Women and Fiction

REVIEWS For this reason he represents the eternal dualism of human life, bound by necessity to toil and delivered from the necessity of toil by speculation. The contrast between Bacon and Spinoza illuminates the complexity of modern life. The ideal of power, achieved by the conquest of nature and the use of limitless resources, has been partly realized as time goes on. The ideal of un~versal harmony and peace, described by Spinoza as the logical product of intellectual development, does not seem to make similar progress. The material products of scientific activity, so adequately described by Dr. Wolf, are worthy of the admiration they excite; but even more admirable is the spirit of the men who achieved this work,·and hope for the future welfare of mankind seems now to depend less on the multiplication of discoveries than on the universal acceptance of rational principles in conduct. WOMEN AND FICTION* M. M. KIRKWOOD This bo.ok treats of people more than of books about people, and makes literary criticism into a live discussion of social values. I ts approach to fiction is like that of Lytton Strachey and Andre Maurois to biography. Miss Lawrence looks at literature for what it may reveal of the impulses and drives that constitute human nature, and in the writing of women since the time of Mary Wollstonecraft finds a clear thread runningJ the thread of their dual nature, their economic and biological necessities, their two soul..; sides which up to that time convention had called one soul-side. She focusses attention on the feminine dilemma, brought about by feminism, of economic rights gained with human rights lost, of books produced and children unborn, of art promoted and life frustrated. She also forces the reader to consider whether the suffering of women in a mental and moral way, through the suppression of. the truth abou t their dual nature, .is necessary in an advanced civilization-any more necessary than the aberrations of genius are necessary as in the case of Swift, or any other miseries which a straightforward study and estimate of human facts might *The School oj Femininity: A Book jor and about Women as They are In- . terpreted through Feminine Writers oj Yesterday and Today, by Margaret Lawrence, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1936. 611 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY obviate. The courage of this young author is admirable, for her study derives sincerely from a desire to find and face the truth, whatever the truth may be. And to courage she joins knowledge. Although her work is popular and unsupported hy documentation, her reading has evidently been wide; and her conclusions frequently startle by their shrewd insight into facts. Mi~s Lawrence's findings are conservative, in spite ofindications throughout the work that a relapse into femininity may not be the best wisdom for women to-day. She writes on page 235, "Unless a very rapid result occurs from the use of psychoanalysis among very young women, it does seem that so far as the immediate future is concerned there is li ttle hope of a woman attaining normal love of a man and normal outlet for her own work in the world with any considerable equality"-and on page 345 (though exceptions are admitted), "It may be said w.ith security that it is aJways tragedy connected ,with her biological nature which sends a young woman to writing." If one reads these statements in conjunction with the sentences on page 193, "Nature created women normally incapable of happiness in companionship with men weaker than themselves," one may suspect the author of wishing to please the reactionary reader by keeping her eye on the woman of rom'antic fiction, rather than on the working woman who through gen.erations has had to balance her activities amid the varying calls of life and to give and take in her biological relations. Actually the extra-domestic work of women, and the unequal powers of men in relation to women and of women in relation to men, are features of the life of certain groups in our own society to-day without causing detriment to happiness, as well as having been features of primitive and...