[From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal.]
THE EVERY-DAY MARRIED LADY.
It might be supposed that the every-day married lady was formerly the every-day young lady, and has now merely changed her condition. But this is not the case, for nothing is more common than to see the most holiday spinsters settle down into the most working-day matrons. The married lady, in fact, of the species we would describe, has no descent in particular. If you can imagine a pupa coming into the world of itself without any connection with the larva, or an imago unconscious of the pupa, that is the every-day married lady. She is born at the altar, conjured into life by the ceremonial, and having utterly lost her individual existence, becomes from that moment a noun of multitude. People may say, "Oh, this is our old acquaintance, Miss Smith!" but that is only calling names, for the identity is gone. If she is any thing at all but what appertains to the present, she is the late Miss Smith, who has survived herself, and changed into a family.
We would insist upon this peculiarity of the every-day married lady—that her existence is collective. Her very language is in the plural number—such as we, ours, and us. She respects the rights of paternity so much, as never to permit herself to talk of her children as peculiarly her own. Her individuality being merged in her husband and their actual or possible offspring, she has no private thoughts, no wishes, no hopes, no fears but for the concern. And this is all the better for her tranquillity: for although a part of her husband, she does not quite fancy that he is a part of her. She leaves at least the business to his management, and if she does advise and suggest on occasions, she thinks that somehow things will come out very well. She feels that she is only a passenger; and although, as such, she may recommend the skipper to shorten sail when weathering a critical point, or, for the sake of safety, to come to anchor in the middle of the sea, she has still a certain faith in his skill or luck, and sleeps quietly in the storm. For this reason the every day married lady is comfortable in the figure, and has usually good round features of her own. The Miss Smith she has survived had a slender waist and small delicate hands; but this lady is a very tolerable armful, and the wedding-ring makes such a hollow on her finger, that one might think it would be difficult to get off.
The every-day married lady is commonly reported to be selfish; but this is a mistake. At least her selfishness embraces the whole family circle: it has no personality. When the wife of a poor man, she will sit up half the night sewing and darning, but not a stitch for herself: that can be done at any time; but the boys must go comfortably to school, and the girls look genteel on the street, and the husband—to think of Mr. Brown wanting a button on his shirt! She looks selfish, because her eye is always on her own, and because she talks of what she is always thinking about; but how can one be selfish who is perpetually postponing herself, who dresses the plainest, eats the coarsest, and sleeps the least of the family? She never puts herself forward in company unless her young ladies want backing; but yet she never feels herself overlooked, for every word, every glance bestowed upon them, is communicated electrically to her. She is, indeed, in such perfect rapport with the concern, that it is no uncommon thing for her to go home chuckling with amusement, overpowered with delight, from a party at which she had not once opened her lips. This is the party which she pronounces to have "gone off" well. Half-observant people fancy that the calculation is made on the score of the jellies and ice, and singing and dancing, and so on, and influenced by a secret comparison with her own achievements; but she has more depth than they imagine, and finer sympathies—they don't understand her.
Not that the every-day married lady is unsocial—not at all: all comfortable people are social; but she is partial to her own class, and does not care to carry her confidences out of it. She has several intimate friends whom she is fond of meeting; but besides that, she is a sort of freemason in her way, and finds out every-day people by the word and sign. Rank has very little to do with this society, as you will find if you observed her sitting at a cottage door, where, in purchasing a draught of milk, she has recognized a sister. If these two every-day married women had been rocked in the same cradle, they could not talk more intimately; and, indeed, they have heavy matters to talk about, for of all the babies that ever came into this breathing world, theirs were the most extraordinary babies. The miracle is, that any of them are extant after such outrageous measles, and scarlet fevers, and chicken-poxes—prophesied of, so to speak, even before their birth, by memorabilia that might have alarmed Dr. Simson. The interlocutors part very well pleased with each other: the cottager proud to find that she has so much in common with a real lady, and the lady pronouncing the reflection of herself she had met with to be a most sensible individual.
Although careless in this instance of the circumstance of rank, the every-day married lady has but little sympathy with the class of domestic servants. She looks upon her servants, in fact, as in some sort her natural enemies, and her life may therefore be said to be passed at the best in a state of armed neutrality. She commonly proceeds on the allowance system; and this is the best way, as it prevents so many sickening apprehensions touching that leg of mutton. Indeed the appetite of servants is a constant puzzle to her: she can not make it out. She has a sharp eye, too, upon the policeman, and wonders what on earth he always looks down her area for. As for followers, that is quite out of the question. Servants stay long enough upon their errands to talk to all the men and women in the parish; and the idea of having an acquaintance now and then besides—more especially of the male sex—tramping into the kitchen to see them, is wildly unnatural. She tells of a sailor whom she once detected sitting in the coolest possible manner by the fireside. When she appeared, the man rose up and bowed—and then sat down again. Think of that! The artful girl said he was her brother!—and here all the every-day married ladies in the company laugh bitterly. Since that time she has been haunted by a sailor, and smells tar in all sorts of places.
If she ever has a passable servant, whom she is able to keep for a reasonable number of years, she gets gradually attached to her, and pets and coddles her. Betty is a standing testimony to her nice discrimination, and a perpetual premium on her successful rearing of servants. But alas! the end of it all is, that the respectable creature gets married to the green grocer, and leaves her indulgent mistress: a striking proof of the heartlessness and ingratitude of the whole tribe! If it is not marriage, however, that calls her away, but bad health; if she goes home unwell, or is carried to the infirmary—what then? Why, then, we are sorry to say, she passes utterly away from the observation and memory of the every-day married lady. This may be reckoned a bad trait in her character; and yet it is in some degree allied to the great virtue of her life. Servants are the evil principle in her household, which it is her business to combat and hold in obedience. A very large proportion of her time is spent in this virtuous warfare; and success on her part ought to be considered deserving of the gratitude of the vanquished, without imposing burdens upon the victor.
The every-day married lady is the inventor of a thing which few foreign nations have as yet adopted either in their houses or languages. This thing is Comfort. The word can not well be defined, the items that enter into its composition being so numerous, that a description would read like a catalogue. We all understand, however, what it means, although few of us are sensible of the source of the enjoyment. A widower has very little comfort, and a bachelor none at all; while a married man—provided his wife be an every-day married lady—enjoys it in perfection. But he enjoys it unconsciously, and therefore ungratefully: it is a thing of course—a necessary, a right, of the want of which he complains without being distinctly sensible of its presence. Even when it acquires sufficient intensity to arrest his attention, when his features and his heart soften, and he looks round with a half smile on his face, and says, "This is comfort!" it never occurs to him to inquire where it all comes from. His every-day wife is sitting quietly in the corner: it was not she who lighted the fire, or dressed the dinner, or drew the curtains, and it never occurs to him to think that all these, and a hundred other circumstances of the moment, owe their virtue to her spiriting, and that the comfort which enriches the atmosphere, which sparkles in the embers, which broods in the shadowy parts of the room, which glows in his own full heart, emanates from her, and encircles her like an aureola. We have suggested, on a former occasion, that our conventional notions of the sex, in its gentle, modest, and retiring characteristics, are derived from the every-day young lady; and in like manner we venture to opine that the every-day married lady is the English wife of foreigners and moralists. Thus she is a national character, and a personage of history; and yet there she sits all the while in that corner, knitting something or other, and thinking to herself that she had surely smelt a puff of tar as she was passing the pantry.