Plain Girls

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Title:     Plain Girls
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the kitchen and housekeeper's-room.

It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man, public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.

Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly, but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of humanity in the abstract.

One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been made for them.

It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever authoress of "Jane Eyre" nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through their deep eyes and from their massive foreheads, seemed for a while, on paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.

The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice what they so completely admired in Miss Bronté's three-volume novels. Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be brought to do it. They recognized the beauty of the conception about plain girls, they were very glad to see them married off in scores to heroic village doctors, and they quite admitted that occasional young noblemen might be represented in fiction as becoming violently attached to young creatures with inky fingers and remarkable minds.

But no real change was brought about in ordinary life. Man, sinful man, read with pleasure about the triumphs of the sandy-haired girls, but still kept on dancing with and proposing to the pretty ones. And at last authoresses were driven back on the old standard of beauty. At present, in the productions both of masculine and feminine workmanship, the former view of plain girls has been resumed. They are allowed, if thoroughly excellent in other ways, to pair off with country curates and with devoted missionaries; but the prizes of fiction, as well as the prizes of reality, fall to the lot of their fairer and more fortunate sisters.

Champions of plain girls are not, however, wanting who boldly take the difficulty by the horns, and deny in toto the fact that in matrimony and love the race is usually to the beautiful. Look about you, they tell us, in the world, and you will as often as not find beauties fading on their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however, follow that plain girls are not terribly weighted in the race.

There are several reasons why women who rely on their beauty remain unmarried at the last, but the reason that their beauty gives them no advantage is certainly not one. The first reason perhaps is that beauties are inclined to be fastidious and capricious. They have no notion of following the advice of Mrs. Hannah More, and being contented with the first good, sensible, Christian lover who falls in their way; and they run, in consequence, no slight risk of overstaying their market. They go in for a more splendid sort of matrimonial success, and think they can afford to play the more daring game.

Plain girls are providentially preserved from these temptations. At the close of a well-spent life they can conscientiously look back on a career in which no reasonable opportunity was neglected, and say that they have not broken many hearts, or been sinfully and distractingly particular. And there is the further consideration to be remembered in the case of plain girls, that fortune and rank are nearly as valuable articles as beauty, and lead to a fair number of matrimonial alliances. The system of Providence is full of kindly compensations, and it is a proof of the universal benevolence we see about us that so many heiresses should be plain. Plain girls have a right to be cheered and comforted by the thought. It teaches them the happy lesson that beauty, as compared with a settled income, is skin-deep and valueless; and that what man looks for in the companion of his life is not so much a bright cheek or a blue eye, as a substantial and useful amount of this world's wealth.

Plain girls again expect less, and are prepared to accept less, in a lover. Everybody knows the sort of useful, admirable, practical man who sets himself to marry a plain girl. He is not a man of great rank, great promise, or great expectations. Had it been otherwise, he might possibly have flown at higher game, and set his heart on marrying female loveliness rather than homely excellence. His choice, if it is nothing else, is an index of a contented and modest disposition. He is not vain enough to compete in the great race for beauties. What he looks for is some one who will be the mother of his children, who will order his servants duly, and keep his household bills; and whose good sense will teach her to recognise the sterling qualities of her husband, and not object to his dining daily in his slippers. This is the sort of partner that plain girls may rationally hope to secure, and who can say that they ought not to be cheerful and happy in their lot? For a character of this undeniable sobriety there is indeed a positive advantage in a plain girl as a wife. It should never be forgotten that the man who marries a plain girl never need be jealous. He is in the Arcadian and fortunate condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the wives of dull and steady mediocrity.

Lest it should be supposed that the above calculation of what plain girls may do leaves some of their power and success still unaccounted for, it is quite right and proper to add that the story of plain girls, if it were carefully written, would contain many instances, not merely of moderate good fortunes, but of splendid and exceptional triumph. Like prima donnas, opera-dancers, and lovely milliners, plain girls have been known to make extraordinary hits, and to awaken illustrious passions. Somebody ought to take up the subject in a book, and tell us how they did it.

This is the age of Golden Treasuries. We have Golden Treasuries of English poets, of French poets, of great lawyers, of famous battles, of notable beauties, of English heroes, of successful merchants, and of almost every sort of character and celebrity that can be conceived. What is wanted is a Golden Treasury containing the narrative of the most successful plain girls. This book might be called the Book of Ugliness, and we see no reason why, to give reality to the story, the portraits of some of the most remarkable might not be appended. Of course, if ever such a volume is compiled, it will be proved to demonstration that plain girls have before now arrived at great matrimonial honor and renown.

There is, for example, the sort of plain girl who nurses her hero (perhaps in the Crimea) through a dangerous attack of illness, and marries him afterwards. There is the class of those who have been married simply from a sense of duty. There is the class that distinguishes itself by profuse kindness to poor cottagers, and by reading the Bible to blind old women; an occupation which as we know, from the most ordinary works of fiction, leads directly to the promptest and speediest attachments on the part of the young men who happen to drop in casually at the time. The catalogue of such is perhaps long and famous. Yet, allowing for all these, allowing for everything else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it ought not to be so.

Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or retroussé; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been failures.

It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society. We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up; and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not be altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's physical capacity.

It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession, and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age, of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary women is that women, with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for (apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married life.

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Plain Girls

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