WOMAN IN LITERATURE

Miss (or Mrs ) E. R. Chapman proves her claim to be heard on "The Marriage Question in Modern Fiction" (John Lane) by her earnestness, vigour, and eloquence. She is one of the foremost of the champions of the "feminine woman" in this idle and decadent age. Her main plea, which is urged with singular acuteness and fervour, is in favour of the indissolubility of the marriage tie, and in strong opposition to tho school of later day philosophers who tell sad stories from the hilltops and elsewhere on what is supposed to be the woman's side, illustrating the superior blessing of freedom in the sexual contract, of marriage with limited liability—the wife to be taken, like tho piano, on "easy terms"—on the three or seven year's system. On this text Miss (or Mrs ) Chapman dilates with extraordinary energy, exposing with much force of language the fallacy that this so-called "freedom" is calculated to promote either human happiness or morality— least of all, that it is likely to benefit the woman. In good round terms, this new champion of the sex rates both the advanced woman and the male writer who, under pretence of a superior morality, advocates the loosening of the marriage tie. She insists that there can be no hope for the new generation which has "in so many directions strayed from the path of saints"—a generation which "tolerates the Rougon-Macquart novels, which exonerates Verlaine, which accepts Walt Whitman as poet, Maeterlinck as dramatist, and Nietzsche as philosopher." She believes in the ultimate triumph of idealism—"the ideal," she declares in the sense of human experience, transfigured by human genius, will always be, as it has always been, inseparable from true art. What is now practised and defended as "realism"—on the false and delusive principle of "art for arts sake," which should rather be, in Tennyson's phrase, "art for man's sake"—is not liberty at all, but "the freedom to flaunt a sickly and one-sided pessimism, to riot in every kind of neurotic perversion and morbid whim and to vend all manner of homographic wares without restriction." Thus far Miss (or Mrs ) Chapman will carry all her healthy-minded readers with her. But when she extends her privileges to the denouncing of the marriage laws as not founded on the absolute equality of tho sexes, and the claiming that all the grounds of divorce should be the same for man and woman, she argues in a spirit which is too entirely feminine, and nearer railing and shrieking than reasoning. The chapter on "The Disparagement of Woman in Literature" is especially characterised by all those peculiar defects which man has so long attributed to the other sex. What are we to say to a woman who is not even content with Shakespeare as a delineator of woman in literature, holding that the creator of Imogen and Isabella, of Rosalind, Miranda, Desdemona, of Sylvia and Cordelia, "was not great enough to rise above the normal standard in this matter," because he remained unconvinced, as his jokes about woman show, that the female sex was in no way inferior to his own?

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 12 June 1897, page 13