Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 6

to a romping optimism which frightens
away both thought and passion. From The Wide, Wide World to
Pollyanna, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence
for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American
popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome
aspects; it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in
America without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual
designs which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the
Daisy Millers who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at
home, and that the understanding given them is a form of homage
certainly no less honorable than the compliments of gallantry. In actual
experience, however, girls grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the
United States has done its best to keep them forever children. Nothing
breaks the crystal shallows of their confidence. They are insolently
secure in a world apparently made for them. The little difficulties
which perturb their courtship are nine-tenths of them superficial and
external matters, and the end comes as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before
doubt has ever had an opportunity to shatter or passion the occasion to
purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to the beginnings of naturalism there
was hardly a single profound love story written in America. How could
there be when green girls were the sole heroines and censors?
Among the older women created by the local color generation there
were certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large
cities who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the
most part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold
and as hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as
Mary Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer

to reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States:
the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the
functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of
her society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has
served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at
their domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the
fields. They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European
ladies to love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless
labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the strength
which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery. The
combination of functions has probably done much to increase
sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a
new species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great
moment in the national life. Local color, however, taking the species
for granted, seems hardly to have been aware of its significant
existence.
Only New England emphasized a distinct type: the old maid. She has
been studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world.
Expansion and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon
the declining Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their
native farms and villages more numerously than the young women,
who remained behind and in many cases never married. Local fiction
fell very largely into the hands of women--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose
Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice
Brown--who broke completely with the age-old tradition of ridiculing
spinsters no longer young. In the little cycles which these story-tellers
elaborated the old maid is likely to be the center of her episode, studied
in her own career and not merely in that of households upon which she
is some sort of parasite. The heroine of Mrs. Freeman's A New England
Nun is an illuminating instance: she has been betrothed to an absent,
fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she
finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices
when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity
of her contented cell.
What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New

England as a relief. Energy has run low in the calm veins of such
women, and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives
they might have led had marriage complicated them. Here genre
painting reaches its apogee in American literature: quaint interiors
scrupulously described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed;
skimpy moods analyzed with a delicate competence of touch. At the
same time, New England literature was now too sentimental and now
too realistic to allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and
passive. In its sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days
and to show them at the point which had decided or compelled their
future loneliness--again and