Fern Fanny
Fresh Leaves
A GLANCE AT A CHAMELEON SUBJECT
“Tell you what are the fashions?” I, who am sick of the very word fashion? who could shake hands with every rustic I meet, for very delight at his napless hat, and ark-like coat?
You should be surfeited, as I am, with harlequin costumes; disgusted, as I am, with troops of women, strutting, like peacocks, to show their plumage; but who, less sensible than peacocks, never shed their feathers. You should see brocades, and silk velvets, fit only for carriage or dinner dresses, daily mopping up the tobacco pools on these unmitigatedly nasty sidewalks. You should see the gay little bonnets, and oh! you should see the vapid, expression-less, soul-less faces beneath them. You should see the carriages, with their liveried servants, in our republican streets, and the faces, seamed with ennui and discontent, which peer through the windows, from beneath folds of lace and satin.
You should see how this dress furore infects every class and circle. You should see the young apprentice girl who can afford but one bonnet, buying a flimsy dress-hat, to be worn in all weathers; securing for Sunday, a showy silk dress and gilt bracelet, when she has hardly a decent chemise, or petticoat, and owns, perhaps, but one handkerchief, and a couple of pairs of stockings. You should see the wife of the young mechanic, with her embroidered pocket-handkerchief, and flaunting pink parasol, while she can number but one pair of sheets, and one table-cloth. You should see her children, with their plumed hats, while parti-colored, dilapidated petticoats peep from beneath their dresses, and they are shivering for the want of warm flannels. You should see the servant-girl, with her greasy flounces, and soiled artificial flowers. You should see young men, with staring diamond pins stuck on their coarse shirt-bosoms, with shabby velvet vests, and mock chains looped over them.
You should go into the “furnishing stores for ladies’ and children’s garments;” and see how impossible it is to find plain, substantial articles of clothing for either– two thirds, at least, of the cost of every article being for elaborate trimming, and ruffling, and useless embroidery. You should go into the “ladies’ cloak stores,” and see these garments loaded indeed with gay trimmings, but miserably thin, and ill-adapted for winter wear; hence the stories of garments you frequently notice on New York ladies (as winter intensifies), as if one good, sensible, thickly-wadded, old-fashioned, outside garment, could, by any possibility, be more awkward and ugly than such an “arrangement,” and as if it were not a million degrees more comfortable, and less troublesome; but, then – Fashion says, No!
“Tell you the fashions?”
Excuse my rambling. Well; here they are, as near as I can find out:
Puff your hair and your skirts. Lace your lungs and your handkerchief. Put on the most stunning dress you can find; wear it of a stumbling length, because Queen Victoria’s royal ankles are thick.
Take a handful of artificial roses, each of a different color, half a dozen yards of ribbon ditto, lace ditto. Secure them, for a bonnet, to your bump of amativeness, with two long pins. Then sprinkle the contents of a jeweler’s shop promiscuously over your person; and by no means, before you go out, omit drawing on a pair of bright yellow gloves; that sine quâ non of a New York woman’s toilette.
“Tell you the fashions?” Take a walk down Broadway, and see for yourself. If you have a particle of sense, it will cure you of your absorbing interest in that question during your natural life, though your name be written “Methuselah.”
FACTS FOR UNJUST CRITICS
A few scraps from the “Life of Charlotte Bronte,” that I would like to see pasted up in editorial offices throughout the length and breadth of the land:
“She, Miss Bronte, especially disliked the lowering of the standard by which to judge a work of fiction if it proceeded from a feminine pen; and praise, mingled with pseudo-gallant allusions to her sex, mortified her far more than actual blame.
“Come what will,” she says, “I can not, when I write, think always of myself, and of what is elegant and charming in femininity; it is not on these terms, or with such ideas, that I ever took pen in hand, and if it is only on these terms my writing will be tolerated, I shall pass away from the public and trouble it no more.
“I wish all reviewers believed me to be a man; they would be more just to me. They will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what they deem becoming to my sex; where I am not what they consider graceful, they will condemn me.
“No matter – whether known or unknown – misjudged or the contrary – I am resolved not to write otherwise. I shall bend as my powers tend. The two human beings who understood me are gone; I have some who love me yet, and whom I love, without expecting or having a right to expect they shall perfectly understand me. I am satisfied, but I must have my own way in the matter of writing.”
Speaking of some attacks on Miss Bronte, her biographer says:
“Flippancy takes a graver name, when directed against an author by an anonymous writer; we then call it cowardly insolence.”
She also says:
“It is well that the thoughtless critics, who spoke of the sad and gloomy views of life presented by the Brontes in their tales, should know how such words were wrung out of them by the living recollection of the long agony they suffered. It is well, too, that they who have objected to the representation of coarseness, and shrank from it with repugnance, as if such conception arose out of the writers, should learn, that not from the imagination, not from internal conception – but from the hard cruel facts, pressed down, by an external life upon their very senses, for long months and years together, did they write out what they saw, obeying the stern dictates of their consciences. They might be mistaken. They might err in writing at all, when their afflictions were so great that they could not write otherwise than as they did of life. It is possible that it would have been better to have described good and pleasant people, doing only good and pleasant things (in which case they could hardly have written at any time): all I say is, that never, I believe, did women possessed of such wonderful gifts exercise them with a fuller feeling of responsibility for their use.”
A friend of Miss Bronte says:
“The world heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of Miss Bronte’s labors, and then found out she was much to blame for possessing such faculties.”
Mrs. Gaskell says:
“So utterly unconscious was Miss Bronte of what was by some esteemed ‘coarse’ in her writings, that on one occasion, when the conversation turned upon women’s writing fiction – she said, in her grave, earnest way, ‘I hope God will take away from me whatever power of invention, or expression I may have, before he lets me become blind to the sense of what is fitting, or unfitting to be said.’”
Fanny Fern says:
I would that all who critically finger women’s books, would read and ponder these extracts. I would that reviewers had a more fitting sense of their responsibility, in giving their verdicts to the public; permitting themselves to be swayed neither by personal friendship, nor private pique; speaking honestly, by all means, but remembering their own sisters, when they would point a flippant, smart article by disrespectful mention of a lady writer; or by an unmanly, brutal persistence in tearing from her face the mask of incognito-ship, which she has, if she pleases, an undoubted right to wear. I would that they would speak respectfully of those whose pure, self-denying life, has been through trials and temptations under which their strong natures would have succumbed; and who tremblingly await the public issue of days and nights of single-handed, single-hearted weariness and toil. Not that a woman’s book should be praised because it is a woman’s, nor, on the contrary, condemned for that reason. But as you would shrink from seeing a ruffian’s hand laid upon your sister’s gentle shoulder, deal honestly, but, I pray you, courteously, with those whose necessities have forced them out from the blessed shelter of the home circle, into jostling contact with rougher natures.
TRY AGAIN
“No woman ever produced a great painting or statue.” —Ex.
On the contrary, she has produced a great many “statues,” who may be seen any sunshiny day, walking Broadway, in kid gloves and perfumed broadcloth, while “Lawrence” lies in ashes.
“No woman ever wrote a great drama.” —Ex.
Ay – but they have lived one; and when worn out with suffering at hands which should have shielded them, have died without a murmur on their martyr lips.
“No woman ever composed a great piece of music.” —Ex.
What do you call a baby?
“No woman was ever a great cook!” —Ex.
True – it takes a man to get up a broil.
“Women have invented nothing outside of millinery since the world began.” —Ex.
How can they? when they are so hooped in?
“Women have written clever letters, tolerable novels, and intolerable epics.” —Ex.
Indeed! It strikes me, though, that we have furnished you the material for yours; just tell me what your “letters,” your “novels,” your “epics,” would have amounted to, without the inspiring theme —woman. When the world furnishes us heroes, perhaps we shall write splendid novels, and splendid epics. Pharaoh once required bricks to be made “without straw.”
“Letters?” No man, since the world began, could pen a letter equal to a woman. Look at the abortions dignified by that name in men-novels; stiltified – unnatural – stiff – pedantic, or else coarse. You can no more do it than an elephant can waltz. The veriest school girl can surpass you at it. I have often heard men confess it (when off their guard). One thing at least we know enough to do, viz.: when we wish to make one of your sex our eternal and unchangeable friend we always allow him to beat us in an argument.
FAIR PLAY. OR, BOTH SIDES OF THE STORY
“It is too bad,” said a lady to me, not long since, “it is too bad; I am almost tired to death.” She had been to York on a shopping expedition; and, having finished her purchases, and returned, laden with them to the ferry, found two thirds of the seats in the ladies’ cabin of the ferry-boat occupied by men, while she and several other ladies were compelled to stand till the boat reached the pier. “It is too bad,” she repeated; “they have no right to occupy the ladies’ cabin, when ladies are standing. Give them a dig, Fanny, won’t you?”
“Of course I will,” said I; “the case, to my mind, is clearly against the coat-tails; more especially, as, when the boat touches the pier, they rush past the ladies, and by right of their pantaloons leap over the chain (which femininity must wait to see unhooked), in order to monopolize all the seats in the street cars, to the exclusion of the aforesaid dismayed and weary ladies. Most certainly I will give them a dig, my dear; it is an exhibition of ‘grab’ which is quite disgusting.”
But stay – have the ladies no sins to answer for? May it not be just possible that the men are at last getting weary of rendering civilities to women who receive them as a matter of right, without even an acknowledging smile, or “Thank you?” May they not have tired of creeping, with an abject air, into cars and omnibusses, and gradually and circumspectly lowering themselves amid such billows of hoops and flounces? May they not at last have become disgusted at the absurd selfishness which ladies manifest on these occasions? the “sit closer, ladies,” of the conductors and drivers being met with a pouting frown, or, at best, the emigration of the sixteenth part of an inch to the right or left. And is it not a shame, that a deprecating blush should crimson a gentleman’s forehead because he ventures to seat himself, in a public conveyance, in the proximity of these abominable, limb-disguising, uncomfortable, monopolizing hoops? Women who are blessed with hips, should most certainly discard these nuisances, and women who are not, should know that narrow shoulders, and a bolster conformation, look more ramrod-y still, in contrast with this artificial voluminousness of the lower story.
And then the little girls! The idea of hunting under these humbugs of hoops, for little fairy girls, whose antelope motions are thus circumscribed, their graceful limbs hidden, and their gleeful sports checked – the monstrosity of making hideous their perfect proportions, and rendering them a laughing-stock to every jeering boy whom they meet; and – worse than all – the irreparable moral wrong of teaching them that comfort and decency must be sacrificed to Fashion! Bah! – I have no patience to think of it. I turn my pained eyes for relief to the little ragged romps who run round the streets, with one thin garment, swaying artistically to the motion of their unfettered limbs. I rush into the sculptor’s studio, and feast my eyes on limbs which have no drapery at all.
Yes, it is trying to feminine ankles and patience, to have gentlemen occupy ladies’ places in the “ladies’ cabin,” and gentlemen who do this will please consider themselves rebuked for it; but it is also disgusting, that women have not fortitude sufficient to discard the universal and absurd custom of wearing hoops. Nay, more, I affirm that any woman who has not faith enough in her Maker’s taste and wisdom, to prefer her own bones to a whale’s, deserves the fate of Jonah – minus the ejectment.
TO GENTLEMEN. A CALL TO BE A HUSBAND
Yes, I did say that “it is not every man who has a call to be a husband;” and I am not going to back out of it.
Has that man a call to be a husband, who, having wasted his youth in excesses, looks around him at the eleventh hour for a “virtuous young girl” (such men have the effrontery to be very particular on this point), to nurse up his damaged constitution, and perpetuate it in their offspring?
Has that man a call to be a husband, who, believing that the more the immortal within us is developed in this world, the higher we shall rank with heavenly intelligences in the next, yet deprecates for a wife a woman of thought and intellect, lest a marriage with such should peril the seasoning of his favorite pudding, or lest she might presume in any of her opinions to be aught else than his echo?
Has that man a call to be a husband, who, when the rosy maiden he married is transformed by too early an introduction to the cares and trials of maternity, into a feeble, confirmed invalid, turns impatiently from the restless wife’s sick-room, to sun himself in the perfidious smile of one whom he would blush to name in that wife’s pure ears?
Has he any call to be a husband, who adds to his wife’s manifold cares that of selecting and providing the household stores, and inquires of her, at that, how she spent the surplus shilling of yesterday’s appropriation?
Has he any call to be a husband, who permits his own relatives, in his hearing, to speak disrespectfully or censoriously of his wife?
Has he any call to be a husband, who reads the newspaper from beginning to end, giving notice of his presence to the weary wife, who is patiently mending his old coat, only by an occasional “Jupiter!” which may mean, to the harrowed listener, that we have a President worth standing in a driving rain, at the tail of a three-mile procession, to vote for, or – the contrary? and who, after having extracted every particle of news the paper contains, coolly puts it in one of his many mysterious pockets, and goes to sleep in his chair?
Has he a call to be a husband, who carries a letter, intended for his wife, in his pocket for six weeks, and expects any thing short of “gunpowder tea” for his supper that night?
Has he a call to be a husband, who leaves his wife to blow out the lamp, and stub her precious little toes while she is navigating for the bed-post?
Has he a call to be a husband, who tells his wife “to walk on a couple of blocks and he will overtake her,” and then joins in a hot political discussion with an opponent, after which, in a fit of absence of mind, he walks off home, leaving his wife transformed by his perfidy into “a pillar of salt?”
Has he any call to be a husband, who sits down on his wife’s best bonnet, or puts her shawl over her shoulders upside down, or wrong side out at the Opera?
Has he any call to be a husband, who goes “unbeknown” to his wife, to some wretch of a barber, and parts, for twenty-five cents, with a beard which she has coaxed from its first infantile sprout, to luxuriant, full-grown, magnificent, unsurpassable hirsuteness, and then comes home to her horrified vision a pocket edition of Moses?
Has he any call to be a husband, who kisses his wife only on Saturday night, when he winds up the clock and pays the grocer, and who never notices, day by day, the neat dress, and shining bands of hair arranged to please his stupid milk-and-water-ship?
TO THE LADIES. A CALL TO BE A WIFE
Has that woman a call to be a wife, who thinks more of her silk dress than of her children, and visits her nursery no oftener than once a day?
Has that woman a call to be a wife, who cries for a cashmere shawl when her husband’s notes are being protested?
Has that woman a call to be a wife, who sits reading the last new novel, while her husband stands before the glass, vainly trying to pin together a buttonless shirt-bosom?
Has that woman a call to be a wife, who expects her husband to swallow diluted coffee, soggy bread, smoky tea, and watery potatoes, six days out of seven?
Has she a call to be a wife, who keeps her husband standing on one leg a full hour in the street, while she is saying that interminable “last word” to some female acquaintance?
Has she a call to be a wife, who flirts with every man she meets, and reserves her frowns for the home fireside?
Has she a call to be a wife, who comes down to breakfast in abominable curl-papers, a soiled dressing-gown, and shoes down at the heel?
Has she a call to be a wife, who bores her husband, when he comes into the house, with the history of a broken tea-cup, or the possible whereabouts of a missing broom-handle?
Has she a call to be a wife, whose husband’s love weighs naught in the balance with her next door neighbor’s damask curtains, or velvet carpet?
Has she a call to be a wife, who would take advantage of a moment of conjugal weakness, to extort money or exact a promise?
Has she a call to be a wife, who “has the headache” whenever her husband wants her to walk with him, but willingly wears out her gaiter boots promenading with his gentlemen friends?
Has she a call to be a wife, who takes a journey for pleasure, leaving her husband to toil in a close office, and “have an eye, when at home, to the servants and children?”
Has she a call to be a wife, who values an unrumpled collar or crinoline more than a conjugal kiss?
Has she a call to be a wife, to whom a good husband’s society is not the greatest of earthly blessings, and a house full of rosy children its best furnishing, and prettiest adornment?
MATRIMONIAL ADVERTISEMENTS
That prurient young men, and broken-down old ones, should seek amusement in matrimonial advertisements, is not so much a matter of surprise; but that respectable papers should lend such a voice in their columns, is, I confess, astonishing. I do not say that a virtuous woman has never answered such an advertisement; but I do say, that the virtue of a woman who would do so is not invincible. There is no necessity for an attractive, or, to use a hateful phrase, a “marketable” woman, to take such a degrading step to obtain what, alas! under legitimate circumstances, often proves, when secured, but a Dead Sea apple. It is undesirable, damaged, and unsaleable goods that are oftenest offered at auction. A woman must first have ignored the sweetest attributes of womanhood, have overstepped the last barrier of self-respect, who would parley with a stranger on such a topic. You tell me that marriage has sometimes been the result. Granted: but has a woman who has effected it in this way, bettered her condition, how uncongenial soever it might have been? Few husbands (and the longer I observe, the more I am convinced of the truth of what I am about say, and I make no exception in favor of education or station) have the magnanimity to use justly, generously, the power which the law puts in their hands. But what if a wife’s helplessness be aggravated by the reflection that she has abjectly solicited her wretched fate? How many men, think you, are there, who, when out of humor, would hesitate tauntingly to use this drawn sword which you have foolishly placed in their hands?
Our sex has need of all the barriers, all the defenses, which nature has given us. No – never let woman be the wooer, save as the flowers woo, with their sweetness – save as the stars woo, with their brightness – save as the summer wind woos – silently unfolding the rose’s heart.
