When I said to you the other day that things would have to go my way now, you were horrified at the conceit of it. To get to facts, there’s no conceit in it—because my way is simply the practise of not imposing one’s will upon other people. I made the remark merely as a common sense suggestion, and made it out of a seriousness that is desperate. I say “desperate” because I mean that literally: the situation isn’t a question of a mere temporary adjustment—just some sort of superficial arrangement so that we can get on pleasantly for a while before the next outbreak comes. The plans Betty and I have discussed have been made in the interest of our whole future lives:—whether we’re going to submit (either by surrender or compromise or by just drifting along and not doing anything) to an existence of bickering, nagging, hours spent in the discussion of non-essentials, hideous lack of harmony—the whole stupid programme we’ve watched working for years and achieving nothing but unhappiness, folly, and a terrible “human waste.” You ask us to continue in your way; but from at least three points of view that way has been a failure. I ask you to adopt my way—which has not yet failed. That’s why I say it’s not conceit, but common sense.
My way is simply this: that we three can live together and work in peace and harmony if this awful bugbear of Authority is dropped out of the scheme. Each of us must go her own way; we’re all different, and there’s no reason why one should impose her authority on the lives of the others. You say that you should because you’re our mother. But that’s the thing I want to discuss.
Motherhood isn’t infallibility. If a woman is a wise woman she’s a wise mother; if she’s a foolish woman she’s a foolish mother. Because you’re our mother doesn’t mean that you must always be right; before being a mother you’re a human being, and any human being is likely to be wrong. To get down to brutal facts, we think you are not right about the whole thing. We’ve thought so for years, but now it’s come to the time when our thinking must be put into action. We’re no longer children; but even as mere infants we thought these things—without having the right to express them. What I’m trying to do now is to express them not as a daughter, but quite impersonally as a human being, as a mere friend, a sister, or anyone who might come to you stating that she believed with all her soul that you were wrong, and also stating, just as impersonally, that she wouldn’t think of modeling her line of conduct after that pattern which appeared to her so wrong. We must face the facts; if you do that squarely it doesn’t seem so bad, and you stop flinching about it. You get to the point where you’re not afraid to face them boldly, and then you begin to construct. And this is the only way to clear up the kind of rottenness and decay that flourishes in our family life.
It’s in the interest of this achievement that I say the thing a girl isn’t supposed to say to her mother—namely, that Betty and I will not any longer subscribe to the things you expect us to. The fact to face just as quickly as possible is this: it’s the starting point. When you realize that we feel it’s a question of doing this or laying a foundation for lives that are just half lives—hideous perverted things which miss all the beauty that you can put into the short life given you—I think you’ll see how serious we are. We’re at least two intelligent human beings, if we’re nothing else. And why should you ask or expect that we’ll submit to a system which to us means stupidity, misery, pettiness—all those things which we’ve seen working out for years and which, being at least intelligent, we want to keep away from?
That much settled, we can continue to live together in just one way—as three sisters or friends; the motherhood, in so far as it means authority or an attempt to mould us to your way, must be eliminated. A complete new family idealism can be built on such a basis. You will say that it’s an abnormal basis for any mother to accept. Of course it is; but the situation is abnormal, and the orthodox remedies aren’t applicable.
The reason I say the situation is abnormal is this: usually when a mother objects to her daughters’ behavior it is on some definite basis of opposing the things they do—like going to too many parties or falling in love with the wrong man. You have very little fault to find with the things we do. Your objections are on a basis of what we are—or, rather, of what we are not: that we are not orthodox, that we are not hypocrites, that we are not the kind of daughters the Victorians approved of. “Hypocrites” will sound paradoxical; but you have confessed that you would rather have us lie to you than to disagree with you; that you would rather have us be sentimental about “the way a girl should treat her mother” than to learn how we ought to treat ourselves. You call that being “respectful” and think that harmony is possible only under such conditions. We call it being “insulting,” and think that it’s the one sure way of destroying any chance of harmony. If we respect you it must be because we think you worthy of the truth: anything else is degrading to both sides.
You’ll say you can’t be satisfied to live with us and not give advice and all the other things that are part of a mother’s duty. You may give all the advice you want to; the keynote of the new situation will be that we’ll take the advice if we believe it’s right; if not we’ll ignore it, just as a man ignores his friend’s advice when he feels it to be wrong. Of course the wise person doesn’t give much advice; he simply lives his life the best way he knows how. That’s the only bid he can make for emulation. If we tell you that we don’t approve of the creed you have made you mustn’t be surprised if we try to formulate one of our own. There’s no reason for us to ask you to change just because we’re your daughters. You must do as you believe. But you must grant us the same privilege.
We disagree about fundamentals. If our beliefs were merely the vague, unformed ideas of children you might try to change them. But it’s too late now. So we can live together harmoniously only if we give up the foolish attempts at “influencing.”
We’re not living three generations ago. We’ve had Shaw since then, and parents and children aren’t doing the insulting things to each other they used to do. Among intelligent people some of the old issues can never raise their heads again. And so, it’s for you to decide:—whether we shall build on the new foundation together or separately.
It might be a play; it’s certainly rather good for reality. And what happened? The mother refused to “accept the terms”—which is not surprising, perhaps; and the household broke up into two establishments with results that will disappoint the conservative who thinks those girls should have been soundly beaten. The first wrench of it, the girl said, reminded her of George’s parting with Marion in Tono-Bungay:—that sense of belonging to each other immensely, that “profound persuasion of irreparable error” in the midst of what seemed profoundly right. “Nothing is simple,” Wells wrote in that connection; “every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil.” But the girl and her mother have learned to be friends as a result of that break, and the latter will tell you now that it was the right thing to have done.