When I returned to my study, I dropped into a chair which frequently invites meditation, before a case containing current fiction. My eyes glanced swiftly along the rows of Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett, Beresford, and Walpole, lingering an extra moment on Ann Veronica, The Dark Flower, and The Pretty Lady; visited with slow interrogative scrutiny the "colorful" assemblage of Hergesheimer, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, W. L. George, James Joyce, Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Charles G. Norris, Ben Hecht, and Waldo Franck; then fluttered to rest upon a half-dozen miscellaneous recent arrivals—Meredith Nicholson's Broken Barriers, Mrs. Gerould's Conquistador, Maxwell's Spinster of This Parish, Willa Cather's The Lost Lady, G. F. Hummel's After All, and West of the Water Tower.
Here, I said to myself, is material enough to prove Cornelia's case, if she has a case. Among this company I shall find the challengers, if there is a challenge. What are they calling in question? The idea of chastity—whose idea of chastity? Cornelia's idea, the idea of all nice people—What is the idea of all nice people regarding chastity? Look in the Dictionary, the record of good usage—Here it is: "Innocence of unlawful sexual intercourse." As a history of usage, the Dictionary should add in parenthesis: "This is a virtue assumed to be present in all members of the female sex in good and regular standing."
Here we have a simple and definite idea to work upon: Chastity is a virtue assumed to be present in all members of the female sex in good and regular standing. Who first gave currency to that idea? Our friends the Victorians? Oh, no! It is astonishing how many so-called Victorian ideas, delicate and fragile, can be found thriving in manlier ages, in old robust books like Don Juan and Tom Jones, and in the drama of that "den of lions," the Renaissance. How they valued this virtue—those "lions" of the Renaissance! How they valued this virtue in their wives! What praise they had for its possessors—"chaste as the icicle that's curded by the frost from purest snow and hangs on Dian's temple"! Shakespeare valiantly assumed the presence of that virtue in all members of the female sex in good and regular standing—except Cleopatra.
But we must not be too historical. The idea of chastity exists full-blown in Goldsmith, in those two famous stanzas which inquire what happens when lovely woman stoops to "folly" and learns too late that men "betray," that is, fail to legalize the "folly." We remember what follows, for the lines were in every anthology employed in our formative period to give to our young minds a relish for virtue and a lively apprehension of the consequences of departing from it. Cornelia still thinks we should prescribe Goldsmith rather than Mr. Galsworthy for the collateral reading of her daughter. Goldsmith declares very firmly that when lovely woman stoops to folly, no art can wash her guilt away.
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom—is to die.
Several distinct elements appear in our fully developed idea: first, chastity is the virtue of a legal status; second, women are naturally law-abiding; third, if they lose their status, it is by the natural perfidy of predatory man; fourth, the disaster is irretrievable. There is no salvation for the woman but death, the cloister, exile, or, occasionally, a shamefaced return to "chastity" under the horsewhip or at point of the pistol.
This idea flourished in the "good old" novels of Sir Walter Scott; it is fairly well illustrated in the case of Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. Scott was a romancer. His contemporary, Jane Austen, was a realist. She was far less chivalrously certain than he that lovely women who are neglectful of legal status are by nature virtuous. She looked at them hard; she inclined strongly to believe that such women are by nature vain, sentimental, and ignorant—like Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. But Jane Austen is at one with Scott in treating unlawful passion austerely. In the fiction of both these worthies the erring woman is unmistakably a "victim"; the man, however plausible his manners, is a profligate and unprincipled, if not a designing, villain; the consequences of departure from legal status are depicted in strongly deterrent colors. Our idea of chastity is fortified by them.
Now let us advance a generation or so and question our friends the Victorians: do they accept our idea and loyally enforce it? Yes—now and then. Familiar cases? There is the case of little Em'ly in David Copperfield. She is the typical victim of the typical seducer; and Dickens punishes them both in approved traditional fashion. He drowns the wicked lover—which is, of course, a logical consequence of departure from legal status. He sends the victim with her "soft sorrowful blue eyes" to Australia, where she attempts to expiate her guilt by a life of self-sacrifice. She has many a good offer of marriage; "'But, uncle,' she says to me, 'that's gone for ever.'" Here we have the doctrine of the irretrievable. That doctrine is sternly proclaimed by George Eliot in the graver case of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede. The repentant lover tries to do something for Hetty. His last words are that it is no use: "You told me the truth when you said to me once, 'There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.'" Neither Scott nor Jane Austen could have handled these elementary cases in a more strictly orthodox fashion. Our idea is again fortified.
But the great Victorian novelists pushed their speculations beyond the elementary problems raised by the victim-villain situation. They had, several of them, personal reasons for reflecting thoughtfully upon the social utility of the stout bulwarks with which the English law attempted to fortify the idea of chastity and the related doctrine of the irretrievable. Dickens is said to have fallen in love with all the Hogarth daughters and to have married the wrong one. Thackeray married at twenty-five a woman who half a dozen years later became insane and who outlived him. Bulwer-Lytton was legally separated at twenty-three from a woman who outlived him. Meredith's Modern Love discusses an incompatibility of temper from which a death divorced him. And George Eliot, high priestess of Victorian morality, was actually living in a kind of solemn and almost officious virtue with another woman's husband. These were circumstances arranged to liberate speculation and to set it playing a little skeptically about the one way out—the sole dark exit which Goldsmith had so glibly offered to lovely women who are unfortunate in love.
In a novel of the mid-nineteenth century, which used to be thought very dangerous reading,—Jane Eyre,—Charlotte Brontë considered one of these more difficult cases, and almost presented it. Jane, an eager, self-reliant, self-supporting, and fairly hard-headed young woman, first of our modern heroines, is loved with a grand passion by Rochester, who is enchained by marriage to a hopeless lunatic. Now the novelist permits Jane to fall deeply in love with Rochester, thus perilously illustrating the possibility that a truly great and two-sided passion may come into existence outside legal status. Charlotte Brontë, however, intervened twice to save the situation. She wasn't fastidious about the chastity of Rochester: chastity is a female virtue. But she was fastidious about the chastity of Jane. And so, of course, she makes Jane ignorant at first of the fact that Rochester is married; and she makes Jane tell him that it is all up, when she learns that he is married. That was the perfectly correct thing for Jane to do.
But it created a dilemma. Charlotte Brontë knew that it created a dilemma—a dilemma with unchastity for one horn and the frustration of a grand passion for the other. (It should perhaps be explained that a grand passion, in those illiberal days, was thought of as an experience that befell a girl but once in a lifetime.) Charlotte Brontë did not quite dare to treat this dilemma. She faced it for a moment. She let her readers face it for a moment. Then she intervened again: she destroyed the dilemma. She made it all come right. She restored both hero and heroine to chastity by pitching the lunatic wife headlong into the flames of the house of Rochester.
A happy thought—so it must have seemed to the author. Yet, as one reflects upon it, this solution appears a little dangerous. To pitch a superfluous wife into the flames—well, it would not quite serve as a Kantian basis for the solution of all such problems. Under the English law, the dilemma reasserted its actuality. Jane Eyre stands there early in the Victorian Age as a challenge, rather evasively presented, to the idea of chastity. In W. B. Maxwell's Spinster of This Parish, 1923, a modern heroine is placed in almost precisely Jane's situation, except that her lover does not think it necessary to lie to her about his lunatic wife. Without a moment's hesitation, she accepts the grand passion. Since she accepts it with all the fortitude and fidelity of an old-fashioned wife, she seems to-day a quite safe, old-fashioned character; and it is hard to conceive of any one's thinking of her as "unchaste."
Other Victorians, usually with much circumspection, returned to the dilemma; and they returned to it in such numbers that to challenge the idea of chastity as a legal creation may be regarded as a rather distinctively Victorian contribution. From the question what to do when you are united to an undivorceable insane wife, the Victorians proceeded cautiously to consider the demands of virtue in analogous sets of circumstances. What is the point at which the maintenance of legal chastity involves the loss of ethical integrity? What is right conduct for a young girl whose parents or relatives have united her in a "suitable marriage" to a repellent brute of means and good family? That is a question which interested Thackeray in The Newcomes; and it will be remembered that the wife of Barnes Newcome answers the question in her own case by giving her husband occasion for divorce under the English law. It is not always observed that to Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter right conduct, to the last page of the book, consists in fidelity to her lover, not to her fanatical husband; and Hawthorne, perhaps indecently, places the lovers in adjacent graves of a Boston burying-ground. Isabel Archer, in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, is begged by her lover to desert her husband and come to him, and to disregard the "bottomless idiocy" of what other people will think or say about them. Though, on the last page, Isabel is still clinging to legality, one is left in some doubt whether she will cling indefinitely. Meredith's Diana is a standing challenge to the doctrine of irretrievable marriage. Hardy's Tess is a defiance to the idea of chastity entertained by the Angel Clares; and the obscene relation in Jude the Obscure is obviously that between him and his wife, not that between him and Sue, except as it is smirched by his return to his wife and by her return to her husband.
But why multiply instances? Here are enough to show that the good Victorians repeatedly solicited our sympathy and our support for heroines whose ethical integrity was afflicted by their legal chastity. The idea of illicit love as an affair of victim and villain, has been largely jettisoned or given over to melodrama, as of an interest too primitive or too banal for extended consideration. To their successors, the Victorian realists bequeath, as matter of far higher artistic and general human concern, their rather cautious essays upon the evaded dilemma of Jane Eyre.