We Women and Our Authors

We German women are accustomed to look upon ourselves as an appendage to or a part of man. Up till now it has been the chief object and the pride of our existence to subordinate ourselves to him, and to look after his comforts. It is so no longer, or at any rate it is not as common as it used to be. Women have begun to ask: Who am I? and not: Whose am I? which proves that they are conscious of their individuality and wish to live their own lives. At present they are only helpless beginners filled with desires, needs and claims, which they themselves do not understand and which they would rather not admit. Their first longing is for outward independence, and in that they are not even original, as the economic conditions of the middle classes have long since forced women to exert themselves to the utmost in order that they may be self-supporting in part, if not entirely. And they are proud and happy when they have succeeded thus far, they fight for it in public and in private life, in the family, in Associations for Women’s Rights, in newspapers, and in books where the movement has advanced the furthest. They fight for the first and rudest basis of their independence, for the right to maintain themselves, which, while it is the lowest step on the way to freedom, is the one that gives them the first title to the possession and disposal of their own selves. It is by no means an aimless struggle, but it is a sad one, in which the woman only too often forfeits her most precious possession--her womanliness.

But there is something in the background, besides what a woman ventures for the sake of attaining her wishes and advancing her claims. Many women have not yet learned to express it, many consider it their duty to dispute it even to themselves, while some give way to the indistinct longing with fear and hesitation, and only a very few know what it is and welcome it with gladness and with the consciousness that through it their lives are being strengthened, and their souls and bodies beautified. Women have passed through a fresh development and have entered upon a new stage of their inner consciousness.

It was an event which it took the whole of this century to bring about, and which has only now begun to draw attention to itself and its consequences.

One of the causes which brought it into being was due to the authors of this present century.

There has never been a literature so rich and so full of variety as that which has surrounded us women of the present day. Woman has never played such an important part in the literature of any century as in ours. It is not merely that writers have made use of her as a speaking-trumpet to say much that they could not have trusted themselves to say more plainly, but they have needed the woman herself in many and more various ways than was ever the case in former times. They wanted to have her with them in all that they thought and created, they needed her with her soul, her mind, her approbation, in order that she might make them strong, and give them confidence. Since the end of the last century there have been few literary or intellectual works, either during the classical or the romantic period, or about the year ’48, with which a woman has not been closely connected. The relationship between man and woman had changed from its simple foundation and had assumed a tenderer, more delicate form. This betrays the fact that the men, or rather let us say the élite among the men, of this century have become more sensitive, more refined, more nervous. But the same is true of women, only that they have also become more self-conscious, and this is largely owing to the influence of the superior men of their time. It was an influence that extended far beyond the limits of personal acquaintance. How many young girls have experienced their first soul-rapture in fearful bliss over a book, and have felt their heart and the world and existence itself to be too narrow for their emotions! How many women there are who have been awakened through the influence of writers in distant lands! How many of the tenderest emotions have been lived in secluded country districts and barren towns of which he, their awakener, never hears, although they are often richer and fresher than all the love that he has ever encountered! But the women who were thus moved could never grow entirely stupefied over the kitchen pot, nor could their minds be stultified with knitting, and it was they who became the discontented ones, who felt themselves thwarted and driven to despair by hopes doomed to disappointment; and these natures were among the first to go forth into the world, determined to become independent in order that they might find themselves, to become free, in order that their ego might speak.

If they had a real talent of any sort or kind they were sometimes able to work out their own self-development; but how many women, and many of the best women too, have only the one talent, and that is their warm-hearted womanly nature. It was just this that was a hindrance to them, that prevented them from elbowing their way out of their narrow, gloomy surroundings, and prevented them from attaining to anything higher than a teacher or governess, or some such position of dependence which necessitates a loveless and celibate youth--and they were not happy. Or else they married as best they could in their small circle of acquaintances--and were not happy either.

Some of these unhappy ones became the pioneers of emancipation, and stamped it with their hallmark.

In the meantime the image of the woman in the author’s soul underwent a surprising and rapid change.

The spirit of gallantry towards women with which the classics were imbued had soon disappeared. The writers of young Germany were already too much occupied in revolutionising the woman to do homage to her, and they had to be quick about it, for their own feverish spirits warned them that their reprieve was short. They drove her before them and rebuked her, saying that she was too timid and too luxurious to keep pace with them; they felt as in a wilderness without her, yet they had not the strength to drag her after them. They longed for her that she might rouse them and comfort them, and they found the time pass wearily for both.

They aroused the woman, awoke her out of a condition of vegetative ease, shook her personality awake, taught her to be discontented, to wish, to think, but they gave her nothing, and mirrored her indistinctly in their books.

The first to possess what they lacked was Gottfried Keller, and he possessed it unmistakably. No German writer has ever given us a truer, finer, more complete picture of the German woman. We meet with his models everywhere in life, whether it be in the great world, or in small towns, or in lonely country houses. The woman who is good comme le bon pain, simple, honest, warm-hearted, merry, motherly, the woman who is generous as the fruitful earth, who understands everything from instinct, and who grows more submissive the more she loves--it is the temperament of the German woman in short, with all its native conditionality and indissolubility, with its homely attractions, its domestic bondage, and also with its little and all too simple perversities.

In Keller’s writings the German woman saw herself for the first time reflected as in a truthful mirror, and she was astonished when she recognised the likeness and learned to know herself.

How many of us have been told by Keller what we are, and what we need, and what we endure, and what we ought not to endure! He became, what he least of all men ever dreamed of becoming, an awakener of women, and while he bade them glance into that part of their being of which they knew nothing, he awakened in them the consciousness of their personality.

In their surroundings and external circumstances, Keller’s women belonged to a bygone age. The social conditions in which they lived were simple and primitive as their own souls. They were never in want, or overworked, and they had no need to earn their living.

In Paul Heyse’s writings also there is no outward misery, no cruel restraint. But in spite of the absence of this peculiar feature of the time, he too has become an awakener of the individual woman of our century.

In the first place he understood women. Not one of his contemporaries can produce as rich a portrait gallery. His success did not depend upon one or two special types, for he never confined himself to exteriors, however interesting. He understood women in all the impetuosity of their being, he had the intuition necessary for seeing them as they really are in all their various moods, and he, of all the writers of the age, was the only one who invariably respected them. By these means he introduced something into literature and into the nature of women which was destined to bear incalculable results, for by regarding them in every position and under all circumstances as individuals, he taught them so to regard themselves. Till then women had been accustomed to be more or less at the disposal of others--Paul Heyse aroused them to the consciousness of their own worth. He gave them the right to dispose of themselves. He led them out of mere vegetation into the light of existence and taught them to reverence their sex. He taught them the courage of individualism.

He did more. After having improved and enriched these women, he freed them from household drudgery, and gave them the grace and manners of the outer world. To a cultivated soul he added a cultivated mind, a fearless gaze, and a certain savoir faire in all the circumstances of life.

In former days the German woman in fiction had been a native of the provinces, her chief charm lay in her romantic imagination, and she looked up to man with the trustful admiration that is born of inexperience; but Heyse’s woman sometimes overlooked man altogether, she possessed the knowledge of life and discernment of one who had travelled and seen the world, she was a cosmopolitan with few illusions. She had a keen sense of proportion, and was in the habit of criticising every one, even the man she loved; she had analysed life to its core, and she knew the why and the wherefore of her affections, but her scepticism only made her love richer, fuller, deeper and more attractive than it had been before. She was innocent, not from ignorance, but from a certain delicacy of soul, and chaste, not from piety or duty or coldness, but from a finer cult of the ego, which loathes impurity as if it were actual dirt, and reserves itself for rare and noble enjoyments.

It was thus that we women encountered ourselves in Heyse’s portrait gallery, at a time when we had reached our most impressionable age and were beginning to dream about life. We were made of pliant material, and a rough hand might have left its clumsy mark upon us, especially if it had been the hand of a favourite author. We shut ourselves out from our surroundings, we would not allow ourselves to be stamped with the dull stupid sameness of the life in which we had been brought up, we stretched out our open hands to receive all that was brought to us by the precious, forbidden books, the books which made our pulses beat faster, and aroused from the darkest depths of our souls all that was capable of perfection in us. How many helpless women whose talents bore no hope of fruition have lived their youth solely in books and for books! And as though their hearts were the chords of a quivering instrument, Heyse played his tender tale of the far horizon, and sang to them of liberty, of spiritual greatness, and of the glory of woman, beside which the doctrine of self-renunciation which was preached to us at home and at school appeared ugly and dull in the extreme.