his friends for the sake of being loved, and of quivering with the passion of self-love, they nod to their reflections in the mirror, and invent a new way of doing the hair, or a new and sprightly aperçu when they find that they have succeeded in their desire, which is to experience a faint reflex glow from the feelings which they have kindled in man.

Their looking-glass is their lover, their sole interest is centred in themselves, the aim and object of their lives is to be self-conscious, and life for them consists in circling round themselves.

Men of this sort, men who are sterile egoists, have frequently been described; but until now no one has ever probed the depths of woman’s lack of feeling. Here, as in almost every subject that is new to literature, the French are the first to lead the way. But in real life these types meet us long before literature sees them and makes them her own, and women have long been familiar with this side of one another’s nature. The silent struggles which man does not perceive, and which both parties conceal from him, the coquette from vanity and her rival from pride, these silent struggles are legion as the sacrifices which they have cost.

It is not moral prejudice that restrains the best types of the species from satisfying the more or less forbidden love which they awaken, for they pride themselves on their open minds; and it is not cowardice, for they are clever enough to escape any suspicion of scandal attaching to themselves; their inward coldness is the only cause. They are not willing to disturb themselves, lest in so doing the work of art, which is their own selves, should discover its defects. They lose nothing, or if they do, it is their imagination that is the loser. And if at the last they forget themselves it is not their blood or their heart, but it is the glow of reflex desire that forgets itself.