The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

is fit for nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her

shrine. No matter. Anything is more endurable than to change our established

formulae about women, or to run the risk of looking up to our wives instead

of looking down on them. Sit divus, dummodo non sit vivus (let him be a god,

provided he be not living), said the Roman magnates of Romulus;1 and so men

say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of previous things, pro

vided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be

treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence. On one side we hear that woman's position can never be improved until

women themselves are better; and, on the other, that women can never

become better until their position is improved�until the laws are made more

just, and a wider field opened to feminine activity. But we constantly hear the

same difficulty stated about the human race in general. There is a perpetual

action and reaction between individuals and institutions; we must try and

mend both by little and little�the only way in which human things can be

mended. Unfortunately, many over-zealous champions of women assert their

actual equality with men�nay, even their moral superiority to men�as a

ground for their release from oppressive laws and restrictions. They lose

strength immensely by this false position. If it were true, then there would be

a case in which slavery and ignorance nourished virtue, and so far we should

have an argument for the continuance of bondage. Rut we want freedom and

culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and

with her, Man; for� If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,

How shall men grow?2 Both Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft have too much sagacity to

fall into this sentimental exaggeration. Their ardent hopes of what women may

become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as they are. On

the relative moral excellence of men and women Mary Wollstonecraft speaks

with the most decision: Women are supposed to possess more sensibility, and even humanity,

than men, and their strong attachments and instantaneous emotions of

compassion are given as proofs; but the clinging affection of ignorance

has seldom anything noble in it, and may mostly be resolved into selfish

ness, as well as the affection of children and brutes. I have known many

weak women whose sensibility was entirely engrossed by their husbands;

and as for their humanity, it was very faint indeed, or rather it was only a

transient emotion of compassion. Humanity does not consist "in a squea

mish ear," says an eminent orator.3 "It belongs to the mind as well as to

the nerves." But this kind of exclusive affection, though it degrades the

individual, should not be brought forward as a proof of the inferiority of

9. Cf. Eliot's fictional representation of such a sit-made on a proposal to have a man deified. Romuation in her account of Dr. Lvdgate's married life ulus: legendary founder of Rome; after his death in Middlemarch (1871-72). he was worshipped by the Romans as a god. 1. Cf. Historia Augusta (ca. 4th century C.E.), Life 2. Tennvson's The Princess 7.249�SO. of Geta 2, in which the same cynical comment is 3. Perhaps Edmund Burke (1729-1797).

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1342 / GEORGE ELIOT

the sex, because it is the natural consequence of confined views; for even

women of superior sense, having their attention turned to little employ

ments and private plans, rarely rise to heroism, unless when spurred on

by love! and love, as an heroic passion, like genius, appears but once in

an age. I therefore agree with the moralist who asserts "that women have

seldom so much generosity as men"; and that their narrow affections, to

which justice and humanity are often sacrificed, render the sex apparently

inferior, especially as they are commonly inspired by men; but I contend

that the heart would expand as the understanding gained strength, if

women were not depressed4 from their cradles. We had marked several other passages of Margaret Fuller's for extract, but

as we do not aim at an exhaustive treatment of our subject, and are only

touching a few of its points, we have, perhaps, already claimed as much of the

reader's attention as he will be willing to give to such desultory material.

1855

From Silly Novels by Lady Novelists1

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined

by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them�the frothy,

the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these�a com

posite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels,

which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is

usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious

baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers

in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle dis

tance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and