Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  The plot of the story then proceeds to show how very badly the young wife behaves when her husband takes her to mean lodgings, deprives her of wonted luxuries and comforts, and obstinately refuses to give any kind of sensible reason for his conduct. Instead of looking up to him with blind faith and unquestioning obedience, following his directions without inquiry, and believing not only without evidence, but against apparent evidence, that he is the soul of honour and wisdom, this perverse Agatha murmurs, complains, thinks herself very ill-used, and occasionally is even wicked enough, in a very mild way, to say so, — whereat her husband looks like a martyr and suffers in silence; and thus we are treated to a volume of mutual distresses, which are at last ended by the truth coming out, the abused husband mounting the throne in glory, and the penitent wife falling in the dust at his feet, and confessing what a wretch she has been all along to doubt him.

  The authoress of “Jane Eyre” describes the process of courtship in much the same terms as one would describe the breaking of a horse. Shirley is contumacious and self-willed, and Moore, her lover and tutor, gives her “Le Cheval dompté” for a French lesson, as a gentle intimation of the work he has in hand in paying her his addresses; and after long struggling against his power, when at last she consents to his love, he addresses her thus, under the figure of a very fierce leopardess: —

  “Tame or wild, fierce or subdued, you are mine.”

  And she responds: —

  “I am glad I know my keeper and am used to him. Only his voice will I follow, only his hand shall manage me, only at his feet will I repose.”

  The accomplished authoress of “Nathalie” represents the struggles of a young girl engaged to a man far older than herself, extremely dark and heroic, fond of behaving in a very unaccountable manner, and declaring, nevertheless, in very awful and mysterious tones, that he has such a passion for being believed in, that if any one of his friends, under the most suspicious circumstances, admits one doubt of his honour, all will be over between them for ever.

  After establishing his power over Nathalie fully, and amusing himself quietly for a time with the contemplation of her perplexities and anxieties, he at last unfolds to her the mysterious counsels of his will by declaring to another of her lovers, in her presence, that he “has the intention of asking this young lady to become his wife.” During the engagement, however, he contrives to disturb her tranquillity by insisting prematurely on the right divine of husbands, and, as she proves fractious, announces to her that, much as he loves her, he sees no prospect of future happiness in their union, and that they had better part.

  The rest of the story describes the struggles and anguish of the two, who pass through a volume of distresses, he growing more cold, proud, severe, and misanthropic than ever, all of which is supposed to be the fault of naughty Miss Nathalie, who might have made a saint of him, could she only have found her highest pleasure in letting him have his own way. Her conscience distresses her; it is all her fault; at last, worn out in the strife, she resolves to be a good girl, goes to his library, finds him alone, and, in spite of an insulting reception, humbles herself at his feet, gives up all her naughty pride, begs to be allowed to wait on him as a handmaid, and is rewarded by his graciously announcing, that, since she will stay with him at all events, she may stay as his wife; and the story leaves her in the last sentence sitting in what we are informed is the only true place of happiness for a woman, at her husband’s feet.

  This is the solution which the most cultivated women of England give of the domestic problem, according to these fair interpreters of English ideas.

  The British lion on his own domestic hearth, standing in awful majesty with his back to the fire and his hands under his coat-tails, can be supposed to have no such disreputable discussions as we have described; since his partner, as Miss Bronté says, has learned to know her keeper, and her place at his feet, and can conceive no happiness so great as hanging the picture and setting the piano exactly as he likes.

  Of course this will be met with a general shriek of horror on the part of our fair republican friends, and an equally general disclaimer on the part of our American gentlemen, who, so far as we know, would be quite embarrassed by the idea of assuming any such pronounced position at the fireside.

  The genius of American institutions is not towards a display of authority. All needed authority exists among us, but exists silently, with as little external manifestation as possible.

  Our President is but a fellow-citizen, personally the equal of other citizens. We obey him because we have chosen him, and because we find it convenient, in regulating our affairs, to have one final appeal and one deciding voice.

  The position in which the Bible and the Marriage Service place the husband in the family amounts to no more. He is the head of the family in all that relates to its material interests, its legal relations, its honour and standing in society; and no true woman who respects herself would any more hesitate to promise to yield to him this position and the deference it implies, than an officer of State to yield to the President. But because the President is officially above Mr. Seward, it does not follow that there can be nothing between them but absolute command on the one part, and prostrate submission on the other; neither does it follow that the superior claims in all respects to regulate the affairs and conduct of the inferior. There are still wide spheres of individual freedom, as there are in the case of husband and wife; and no sensible man but would feel himself ridiculous in entering another’s proper sphere with the voice of authority.

  The inspired declaration, that “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church,” is certainly to be qualified by the evident points of difference in the subjects spoken of. It certainly does not mean that any man shall be invested with the rights of omnipotence and omniscience, but simply that in the family state he is the head and protector, even as the Saviour is in the Church. It is merely the announcement of a great natural law of society which obtains through all the tribes and races of men, — a great and obvious fact of human existence.

  The silly and senseless reaction against this idea in some otherwise sensible women is, I think, owing to the kind of extravagances and overstatements to which we have alluded. It is as absurd to cavil at the word obey in the marriage ceremony, as for a military officer to set himself against the etiquette of the army, or a man to refuse the freeman’s oath.

  Two young men every way on a footing of equality and friendship may be one of them a battalion-commander and the other a staff-officer. It would be alike absurd for the one to take airs about not obeying a man every way his equal, and for the other to assume airs of lordly dictation out of the sphere of his military duties. The mooting of the question of marital authority between two well-bred, well-educated Christian people of the nineteenth century is no less absurd.

  While the husband has a certain power confided to him for the support and maintenance of the family, and for the preservation of those relations which involve its good name and well-being before the world, he has no claim to an authoritative exertion of will in reference to the little personal tastes and habits of the interior. He has no divine right to require that everything shall be arranged to please him, at the expense of his wife’s preferences and feelings, any more than if he were not the head of the household. In a thousand indifferent matters, which do not touch the credit and respectability of the family, he is just as much bound, sometimes to give up his own will and way for the comfort of his wife as she is in certain other matters to submit to his decisions. In a large number of cases the husband and wife stand as equal human beings before God, and the indulgence of unchecked and inconsiderate self-will on either side is a sin.

  It is my serious belief that writings such as we have been considering do harm both to men and women, by insensibly inspiring in the one an idea of a licensed prerogative of selfishness and self-will, and in the other an irrational and indiscreet servility.

  Is it any benefit
to a man to find in the wife of his bosom the flatterer of his egotism, the acquiescent victim of his little selfish exactions, to be nursed and petted and cajoled in all his faults and fault-findings, and to see everybody falling prostrate before his will in the domestic circle? Is this the true way to make him a manly and Christ-like man? It is my belief that many so-called good wives have been accessory to making their husbands very bad Christians.

  However, then, the little questions of difference in every-day life are to be disposed of between two individuals, it is in the worst possible taste and policy to undertake to settle them by mere authority. All romance, all poetry, all beauty are over forever with a couple between whom the struggle of mere authority has begun. No, there is no way out of difficulties of this description but by the application, on both sides, of good sense and religion to the little differences of life.

  A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will, and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.

  Every man and every woman, in their self-training and self-culture, should study the art of giving up with a good grace. The charm of polite society is formed by that sort of freedom and facility in all the members of a circle which makes each one pliable to the influences of the others, and sympathetic to slide into the moods and tastes of others without a jar.

  In courteous and polished circles there are no stiff railroad-tracks, cutting straight through everything, and grating harsh thunders all along their course, but smooth, meandering streams, tranquilly bending hither and thither to every undulation of the flowery banks. What makes the charm of polite society would make no less the charm of domestic life; but it can come only by watchfulness and self-discipline in each individual.

  Some people have much more to struggle with in this way than others. Nature has made them precise and exact. They are punctilious in their hours, rigid in their habits, pained by any deviation from regular rule.

  Now Nature is always perversely ordering that men and women of just this disposition should become desperately enamoured of their exact opposites. The man of rules and formulas and hours has his heart carried off by a gay, careless little chit, who never knows the day of the month, tears up the newspaper, loses the door-key, and makes curl-papers out of the last bill; or, per contra, our exact and precise little woman, whose belongings are like the waxen cells of a bee, gives her heart to some careless fellow, who enters her sanctum in muddy boots, upsets all her little nice household divinities whenever he is going on a hunting or fishing bout, and can see no manner of sense in the discomposure she feels in the case.

  What can such couples do, if they do not adopt the compromises of reason and sense, — if each arms his or her own peculiarities with the back force of persistent self-will, and runs them over the territories of the other?

  A sensible man and woman, finding themselves thus placed, can govern themselves by a just philosophy, and, instead of carrying on a life-battle, can modify their own tastes and requirements, turn their eyes from traits which do not suit them to those which do, resolving, at all events, however reasonable be the taste or propensity which they sacrifice, to give up all rather than have domestic strife.

  There is one form which persistency takes that is peculiarly trying: I mean that persistency of opinion which deems it necessary to stop and raise an argument in self-defence, on the slightest personal criticism.

  John tells his wife that she is half an hour late with her breakfast this morning, and she indignantly denies it.

  “But look at my watch!”

  “Your watch isn’t right.”

  “I set it by railroad time.”

  “Well, that was a week ago; that watch of yours always gains.”

  “No, my dear, you’re mistaken.”

  “Indeed I’m not. Did I not hear you telling Mr. B —— about it?”

  “My dear, that was a year ago, — before I had it cleaned.”

  “How can you say so, John? It was only a month ago.”

  “My dear, you are mistaken.”

  And so the contest goes on, each striving for the last word.

  This love of the last word has made more bitterness in families, and spoiled more Christians than it is worth. A thousand little differences of this kind would drop to the ground if either party would let them drop. Suppose John is mistaken in saying breakfast is late, — suppose that fifty of the little criticisms which we make on one another are well or ill-founded, are they worth a discussion? Are they worth ill-tempered words, such as are almost sure to grow out of a discussion? Are they worth throwing away peace and love for? Are they worth the destruction of the only fair ideal left on earth, — a quiet, happy home? Better let the most unjust statements pass in silence than risk one’s temper in a discussion upon them.

  Discussions, assuming the form of warm arguments, are never pleasant ingredients of domestic life — never safe recreations between near friends. They are, generally speaking, mere unsuspected vents for self-will; and the cases are few where they do anything more than to make both parties more positive in their own way than they were before.

  A calm comparison of opposing views, a fair statement of reasons on either side, may be valuable; but when warmth and heat and love of victory and pride of opinion come in, good temper and good manners are too apt to step out.

  And now Christopher, having come to the end of his subject, pauses for a sentence to close with. There are a few lines of a poet that sum up so beautifully all he has been saying that he may be pardoned for closing with them: —

  “Alas! how light a cause may move

  Dissension between hearts that love;

  Hearts that the world has vainly tried,

  And sorrow but more closely tied;

  That stood the storm when waves were rough,

  Yet in a sunny hour fall off,

  Like ships that have gone down at sea

  When heaven was all tranquillity!

  A something light as air, a look,

  A word unkind, or wrongly taken, —

  Oh, love that tempests never shook,

  A breath, a touch like this hath shaken!

  For ruder words will soon rush in

  To spread the breach that words begin,

  And eyes forget the gentle ray

  They wore in courtship’s smiling day,

  And voices lose the tone which shed

  A tenderness round all they said, —

  Till, fast declining, one by one,

  The sweetnesses of love are gone,

  And hearts, so lately mingled, seem

  like broken clouds, or like the stream,

  That, smiling, left the mountain-brow

  As though its waters ne’er could sever,

  Yet, ere it reaches the plain below,

  Breaks into floods that part for ever.”

  V. INTOLERANCE.

  “AND what are you going to preach about this month, Mr. Crowfield?”

  “I am going to give a sermon on Intolerance, Mrs. Crowfield.”

  “Religious intolerance?”

  “No, — domestic and family and educational intolerance, — one of the seven deadly sins on which I am preaching, — one of ‘the foxes.’”

  People are apt to talk as if all the intolerance in life were got up and expended in the religious world; whereas religious intolerance is only a small branch of the radical, strong, all-pervading intolerance of human nature.

  Physicians are quite as intolerant as theologians. They never have had the power of burning at the stake for medical opinions, but they certainly have shown the will. Politicians are intolerant. Philosophers are intolerant, especially those who pique themselves on liberal opinions. Painters and sculptors are intolerant. And housekeepers are intolerant, virulently denunciatory concerning any departures from their particular domestic creed.

  Mrs. Alexander Exact, seated at her domestic altar, gives homilies
on the degeneracy of modern housekeeping equal to the lamentations of Dr. Holdfast as to the falling off from the good old faith.

  “Don’t tell me about pillow-cases made without felling,” says Mrs. Alexander; “it’s slovenly and shiftless. I wouldn’t have such a pillow-case in my house any more than I’d have vermin.”

  “But,” says a trembling young housekeeper, conscious of unfelled pillow-cases at home, “don’t you think, Mrs. Alexander, that some of these old traditions might be dispensed with? It really is not necessary to do all the work that has been done so thoroughly and exactly, — to double-stitch every wristband, fell every seam, count all the threads of gathers, and take a stitch to every gather. It makes beautiful sewing, to be sure; but when a woman has a family of little children and a small income, if all her sewing is to be kept up in this perfect style, she wears her life out in stitching. Had she not better slight a little, and get air and exercise?”

  “Don’t tell me about air and exercise! What did my grandmother do? Why, she did all her own work and made grandfather’s ruffled shirts besides, with the finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise enough, I warrant you. Women of this day are miserable, sickly, degenerate creatures.”

  “But, my dear Madam, look at poor Mrs. Evans, over the way, with her pale face and her eight little ones.”

  “Miserable manager,” said Mrs. Alexander. “If she’d get up at five o’clock the year round, as I do, she’d find time enough to do things properly, and be the better for it.”

  “But, my dear Madam, Mrs. Evans is a very delicately organized, nervous woman.”

  “Nervous! Don’t tell me! Every woman now-a-days is nervous. She can’t get up in the morning, because she’s nervous. She can’t do her sewing decently, because she’s nervous. Why, I might have been as nervous as she is, if I’d have petted and coddled myself as she does. But I get up early, take a walk in the fresh air of a mile or so before breakfast, and come home feeling the better for it. I do all my own sewing, — never put out a stitch; and I flatter myself my things are made as they ought to be. I always make my boy’s shirts and Mr. Exact’s, and they are made as shirts ought to be, — and yet I find plenty of time for calling, shopping, business, and company. It only requires management and resolution.”