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1Author:  Boyce, NeithRequires cookie*
 Title:  The Novel's Deadliest Friend  
 Published:  1995 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: About a century has passed since woman's fondness began to spoil the English novel. Up to Fielding's day, it appears, some good fortune preserved the lusty youth of Fiction from woman's blighting eye; or perhaps the simple appetite of youth made a defence, as the roast of beef and the flagon of ale protected Tom Jones from the blandishments of the strange lady in the inn. But this protection likewise was only temporary; and Fielding, Thackeray said in tears, was the last novelist in England "that dared to paint a man." Thackeray went away from an interview with his editor, with that remark, to write into Pendennis those paragraphs which preserve the hero's virtue—and ever since masculine heroes have been made to fit feminine ideals. Woman never has liked the Tom Jones type of hero—the conquering, destroying, self-indulgent young animal. She likes splendour and dash, but still demands that the hero shall represent somehow the idea of self-sacrifice, of mortification of the flesh, and above all, of constancy. It was Thackeray, again, who said that woman would forgive Nero all his other sins if only he had been a good family man. And this fits in with what Count Tolstoy has said recently, that woman is less noble, less self-sacrificing, than man, since man will sacrifice his family for an idea, while woman won't. It seems, then, to be fairly well established that the heights of self-sacrifice are beyond woman. And in imposing her lower ideals upon the novel she has done the harm that male novelists still deplore. As she has prevented the hero of the novel from soaring to the lonely peaks which she can't reach herself, so also she forbids him to ramp through the pleasant meadows, witlessly enjoying himself. She condemns him to stern probation and as many labours as Hercules had, and all to what end? That he may kneel at her feet for his reward. The modern novel simply flatters woman's egregious vanity. But what to do about it? How to prevent woman reading and buying books? As long as she does so the manful efforts of the novelist to uphold his art must come to naught.
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