From Nora Helmer to Wendy Darling: If You Believe in Heroines, Clap Your Hands

From Nora Helmer to Wendy Darling: If You Believe in Heroines, Clap Your Hands JOHN D. SHOUT A middle-class girl coming of age in the nineteenth century might quite legitimately complain of a number of things, but she could hardly say that she lacked direction. She was provided with explicit instructions, in manuals, homilies and sermons as well as the entertainment media, which made very clear just what she was to do and what at all costs she had better avoid. However emphatic, though, the image projected of her had a schizoid quality: at one moment women would be collectively portrayed as embodiments of various virtues, on this earth largely to provide encouraging models for men; at the next they were the perilous daughters of Eve, disastrously vulnerable to all sorts of temptations, dangers to men and children as well as to themselves . This might lead to confusion - but then no-one had suggested that a woman's lot would be easy. An 1849 American tract asserted that "God increased the cares and sorrows of woman that she might be sooner constrained to accept the terms of salvation," while Godey's Lady's Book, in 183[, had proclaimed that "To suffer and to be silent under suffering seems the great command she has to obey.'" The guidebooks as well as the fiction consistently drove home domestic virtue as the sole road to the otherwise hapless woman's salvation. As Barbara Welter writes, "The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman is judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues - piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife - woman.'" And the proper playing field for these virtues was, of course, the home. The rigid Mrs. John Sandford saw "domestic comfort" as both "the chief source of her influence, and the greatest debt society owes her.'" If the home is anything but harmonious - or if she can't keep her husband in it - that is her fault, and should she make the mistake of straying the consequences were sure to be devastating: "As soon as women go beyond Model'll Drama, 35 (1992) 353 354 JOHN D. SHOUT the world of home and children they are liable to become weak, dangerous, corrupted and corrupting."4 Venturing out of the home was tantamount to abandoning her purity, her respectability, even her womanliness - and what followed would be disgrace at the minimum or, depending on how far she has ventured, derangement and death. Afterwards she might be a figure for all to pity and forgive - Thomas Hood could acclaim the drowned fallen wretch in "The Bridge of Sighs" as "pure womanly" - but in life forgiveness, much less rehabilitation, would be unthinkable. The nineteenth century was incHned to elevate selflessness in women. As Fran~oise Basch writes, "the woman can only justify her presence on earth by dedicating herself to others; through deliberate self-effacement, duty and sacrifice she will discover the identity and raison d' erre of which, by herself, she is deprived.'" Self-sacrifice 'for a husband, father or brother was most estimable next to giving all for one's children: the British Mothers' Magazine in r845 asserted (in a slightly confusing metaphor) that "the wife should remove the bread from her own mouth without a word, while nourishing her most recent child at her breast.,>6 Still, these were the exemplaries: sacrifice for anyone was noble, from which comes the ideal of the tireless nurse. And if leaving the home was shameful, doing so in a coffin was altogether angelic; best of all, if she could manage it, was to die, like Beth March or Little Nell, while still a child. Of course the existence of all this high-minded advice does not prove that it was widely read or widely heeded. "One scholar," Mary Beth Norton remarks, "has in fact suggested that many of the most popular of such works were probably bought by doting parents or grandparents as 'proper' presents for their daughters, who may never have read them at all."7 But whether or not the stem preachings...