Later on I hope to find time to arrange and verify and issue the new material on the subject. It has grown in confirmatory evidence as it has grown in bulk, with steady and assuring regularity.
Helen Hamilton Gardener.
THE FICTIONS OF FICTION
I read—on a recent railway journey—a popular magazine. Its leading story was labeled as a "story for girls." In it the traditional gentleman of reduced fortunes continued to still further deplete the family-resources by speculation, and the three daughters who figure in most such stories went through the regular paces, so to speak.
One taught music; one painted well and sold her bits of canvas for ten dollars each; but the third girl had no talent except that of a cheerful temperament and the ability to drape curtains and arrange furniture attractively. These girls talked over the fact, that they were now reduced to their last ten dollars and the pantry was empty, father ill, and mother—not counted. They joked a little, wept a few tears, and prayed devoutly. Then the talentless one received an invitation in the very nick of time to visit the richest lady in town (a cripple with a grand house). She went, she saw, and, of course, she conquered—earned money by giving artistic touches to the houses of all the rich people in town, and eight months later married the nephew of the opulent cripple. No more mention is made of the empty pantry, the sick father, and the two talented girls whose labor did not previously keep the wolf from the door. But it is only fair to suppose that the new husband was to be henceforth the head of the entire establishment—surely a warning to most young men contemplating matrimony under such trying circumstances. All is supposed to move on well, however, and every hapless girl who reads such a story, is led to believe that she is the household fairy who will meet the prince and somehow (not stated) redeem her father's family from want and despair. For it is the object of such stories to convey the impression that everything is quite comfortable and settled after the wedding. The young girl who reads these stories looks out upon life through the absurd spectacle thus furnished her. She sees nothing as it is. Such little plans as she can make, are based upon wholly incorrect data. Her whole existence is unconsciously made to bend to the idea of matrimony as a means of salvation for herself and such persons as may be in any way objects of care to her.
Indeed, what are commonly known as "safe stories for girls," are made up of just such rubbish, which if it were only rubbish, might be tolerated; but the harm all this sort of thing does can hardly be estimated. I do not now refer to the harm of a more vicious sort that is sometimes spoken of as the result of story reading. I am not considering the deliberately scheming nor the consciously self-sacrificing girl who struts her day on the stage and in fiction marries to save the farm or her father or any one else. I am thinking of the every-day girl, who is simply led to see life exactly as it is likely not to be, and is therefore disarmed at the outset. She is filled with all sorts of dreamy ideas of rescue by prayer or by means of some suddenly developed—previously undreamed-of—rich relation or lover or, I had almost said—fairy. And why not? Literature used to bristle with these intangible aids to the helpless or stranded author. The name is changed now, it is true, but the fairy business goes bravely on at the old stand, and the young are fed with views of life, and of what they will be called upon to meet, which are none the less harmful and visionary because of the changed nomenclature.
A gentleman of middle age said to me not long ago: "I grew up with the idea that people were like those I met in books. I went out into life with that belief. I measured myself by those standards, and I have spent much time in my later years re-adjusting myself to fit the facts. It placed me at a great disadvantage. I saw people and deeds as they were not—as they are never likely to be in this world—and I could not believe that my own case was not wholly exceptional. I began to look at myself as quite out of the ordinary. My experiences were such as belied my reading, and it was a very long time and after serious struggle, that I discovered that it was my false standards, derived from reading popular fiction, that had deceived me and that, after all, life had to be met upon very different lines from the ones laid down by the ordinary writers of fiction. I really believe I was unfitted for life as I found it, more by the fictions of fiction than by any other one influence."
Another gentleman—a writer of renown—said to me: "We may not 'hold the mirror up to nature' as nature is. The critics will not have it. We must hold it up to what we are led to think nature ought to be."
Now that would be all very well, no doubt, if the picture were labeled to fit the facts. If it were distinctly understood by the reader that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the outcome of real life would be wholly different, that the right man would not turn up, in the nick of time, to point out to the defenseless widow that there was a flaw in the deed; if the reader was warned that honest effort often precedes failure; that virtue and vice not only may, but do, walk hand in hand down many a life-long path and sometimes get the boundary lines quite obliterated between them; if he understood that in life the biggest scoundrel often wears the most benign countenance and does not go about with a leer and a scowl that labels him, all might be well.