| | 1 | Author: | Boyce, Neith | Add | | | 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. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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