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Updated July 24, 1997
Created July 24, 1997
Review of Léonie Villard: La Anglaise au XIXeme Siècle et son Evolution d’après le Roman Anglais Contemporain in The Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 1920. It is reprinted in Books and Portraits.
If you look at a large subject through the medium of a little book you see for the most part something of such vague and wavering outline that, though it may be a Greek gem, it may almost equally be a mountain or a bathing machine. But though Mlle Villard's book is small and her subject vast, her focus is so exact and her glass so clear that the outline remains sharp and the detail distinct. Thus we can read every word with interest because it is possible at a thousand points to check her statements; she is on every page dealing with the definite and the concrete. But how, in treating of a whole century, a whole country, and a whole sex, is it possible to be either definite or concrete? Mlle Villard has solved the problem by using fiction as her material; for, though she has read Blue-books and biographies, her freshness and truth must be ascribed largely to the fact that she has preferred to read novels. In novels, she says, the thoughts, hopes and lives of women during the century and in the country of her most remarkable development are displayed more intimately and fully than elsewhere. One might indeed say that were it not for the novels of the nineteenth century we should remain as ignorant as our ancestors of this section of the human race. It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald; but save in these respects, and in others where they are said to be identical -with men, we know little of them and have little sound evidence upon which to base our conclusions. Moreover, we are seldom dispassionate.
Before the nineteenth century literature took almost solely the form of soliloquy, not of dialogue. The garrulous sex, against common repute, is not the female but the male; in all the libraries of the world the man is to be heard talking to himself and for the most part about himself. It is true that women afford ground for much speculation and are frequently represented; but it is becoming daily more evident that Lady Macbeth, Cordelia, 0phelia, Clarissa, Dora, Diana, Helen and the rest are by no means what they pretend to be. Some are plainly men in disguise; others want what men would like to be, or are conscious of not being; or again they embody that dissatisfaction and despair which afflict most people when they reflect upon the sorry condition of the human race. To cast out and incorporate in a person of the opposite sex all that we miss in ourselves and desire in the universe and detest in humanity is a deep and universal instinct on the part both of men and of women. But though it affords relief, it does not lead to understanding. Rochester is as great a travesty of the truth about men as Cordelia is of the truth about women. Thus Mlle Villard soon finds herself confronted by the fact that some of the most famous heroines even of nineteenth-century fiction represent what men desire in women, but not necessarily what women are in themselves. Helen Pendennis, for example, tells us a great deal more about Thackeray than about herself. She tells us, indeed, that she has never had a penny that she could call her own, and no more education than serves to read the Prayer-book and the cookery-book. From her we learn also that when one sex is dependent upon the other it will endeavour for safety's sake to simulate what the dominant sex finds desirable. The women of Thackeray and the women of Dickens succeed to some extent in throwing dust in their masters' eyes, though the peculiar repulsiveness of these ladies arises from the fact that the deception is not wholly successful. The atmosphere is one of profound distrust. It is possible that Helen herself flulng off her widow's weeds, took a deep draught of beer, produced a short clay pipe, and stuck her legs on the mantelpiece directly her master was round the corner. At any rate, Thackeray cannot forbear one glance of suspicion as he turns his back. But midway through the nineteenth century the servile woman was stared out of countenance by two very uncompromising characters - Jane Eyre and Isobel Berners. One insisted that she much preferred wandering on a heath to settlign down and marrying anybody. Mlle Villard attributes the remarkable contrast betwen the servile and the defiant, the sheltered and the adventurous, to the introduction of machinery. Rather more than a century ago, after whirling for many thousands of years, the spinning-wheel became obsolete.
. . . [omits paragraph in French quoted from Villard]
For the first time for many ages the bent figure knobbed hands and the bleared eyes, who, in spite of the poets, is the true figure of womanhood, rose wash-tub, took a stroll out of doors, and went into the factory. That was the first painful step on the road to freedom.
Any summary of the extremely intelligent pages in which Mlle Villard has told the story of the Englishwoman’s progress from 1860 to 1914 is impossible. Moreover, Villard would be the first to agree that not even a woman, and a Frenchwoman at that, looking with the clearsighted eyes of her race across the Channel, can say for certain what the words 'emancipation' and 'evolution-' amount to. Granted that the woman of the middle class has now some leisure, some education, and some liberty to investigate the world in which she lives, it will not be in this generation or in the next that she will have adjusted her position or given a clear account of her powers. "I have the feelings of a woman," says Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd, "'but I have only the language of men." From that dilemma arise infinite confusions and complications. Energy has been liberated, but into what forms is it to flow? To try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others are more fitting, is a task that must be accomplished there is freedom or achievement. Further, it is well to remember that woman was not created for the first time in the year 1860. A large part of her energy is already employed and highly developed. To pour such surplus energy as there may be into new forms without wasting a drop is the difficult problem which can only be solved by the simultaneous evolution and emancipation of man.