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suppose tha t Flaubert woul d have kill ed off a man for such a transgres–
sion . T he anti -bourgeois novelist is o bedient to the bourgeois fam il y
princip le of hi s ti me, tha t the wages o f sin is dea th and that sexual sin
is commiued by women .
And even short of mortal error the fa te of the spirited heroine is a
sorry on e. Shaw con sign s Candida to her priggish hu sband on the so le
ground tha t th e husband need s her more than Marchbanks does-the
people who fo r years fl ocked to Shaw's p lays , and they were o f bo th
sexes, never saw reason to protes t this. O r there is Tolstoy. Tolstoy's is
of course a far grea ter genius than Shaw's. T h e dreariness in whi ch
Na tasha's li fe en sues, o r the nightma re whi ch succeeds upon Anna
Karenin a's adultery, have no such Shav ian taint of contrivance; on the
contrary, o ur pain at the was te of sp irit in Tolstoy's heroines onl y adds
to our admi ra ti on for hi s remarkabl e grasp on rea lity. " How like life!"
we thin k, and like life it is indeed . Nor are women authors exempt
from the charge of using their spirited female characters to support the
social structure as it h as been generall y constituted in Wes tern civili za–
tion . Women n ovelists di spense fema le fa tes tha t are quite as harsh or
grudging as those devised by male writers. From George Eli o t's
Midd lemarch
to so recent a novel as Francine du Plessix Gray's
L overs
and T yran ts
th rough countl ess vo lumes o f the most uneven merit–
Lou isa May Alcott's
Litt le Women,
Edith Wharton 's
House of Mirth,
Willa Ca ther's
My Antonia,
Virgini a Woolf' s
T o the L ighthouse,
Fanni e Hurst's
Back Street-the
female novelist denies her spirited
hero ine the triumph ant destin y whi ch one mi ght have though t was her
d ue.
Now obviously wha t this leads us to is the delica te relation ship
tha t obtains, and always has obtained, between society and bio logy.
If
we can say, as of course we can , tha t litera ture both refl ects and crea tes
culture in an endl essly reciprocal p rocess and tha t thi s p rocess is
participated in by women writers as well as by men writers, and if we
can furth er say, as I beli eve we can , that litera ture uses the heroin e of
spirit as its way of testing how mu ch change, if any, in the rela tion of
the sexes society is able to tolera te at a given moment, then, to judge by
the regu larity with whi ch female spirit is defea ted in literatu re, I think
we can concl ude tha t, even a t revoluti onary moments such as ou r own ,
culture canno t tolera te very much altera tion in the rela ti on of men and
women . Culture and bio logy a re in most intima te secret connection
with each o ther. Bo th of them a re fundamentall y endangered by female
sp irit. T he situa ti on is as depressingly bas ic as tha t.
Freud traced the bi o logical mo ti ve in cu lture to woman 's organi c
