MORBID FICTION.

 THE books poured forth to-day in such quantities have a value beyond the particular stores of wisdom or folly they contain. They serve as a mirror to the national visage. They translate into terms of literature the national character ; and the whole social trend of a community may be judged with rough accuracy by the books it evolves and reads. If this be so there are some aspects of current English literature which may well cause sensible men real disquiet as to the trend of contemporary English character. We are suffering from an eruption of singularly unpleasant books and articles, on singularly unpleasant subjects, and all written by women and for women. All this latest feminine literature is pitched in the shrillest possible key, and deals with the most alarming topics. The magazines are thick and slab with articles from feminine pens on the “Revolt of the Daughters,” the “ Woes of Wives,” the "Longing of Emancipated Women for Inconvenient Knowledge,” and the indignation of “ advanced “ girls that their brothers should possess any deliciously evil experiences denied to them. Daughters a generation or two ago were looked upon, somebody has said, as so many barrels of gunpowder, only to be safely stored between thick layers of the sand of convention. But we have changed all that, and to-day, if we may believe the new school of women writers, all the daughters of English homes are clamouring for the right to be as masculine and to know as much as their own brothers. And, apparently, a good many of them are succeeding. Mrs. HAWEIS, who, in the last number of the Nineteenth Century, holds a brief for old-fashioned ideas about womanliness, declares, with a natural sigh, that as to morality “ even now mothers are not infrequently purer than their daughters, and certainly shyer, for corrupt literature is  very accessible to young people. The religious antidote is gone, whilst  the scientific one, proper medical instruction, has not come in.” But there is a yet more alarming side to this new literature. There are many facts in the relationship betwixt the sexes — in the risks and experiences of marriage, in the conflicting ideas as to “purity” which men and women have — which, no doubt, are important enough, and on which much of the tragedy and most of the happiness of human life turn. But these subjects are not suited for street-corner discussion, and least of all by feminine lips. Old-fashioned canons of modesty drew a veil of reticence over them, and reckoned them amongst the sacred confidences which exist, say, between a wise mother and a loving daughter. Many topics are both pure and legitimate, but which yet ought not to be discussed before a crowd. Healthy nature has its instinctive reticences. What doctor would give a clinical lecture coram publico, or discuss the pathology of a difficult case at a street corner ? But the new literature — all from, feminine pens — has no reserves. It abhors reticence, it insists on discussing with stentorian frankness, and in the ears of young and old, of man, woman, and child, the most delicate problems of sex and of sexual morality. A novel by one of these petticoated artists has the aroma of a dissecting room, the moral atmosphere of a law court at the crisis of a particularly spicy breach of promise case. It is plain that this new school of feminine writers is dreadfully in earnest, and the imagination refuses to conceive the shrieks of wrath which would arise if any rude male critic hinted that their earnestness had not a moral inspiration. But it is at least very remarkable that healthy morality should have such a delight in morbid themes. And it is clear, if these latent feminine novels are to be accepted as reflecting the ideals of the coming woman, that a new conception of womanhood is about to break upon the world. The typical wife and mother of the next generation will be the oddest possible compound of the purity of a saint, the refinement of a lady, and the knowledge of a courtesan. Much of recent feminine literature, indeed, resembles nothing so much as the conventional story of the Fall inverted. Here is forbidden fruit offered ; but it is offered as an aid to virtue, and not by the Serpent but by the Woman — and to girls!

 A morbid taste is, of course, behind this morbid literature ; but what evil force has produced a taste so unfeminine and unwholesome ? It would be rude, perhaps, to hint that the odd delight in discussing sexual questions shown by so many clever women is semi-Zolaesque or Ibsenesque in its inspiration. These writers themselves assure us that they are only contending for the ”emancipation” of their sex. The passion which inspires them is a love of freedom. But it is at least odd that the liberty for which they so loudly profess their love somehow perpetually grazes the borders of lubricity. It is charitable to think that this latest development in feminine literature represents nothing but a passing fad. There is at the present moment a craze for being unconventional. “Half the comforts and decencies of life,” says the London Spectator, “are resigned without a sigh because they  are so dreadfully conventional.” The new unconventionalism has, of course, its own most tyrannical conventions. Its subjects are perpetually on the look-out for what they call “conventionality,” in order that they may go and do the opposite. One of the most ridiculous results of the new unconventionalism, the Spectator adds, is to be seen in “ the intense anxiety of people  who want to be thought smart to talk about things which used to be considered, if not exactly unspeakable, at  any rate better left undiscussed in  general society. People may nowadays he seen laboriously bringing the  conversation round to the drains, in order to show that they are not  afraid to talk about them.” Morality, like history, has its pendulum swings to opposite extremes, and it is true that women in the past have been oppressed by artificial conventions altogether too narrow and rigid. Modern society, too, presses hardly on the sex by the restrictions put in the way of marriage. The standard of luxury rises, with the result that the cost of household life grows more burdensome, and many men prefer the selfish freedom of bachelor luxury to the nobler but more anxious joys of family life. So the number of women to whom marriage, the legitimate and natural vocation of their sex, is impossible tends to increase, and this, undoubtedly, is one of the unwholesome facts of modern society. It generates a fermenting unrest which is accountable for much of the unwholesome feminine literature of the day.

Burrowa News (NSW : 1874 - 1951), Friday 13 April 1894, page 2