She is never so childlike as when she imagines she is most daring. And the charm of the book is its excessive femininity. What she says, even when not absolutely absurd, may be of little importance; but her feeling is so genuine and strong as to merit respect and attention.
THROUGH FIFTY YEARS.
THE ECONOMIC PROGRESS OF WOMEN.
November, 1900.
Looking back fifty years for the best picture of the middle-class woman’s outlook on life, spreading itself before her after some startling shock of reality, none seems to me so true and so vivid as Caroline Helstone’s vision of her own future given in “Shirley.” The book appeared in October, 1849.
Although not so instinct with the flame of genius as “Villette,” yet in some respects “Shirley” is Charlotte Brontë’s greatest work. Her other novels present life only as it appeared to an exceptional woman cut off by what was in those days called the “dependent situation” of a governess from wholesome relations with those about her. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are the morbid products of life in institutions, and Charlotte Brontë, to whom family life was an imperative necessity, was fully conscious of their abnormality. In “Shirley” we have a broader, more sympathetic, in every way saner treatment of men and women. And the protest against the unnecessary tragedy of women’s lives comes not from the passionate egotist of the schoolroom, but from the most lovable, perhaps the only lovable, woman in Charlotte Brontë’s books.
“I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest. Nobody,” she went on—“nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are, and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do—better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now.... Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood—the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions; they have something to do; their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish—the sole aim—of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule: they don’t want them; they hold them very cheap. They say—I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time—the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manœuvres; they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else—a doctrine as unreasonable to hold, as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook, or for wearing what they sew. Could men live so themselves? Would they not be very weary? And, when there came no relief to their weariness, but only reproaches at its slightest manifestation, would not their weariness ferment in time to frenzy?... King of Israel, your model of a woman is a worthy model. But are we, in these days, brought up to be like her? Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal standard? Can they reach it? Can you help them to reach it? Can you give them a field in which their faculties may be exercised and grow? Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids—envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once; but consider the matter well when it is brought before you, receive it as a theme worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle jest or an unmanly insult. You would wish to be proud of your daughters and not to blush for them—then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manœuvrer, the mischief-making tale-bearer. Keep your girls’ minds narrow and fettered—they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you. Cultivate them, give them scope and work—they will be your gayest companions in health, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in age.”
And Mary Taylor—Rose Yorke in “Shirley”—added, “Make us efficient workers, able to earn our living in order that we may be good, useful, healthy, self-respecting women.”
How far have we travelled in these fifty years towards Mary Taylor’s ideal? How far is it accepted as a right one? Is it now considered a sufficiently ambitious one?
There is no doubt that we have travelled much nearer to it than anyone in 1850 would have foreseen, and further than many pioneers at that period would have desired.