Here, I said to myself, is material enough to prove Cornelia’s case, if she has a case. Among this company I shall find the challengers, if there is a challenge. What are they calling in question? The idea of chastity—whose idea of chastity? Cornelia’s idea, the idea of all nice people—What is the idea of all nice people regarding chastity? Look in the Dictionary, the record of good usage—Here it is: “Innocence of unlawful sexual intercourse.” As a history of usage, the Dictionary should add in parenthesis: “This is a virtue assumed to be present in all members of the female sex in good and regular standing.”
Here we have a simple and definite idea to work upon: Chastity is a virtue assumed to be present in all members of the female sex in good and regular standing. Who first gave currency to that idea? Our friends the Victorians? Oh, no! It is astonishing how many so-called Victorian ideas, delicate and fragile, can be found thriving in manlier ages, in old robust books like Don Juan and Tom Jones, and in the drama of that “den of lions,” the Renaissance. How they valued this virtue—those “lions” of the Renaissance! How they valued this virtue in their wives! What praise they had for its possessors—“chaste as the icicle that’s curded by the frost from purest snow and hangs on Dian’s temple”! Shakespeare valiantly assumed the presence of that virtue in all members of the female sex in good and regular standing—except Cleopatra.
But we must not be too historical. The idea of chastity exists full-blown in Goldsmith, in those two famous stanzas which inquire what happens when lovely woman stoops to “folly” and learns too late that men “betray,” that is, fail to legalize the “folly.” We remember what follows, for the lines were in every anthology employed in our formative period to give to our young minds a relish for virtue and a lively apprehension of the consequences of departing from it. Cornelia still thinks we should prescribe Goldsmith rather than Mr. Galsworthy for the collateral reading of her daughter. Goldsmith declares very firmly that when lovely woman stoops to folly, no art can wash her guilt away.
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom—is to die.
Several distinct elements appear in our fully developed idea: first, chastity is the virtue of a legal status; second, women are naturally law-abiding; third, if they lose their status, it is by the natural perfidy of predatory man; fourth, the disaster is irretrievable. There is no salvation for the woman but death, the cloister, exile, or, occasionally, a shamefaced return to “chastity” under the horsewhip or at point of the pistol.
This idea flourished in the “good old” novels of Sir Walter Scott; it is fairly well illustrated in the case of Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. Scott was a romancer. His contemporary, Jane Austen, was a realist. She was far less chivalrously certain than he that lovely women who are neglectful of legal status are by nature virtuous. She looked at them hard; she inclined strongly to believe that such women are by nature vain, sentimental, and ignorant—like Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. But Jane Austen is at one with Scott in treating unlawful passion austerely. In the fiction of both these worthies the erring woman is unmistakably a “victim”; the man, however plausible his manners, is a profligate and unprincipled, if not a designing, villain; the consequences of departure from legal status are depicted in strongly deterrent colors. Our idea of chastity is fortified by them.
Now let us advance a generation or so and question our friends the Victorians: do they accept our idea and loyally enforce it? Yes—now and then. Familiar cases? There is the case of little Em’ly in David Copperfield. She is the typical victim of the typical seducer; and Dickens punishes them both in approved traditional fashion. He drowns the wicked lover—which is, of course, a logical consequence of departure from legal status. He sends the victim with her “soft sorrowful blue eyes” to Australia, where she attempts to expiate her guilt by a life of self-sacrifice. She has many a good offer of marriage; “‘But, uncle,’ she says to me, ‘that’s gone for ever.’” Here we have the doctrine of the irretrievable. That doctrine is sternly proclaimed by George Eliot in the graver case of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede. The repentant lover tries to do something for Hetty. His last words are that it is no use: “You told me the truth when you said to me once, ‘There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.’” Neither Scott nor Jane Austen could have handled these elementary cases in a more strictly orthodox fashion. Our idea is again fortified.