Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

Fiction has utilized even her hours of leisure and amusement to sap the self-respect of womanhood while it helped very greatly to brutalize and lower man by keeping—in this insidious form—the thought ever before him that woman is a function only and not a person, and that even in this limited sphere she is and should be proud to be man's subject. "He for God only, she for God in him."

It is true that since the advent of women writers fiction has shown a tendency to modify, to a limited extent, this previously universal dictum, but the thought still dominates literature greatly to the detriment of morals and of the dignity of both men and women.

"The woman who has no history is the woman to be envied," says literature—and yet people do not envy her any more than they do the man of like inconspicuous position. No one wishes that she might go down to history, if one may so express it, as history less. No one points with pride to Jane Smith as his illustrious ancestor any more than if Jane had chanced to be John. To have been a Mary Somerville, or an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or a George Eliot, most historyless women would be willing to change places even now, and as for "those who come after," can there be a question as to which would give more pride or pleasure to man or woman, to say—"I am the son, or the brother, or the niece of Mrs. Browning," or to say, "Jane Smith, of Amityville, is my most famous relative?"

I have my suspicions that even * Mr. Fitzgerald would waver in favor of Elizabeth in case both women were his cousins. In public, at least, he would mention Jane less frequently and with less of a touch of pride. Personally he might like her quite as well. That is aside from the question. I have no doubt that he might like John Smith as well as Shakespeare, personally, too, and John may have led a happier life than William, but is a man with no history to be envied for that reason? The application is obvious.

One of the most insidious fictions of fiction, which it seems to me is harmful, is the theory that the good are so because they resist temptation, while the bad are vicious because they yield easily—make a poor fight.

Leaving out heredity and its tremendous power, it is likely that you would have yielded under as strong pressure as it took to carry your neighbor down. I say as strong pressure—not the same pressure—for your tastes not being the same, your temptations will take different forms. **

* Fitzgerald "thanked God" when Mrs. Browning died. See
reply by Robert Browning in Athenaeum.
** "Our lives progress on the lines of least resistance."
—Van Dbr Waukr, M. D.

If you had been born of similar parents and on Cherry Hill; if you had been one of a family of ten; if you had been stunted in mind and in body by want of nourishment; if you had been given little or no education; if you had helped to get bread for the family almost from the time you could remember; your record in the police court would not differ very greatly from that of those about you. In nine cases out of ten you would be where you sent that convict last year. Your pretty daughter would be the associate of toughs. She might be pure—in the sense in which the word is applied to women—but she would have a mind muddy and foul with the murk and odors of a life fit only for swine. She would marry a brute who honestly believes that so soon as the words of a priest or a magistrate are said over them, she belongs to him to abuse if he sees fit, to impose upon, lie to, or to let down into the valley of death for his pleasure whenever he sees fit, and quite without regard to her opinions or desires in the matter. She would be an old and broken woman at thirty, ugly, misshapen, and hopeless, with hungry-faced children about her, whose next meal would be a piece of bread, whose next word would be too foul to repeat, whose next act would disgrace a wolf.

In turn they would perpetuate their kind in much the same fashion, and some of your grandchildren would be in the poor-house, some in prison, some in houses of ill-repute, and perchance some doing honest work—sweeping the streets or making shirts for forty cents a dozen for the patrons of a literature that goes on promoting the theory that the chief duty of the poor is to irresponsibly bring more children into the world—to work for them as cheaply as possible. To the end that they may restrict their own families to smaller limits and—by means of cheaper labor caused largely by over population from below—clothe their loved ones in purple and build untaxed temples of worship, where poverty and crime is taught to believe in that other fiction of fictions—the "providence" that places us where we deserve to be and where a loving God wishes us to be content.

Indeed, this supernatural finger in literature has gone farther, perhaps, to place and keep fiction where it is, as a misleading picture of life and reality, than has any other influence. It has dominated talent and either starved or broken the pen of genius. "Oh, if I might be allowed to draw a man as he is!" exclaims Thackeray, as he leaves the office of his publisher, with downcast eyes and bowed head. He goes home and "cuts out most of his facts," and returns the manuscript which is acceptable now, because it is not true to life!