Characteristics of Women Part 2

On the same principle, I suppose, that they have changed the treatment of lunatics; and whereas they used to condemn poor distempered wretches to straw and darkness, stripes and a strait waistcoat, they now send them to suns.h.i.+ne and green fields, to wander in gardens among birds and flowers, and soothe them with soft music and kind flattering speech.

ALDA.

You laugh at me! perhaps I deserve it.

MEDON.

No, in truth; I am a little amused, but most honestly attentive: and perhaps wish I could think more like you. But to proceed: I allow that with this view of the case, you could not well have chosen your ill.u.s.trations from real life; but why not from history?

ALDA.

As far as history could guide me, I have taken her with me in one or two recent publications, which all tend to the same object. Nor have I here lost sight of her; but I have entered on a land where she alone is not to be trusted, and may make a pleasant companion but a most fallacious guide. To drop metaphor: history informs us that such things have been done or have occurred; but when we come to inquire into motives and characters, it is the most false and partial and unsatisfactory authority we can refer to. Women are ill.u.s.trious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. Those characters best fitted to my purpose are precisely those of which history never heard, or disdains to speak; of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless they _might_ be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a part.

MEDON.

But instance--instance!

ALDA.

Examples crowd upon me; but take the first that occurs. Do you remember that d.u.c.h.esse de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?--the heroine of the Fronde?--think of that woman--bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!--who made men rebels with a smile;--or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous, apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was _too_ much!

And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her own servants--preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger, (that were little to a woman of her temper,) but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continual self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now if Shakspeare had drawn the character of the d.u.c.h.esse de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:--for the same being, with the same faculties, and pa.s.sions, and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of benevolence, and a wors.h.i.+pper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy.

MEDON.

But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt, or sick with belief, and are the proper subjects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher.

ALDA.

I cannot say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help _me_ out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves.

MEDON.

But all will not judge alike.

ALDA.

No; and herein lies a part of their wonderful truth. We hear Shakspeare's men and women discussed, praised and dispraised, liked, disliked, as real human beings; and in forming our opinions of them, we are influenced by our own characters, habits of thought, prejudices, feelings, impulses, just as we are influenced with regard to our acquaintances and a.s.sociates.

MEDON.

But we are then as likely to misconceive and misjudge them.

ALDA.

Yes, if we had only the same imperfect means of studying them. But we can do with them what we cannot do with real people: we can unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all pretensions of self-love, all disguises of manner. We can take leisure to examine, to a.n.a.lyze, to correct our own impressions, to watch the rise and progress of various pa.s.sions--we can hate, love, approve, condemn, without offence to others, without pain to ourselves.

MEDON.

In this respect they may be compared to those exquisite anatomical preparations of wax, which those who could not without disgust and horror dissect a real specimen, may study, and learn the mysteries of our frame, and all the internal workings of the wondrous machine of life.

ALDA.

And it is the safer and the better way--for us at least. But look--that brilliant rain-drop trembling there in the suns.h.i.+ne suggests to me another ill.u.s.tration. Pa.s.sion, when we contemplate it through the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicate nature, and a.n.a.lyze its variety of tints; but pa.s.sion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens,--blinding, burning, consuming where it falls.

MEDON.

Your ill.u.s.tration is the most poetical, I allow; but not the most just.

But tell me, is the ground you have taken sufficiently large?--is the foundation you have chosen strong enough to bear the moral superstructure you raise upon it? You know the prevalent idea is, that Shakspeare's women are inferior to his men. This a.s.sertion is constantly repeated, and has been but tamely refuted.

ALDA.

Professor Richardson?--

MEDON.

He is as dry as a stick, and his refutation not successful even as a piece of logic. Then it is not sufficient for critics to a.s.sert this inferiority and want of variety: they first a.s.sume the fallacy, then argue upon it. Cibber accounts for it from the circ.u.mstance that all the female parts in Shakspeare's time were acted by boys--there were no women on the stage; and Mackenzie, who ought to have known better, says that he was not so happy in his delineations of love and tenderness, as of the other pa.s.sions; because, forsooth, the majesty of his genius could not stoop to the refinements of delicacy;--preposterous!

ALDA.

Stay! before we waste epithets of indignation, let us consider. If these people mean that Shakspeare's women are inferior in power to his men, I grant it at once; for in Shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society--they are not equal in prominence or in power--they are subordinate throughout. Richardson remarks, that "if situation influences the mind, and if uniformity of conduct be frequently occasioned by uniformity of condition, there _must_ be a greater diversity of male than of female characters,"--which is true; add to this our limited sphere of action, consequently of experience,--the habits of self-control rendering the outward distinctions of character and pa.s.sion less striking and less strong--all this we see in Shakspeare as in nature: for instance, Juliet is the most impa.s.sioned of the female characters, but what are _her_ pa.s.sions compared to those which shake the soul of Oth.e.l.lo?

"Even as the dew-drop on the myrtle-leaf To the vex'd sea."

Look at Constance, frantic for the loss of her son--then look at Lear, maddened by the ingrat.i.tude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and mountains tremble to their bases!

MEDON.

True; and Lady Macbeth, with all her soaring ambition, her vigor of intellect, her subtlety, her courage, and her cruelty--what is she, compared to Richard III.?

ALDA.

I will tell you what she is--she is a woman. Place Lady Macbeth in comparison with Richard III., and you see at once the essential distinction between masculine and feminine ambition--though both in extreme, and overleaping all restraints of conscience or mercy. Richard says of himself, that he has "neither pity, love, nor fear:" Lady Macbeth is susceptible of all three. You smile! but that remains to be proved. The reason that Shakspeare's wicked women have such a singular hold upon our fancy, is from the consistent preservation of the feminine character, which renders them more terrible, because more credible and intelligible--not like those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history--

MEDON.

In history?--this is new!

ALDA.

Yes! I repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes, or motives, or connecting feelings and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau--but _such_ countenances!--such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty!--and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa--

Where it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone--

'Tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown Athwart the hue of guilt and glare of pain, That humanize and harmonize the strain.

And Shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in women." Hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or Cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink with disgust.