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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Tales of Marriage and Freedom – 5 Classic Feminist Fiction Novels is an enlightening collection that brings together groundbreaking works exploring the themes of autonomy, domesticity, and emancipation. This anthology vividly captures the evolving perspectives on women's roles in society and their pursuit of freedom amid the constraints of marriage and tradition. The selected stories display a rich diversity in narrative style, ranging from the introspective and analytical to the bold and provocative. With standouts that challenge conventional norms, the collection underscores the timelessness and urgency of feminist discourse. The anthology is graced by contributions from eminent authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. These writers, pivotal in the 18th and 19th-century feminist movements, used their pens to question societal norms and advocate for women's rights. Their collective works echo the social and cultural shifts of their times, providing a multifaceted view of women's struggles and aspirations. Through their unique voices, the anthology offers a profound exploration of marriage as both a personal and political institution. Readers will find in Tales of Marriage and Freedom an indispensable resource for understanding the intersectionality of literature and feminist theory. Each narrative not only enriches the reader's comprehension of the historical context but also propels contemporary discussions on gender equality and personal liberty. This collection is an invitation to engage with and reflect on the myriad ways in which women's literature has contributed to broader social transformations, making it a compelling addition to both personal and academic libraries.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Tales of Marriage and Freedom – 5 Classic Feminist Fiction Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together five works that confront the knot between marriage and freedom through fiction’s most elastic forms. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman exposes the legal and emotional machinery constraining wives. Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette turn domestic space and inward consciousness into arenas of resistance. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, with accompanying short stories, probes desire and solitude. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did reimagines household labor as a site of reform. Read together, they trace an arc from critique to countermodel, illuminating how personal autonomy is imagined, tested, and reclaimed.
Our principle in pairing these titles is philosophical continuity amid formal variety. Each narrative asks what a woman owes herself, and how social contracts calibrate or negate that claim. The selection spans courtroom logic, diary-like confession, psychological observation, and pragmatic utopianism, yet converges on the ethics of choice. The terrain includes houses, workplaces, boarding schools, and shorelines, all registering constraint and possibility. The common through-line is not doctrine but inquiry: when does intimacy enable flourishing, and when does it confiscate it? These works reply by staging conflicts between conscience and convention, desire and duty, survival and recognition.
Another aim is to bring structural questions into view alongside intimate feeling. In Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman, injustice is juridical as well as marital. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall insists that economic dependence sharpens moral coercion. What Diantha Did centers labor, wages, and organizational ingenuity as instruments of self-determination. Villette insists on the opacity of inner life, dramatizing freedom as a private, often linguistic practice. The Awakening and short fiction nearby distill the pressures of respectability and the allure of solitude. Together, these angles widen the lens from individual defiance to the systems that script or silence it.
Unlike encountering each title in isolation, this collection invites cross-reading that sharpens contours and complicates assumptions. Placing Maria beside The Tenant of Wildfell Hall foregrounds legal and economic dimensions of marital power. Setting Villette against The Awakening reveals divergent valuations of solitude and desire. Juxtaposing What Diantha Did with any of the others opens practical questions about work, care, and reform. The design is comparative rather than comprehensive, aiming for resonance rather than coverage. The result is a chorus of approaches to freedom within and beyond marriage, heard more distinctly through proximity than through separate, sequential encounters.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Across these works, domestic architecture functions as metaphor and battleground. Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman exposes confinement literal and procedural. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall situates a contested home at the edge of a watchful community. Villette converts classrooms and rented rooms into theaters of secrecy. In The Awakening, coastal spaces promise expanses and risks that household interiors deny, while short stories echo variations of threshold and return. What Diantha Did treats kitchens and parlors as sites of management, invention, and public-facing service. Doors, leases, and journeys recur, marking the fragile boundary between safety, surveillance, and self-possession.
Tone and method vary, creating a dynamic conversation. Wollstonecraft blends sentimental intensity with analytic indictment. Anne Brontë’s plain-spoken gravity contrasts with Charlotte Brontë’s layered, oblique psychology in Villette. Chopin’s prose tends to lyric compression, attending to sensory awakening and the solitude of perception; the short fiction amplifies this range. Gilman’s narrative favors brisk pragmatism and satiric clarity, outlining systems rather than reveries. This spread—from polemical romance to psychological novel, from lyrical impression to social problem narrative—keeps the debate mobile. It allows freedom to appear as feeling, law, work, and art, not as a single, totalizing solution.
Echoes circulate without requiring direct homage. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s insistence on a woman’s right to refuse harm resonates with Maria’s critique of marriage as an unjust contract. Villette’s guarded narrator anticipates the reticence and self-revision seen in Chopin’s protagonists, where interior truth negotiates with public performance. Gilman’s revaluation of paid domestic labor refracts earlier demands for rational agency into logistics and enterprise. Across the collection, letters, testimonies, and confessions surface as instruments of moral claim, yet each author tests their limits, staging misreadings, strategic silence, and the costs of telling. Influence reads here as shared pressure.
Shared dilemmas crystallize: desire that stretches or shatters vows; work that dignifies or exhausts; secrecy that shelters or isolates; community that protects or polices. Characters weigh survival strategies against ideals, asking whether compromise preserves the self or erodes it beyond recognition. Gilman’s logistics challenge sentimental narratives of sacrifice; Chopin complicates self-possession with its attendant solitude; the Brontës trace persistence in the face of scrutiny; Wollstonecraft turns suffering into argument. The resulting interplay resists final answers, yet it cultivates discriminations—between freedom from and freedom to, between lawful permission and ethical possibility—that travel from page to conscience.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These works matter now because the conditions they diagnose have altered yet persist. Coercive control, economic precarity, and the politics of care still contour intimate life. Debates about professional ambition, domestic responsibility, and consent continue to seek language equal to lived complexity. The collection expands that vocabulary by offering experiments in refusal, endurance, and redesign. It shows how legal critique, psychological insight, and organizational imagination can cooperate without collapsing into a single program. In doing so, it insists that art clarifies stakes: who pays for stability, who defines respectability, and how autonomy might be made not only felt but actionable.
Critical histories have repeatedly returned to these titles as touchstones. Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman is frequently cited for articulating a systematic case against marital subjugation. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is widely acknowledged for its uncompromising representation of marital harm and its insistence on a woman’s exit. Villette is praised for its intricate interiority and its cool recognition of ambiguity. The Awakening famously provoked controversy before gaining a durable readership and fresh appraisal, while the accompanying short stories broaden its compass. What Diantha Did invites debate over domestic labor, entrepreneurship, and the social value of care.
Their legacies extend through classrooms, reading circles, and public argument, as well as across theatre, film, and visual culture. Quotations and scenes from these works continue to be invoked in discussions of gendered labor, marital law, and the ethics of desire. Scholars revisit them to test new methods of interpretation; artists revisit them to recalibrate voice and point of view. Cultural memory has not smoothed their edges. Instead, the friction they generate—between sympathy and scrutiny, confession and reticence—remains a productive irritant that keeps debates alive, encouraging audiences to reconsider both the form and the stakes of freedom.
Assembled in conversation, these novels and stories render freedom as a practice rather than a prize. They chart the uneven labor of making a life under pressure, showing where imagination opens paths and where institutions close them. Readers encounter not a single heroine’s triumph but a repertoire of strategies: articulation, retreat, organization, endurance, and risk. The collection’s wager is that juxtaposition sharpens judgment and empathy, enabling attention to small decisional moments as well as grand resolves. In a world still negotiating marriage’s promises and perils, these works model both refusal and creation, turning private dilemmas into shared inquiry.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman emerges from the turbulence that followed the American and French revolutions, when British debates over citizenship, natural rights, and the legal subordination of wives intensified. Under coverture, a married woman’s property and legal person were absorbed into her husband’s, and remedies for marital cruelty were scarce. Debtors’ prisons, private madhouses, and the porous boundaries between moral failing and legal confinement made the female body vulnerable to familial and institutional control. Pamphlet wars, sedition trials, and anxieties about radicalism shadow the novel’s insistence that intimate tyranny mirrors public despotism, making domestic life a crucible for political argument.
By mid-nineteenth-century Britain, industrialization had reordered class relations while the ideology of separate spheres hardened the moral division between public men and private women. The 1832 Reform Act reshaped parliamentary representation without enfranchising women; the 1834 Poor Law centralized relief and stigmatized dependency. Evangelical moral discourse championed temperance and respectability yet often naturalized female submission within marriage. Against this background, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall interrogates the social power of the gentleman drinker and the precarious status of mothers who resist. The emergent middle-class cult of domesticity becomes a contested law court, where community judgment, gossip, and property regimes police behavior.
Legal change both lagged behind and was spurred by such fictional exposures. Before mid-century, custody presumptions favored fathers, though limited reforms began with the 1839 Custody of Infants Act. Divorce for most remained nearly unattainable until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 created civil courts and broadened grounds, albeit unevenly for wives and husbands. Married women’s earnings and property would not be substantially protected until later statutes. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall predates some of these reforms yet participates in the agitation that made them thinkable, dramatizing how moral injury within marriage intersected with property, inheritance, and the management of reputations.
Villette stages its conflicts in a continental setting marked by confessional rivalry, bureaucratic schooling, and the economic uncertainties of the 1840s. The revolutionary wave of 1848 exposed the fragility of monarchies and the volatility of urban crowds, while transnational travel expanded for those able to seek work abroad. Teaching and governessing offered one of the few sanctioned paths to female self-support, yet wages were low and status ambiguous. Surveillance within classrooms echoes the wider climate of policing dissent and managing populations. The novel’s cosmopolitan streets, theaters, and pensionnat make visible how national ideologies and religious authority regulate female mobility and ambition.
The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories are situated in the Gulf South during the consolidation of Jim Crow and the rearticulation of class and ethnic boundaries in Louisiana. A civil code shaped by Napoleonic precedent structured marriage, property, and community expectations, while Catholic and Creole customs governed sociability and reputation. Post-Reconstruction politics curtailed possibilities for many, even as tourism, rail travel, and seaside resorts offered new experiences of leisure and visibility. Economic volatility after the panic of 1893 and the pressures of urban modernity sharpened conflicts between private desire and public role. Domestic space, parish life, and the shoreline all become contested jurisdictions.
What Diantha Did belongs to the Progressive Era, when municipal reformers, clubwomen, and suffrage organizers linked household welfare to public health and social efficiency. Rapid urbanization and a chronic domestic-servant shortage unsettled middle-class routines, while electrification, telephones, and ready-made goods transformed housework’s tempo. Expanding corporations normalized professional management, and new white-collar jobs beckoned women who sought income without abandoning respectability. Debates over wage standards, consumer cooperatives, and scientific housekeeping reframed the home as an economic enterprise. Against this backdrop, the novel’s entrepreneurial protagonist treats marriageable femininity and paid labor as rival currencies, challenging the assumption that romantic fulfillment resolves economic dependence.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman synthesizes Enlightenment appeals to reason with the sentimental novel’s demand for sympathetic identification. It borrows gothic machinery—confinement, threat, and institutional menace—not to mystify but to clarify the structural character of marital power. Testimony, fragments, and embedded life histories create a dossier-like texture that mimics juridical inquiry. The novel contests the doctrine that passion must be domesticated into obedience, proposing instead that feeling can verify injustice and animate reform. Its rhetoric of universal rights collides with the particularities of class and gender, staging a philosophical quarrel within the very forms of popular entertainment.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall recalibrates domestic fiction through documentary strategies: diaries, letters, and paintings become competing records of truth. Realist description anchors scenes of conviviality and degradation, yet the narrative also courts moral instruction without sacrificing psychological nuance. The novel interrogates the sentimental ideal of redemptive patience by tracing the costs of endurance within a legally lopsided marriage. Landscape and architecture function as ethical weather, registering shifts in visibility, concealment, and retreat. The aesthetic of plain speaking—sometimes austere, sometimes indignant—aligns with contemporary reform discourses while maintaining the autonomy of art to reveal what sermon and statute frequently overlook.
Villette advances psychological realism by privileging consciousness over spectacle. Its narrator manages intimacy and reticence with equal skill, staging uncertainty as an epistemological principle rather than a flaw. The result is a poetics of withheld information: glimpses, misrecognitions, and self-surveillance accumulate into a study of desire’s negotiations with propriety. The novel’s theatrical scenes foreground role-playing and spectatorship, while multilingual exchanges underscore the instability of meaning across borders. Gothic effects persist as stains of anxiety rather than as supernatural certainties, and realism absorbs them as symptoms of modern life. The book thus straddles competing aesthetic regimes without reconciling them.
The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories blend regional realism with an impressionistic attention to light, sound, and bodily sensation. The prose favors brevity and resonance over exposition, exploiting periodical culture’s demand for tight structures and vivid settings. Musical motifs and painterly scenes trace the education of feeling alongside the education of taste. Symbolic objects—water, garments, rooms—organize a vocabulary for intimacy and autonomy without reverting to moral allegory. The work’s restraint amplifies shock, as small acts and glances carry ethical consequence. The result is an art of atmosphere and contour, where social codes are apprehended through mood as much as plot.
What Diantha Did adopts reform fiction’s utilitarian clarity, mixing satire with a pragmatic blueprint for reorganizing domestic labor. The narrative draws on contemporary management ideas—standardization, division of labor, and service contracts—while retaining the buoyant tempo of a romance. Its didacticism is frank but inventive, positing the household as an enterprise that can be rationalized without extinguishing companionship. Serialization encourages cliffhangers and public debate, turning the text into a forum for policy by example. Humor disarms resistance, and case-study episodes test proposals under varying social conditions, aligning the novel with a tradition of speculative, solution-oriented storytelling.
Across the anthology, the classic marriage plot becomes a laboratory for competing aesthetics. Narrators employ confession, dossier, case history, and reverie to calibrate authority and doubt. The works question whether love can be disentangled from money, guardianship, and surveillance, and whether truth is best served by candor or by strategic silence. Domestic interiors become stages for political theory; workplaces and schools acquire the aura of romance. The competing pulls of realism, gothic residue, local color, and reform parable yield hybrid forms. These hybrids reflect the ambivalence of their moment, pressing toward freedom while acknowledging the tenacity of convention.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception histories were tangled from the outset. Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman suffered from the author’s posthumous notoriety, which allowed detractors to conflate argument with biography. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was denounced by some contemporaries as coarse or unladylike in its exposure of vice, even as readers recognized its courage. Villette earned admiration for craft yet perplexed audiences with its reticence and ambivalent tone. The Awakening provoked charges of immorality and was quickly marginalized. What Diantha Did found readers among reformers but was often dismissed as schematic. Each work therefore entered cultural memory under the sign of controversy.
As legal regimes evolved, new audiences recalibrated these texts. Property and custody reforms, the establishment of civil divorce, and later expansions of women’s employment reframed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as prophetic social analysis. Campaigns for married women’s earnings and bodily autonomy furnished fresh lenses for Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman. The spread of wage labor for middle-class women illuminated the economic insights of What Diantha Did. Urban anonymity and widening leisure culture made The Awakening’s attention to sensation newly legible. Meanwhile, Villette’s depiction of work abroad and religious pluralism spoke to the mobility and hybridity of modern life.
Second-wave feminism catalyzed a broad recovery. University syllabi and new editions elevated The Awakening to a central text on desire and constraint, while What Diantha Did was revalued for its analysis of domestic labor and service economies. Critics approached The Tenant of Wildfell Hall through legal history and ethics of care, and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman through rights discourse and institutional critique. Villette invited psychoanalytic and narratological attention to secrecy and self-fashioning. Subsequent decades layered in intersectional analysis, probing class, ethnicity, religion, and region—especially in Louisiana contexts—while also revisiting how cosmopolitan schooling and migration inflect identity.
Adaptations and scholarly apparatus reshaped reception. Stage and screen versions of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall foregrounded legal jeopardy and maternal agency for new publics. Dramatic and operatic treatments of The Awakening emphasized musical motifs already latent in the prose, while short stories appeared in anthologies that showcased regional voices. Editions of Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman restored textual complexities and fragments, inviting debate about unfinished form. What Diantha Did circulated in business-history courses and women’s studies classrooms as an experiment in social entrepreneurship. Digital archives, audiobooks, and open-access projects broadened access and facilitated transnational reading communities.
Current scholarship continues to test the limits of liberation each work imagines. Do narratives of escape depend on class privilege or replicate hierarchies of race and service, particularly in depictions of household labor? How should consent and coercion within marriage be understood in light of evolving norms and laws? Are religious critique and secular aspiration in Villette compatible, or structurally at odds? Does The Awakening valorize autonomy or narrate an impasse? Can What Diantha Did reconcile companionship with commodification? The anthology’s durability lies in these open questions, which tie intimate ethics to civic belonging across changing historical horizons.
Tales of Marriage and Freedom – 5 Classic Feminist Fiction Novels
Marriage, Institutional Constraint, and Economic Dependence
Inner Life, Desire, and the Quest for Autonomy
Mary Wollstonecraft
Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman
PREFACE
THE PUBLIC are here presented with the last literary attempt of an author, whose fame has been uncommonly extensive, and whose talents have probably been most admired, by the persons by whom talents are estimated with the greatest accuracy and discrimination. There are few, to whom her writings could in any case have given pleasure, that would have wished that this fragment should have been suppressed, because it is a fragment. There is a sentiment, very dear to minds of taste and imagination, that finds a melancholy delight in contemplating these unfinished productions of genius, these sketches of what, if they had been filled up in a manner adequate to the writer’s conception, would perhaps have given a new impulse to the manners of a world.
The purpose and structure of the following work, had long formed a favourite subject of meditation with its author, and she judged them capable of producing an important effect. The composition had been in progress for a period of twelve months. She was anxious to do justice to her conception, and recommenced and revised the manuscript several different times. So much of it as is here given to the public, she was far from considering as finished, and, in a letter to a friend directly written on this subject, she says, “I am perfectly aware that some of the incidents ought to be transposed, and heightened by more harmonious shading; and I wished in some degree to avail myself of criticism, before I began to adjust my events into a story, the outline of which I had sketched in my mind.” * The only friends to whom the author communicated her manuscript, were Mr. Dyson, the translator of the Sorcerer, and the present editor; and it was impossible for the most inexperienced author to display a stronger desire of profiting by the censures and sentiments that might be suggested.**
In revising these sheets for the press, it was necessary for the editor, in some places, to connect the more finished parts with the pages of an older copy, and a line or two in addition sometimes appeared requisite for that purpose. Wherever such a liberty has been taken, the additional phrases will be found inclosed in brackets; it being the editor’s most earnest desire to intrude nothing of himself into the work, but to give to the public the words, as well as ideas, of the real author.
What follows in the ensuing pages, is not a preface regularly drawn out by the author, but merely hints for a preface, which, though never filled up in the manner the writer intended, appeared to be worth preserving.
W. GODWIN.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
THE WRONGS OF WOMAN, like the wrongs of the oppressed part of mankind, may be deemed necessary by their oppressors: but surely there are a few, who will dare to advance before the improvement of the age, and grant that my sketches are not the abortion of a distempered fancy, or the strong delineations of a wounded heart.
In writing this novel, I have rather endeavoured to pourtray passions than manners.
In many instances I could have made the incidents more dramatic, would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.
In the invention of the story, this view restrained my fancy; and the history ought rather to be considered, as of woman, than of an individual.
The sentiments I have embodied.
In many works of this species, the hero is allowed to be mortal, and to become wise and virtuous as well as happy, by a train of events and circumstances. The heroines, on the contrary, are to be born immaculate, and to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove.
[The following is an extract of a letter from the author to a friend, to whom she communicated her manuscript.]
For my part, I cannot suppose any situation more distressing, than for a woman of sensibility, with an improving mind, to be bound to such a man as I have described for life; obliged to renounce all the humanizing affections, and to avoid cultivating her taste, lest her perception of grace and refinement of sentiment, should sharpen to agony the pangs of disappointment. Love, in which the imagination mingles its bewitching colouring, must be fostered by delicacy. I should despise, or rather call her an ordinary woman, who could endure such a husband as I have sketched.
These appear to me (matrimonial despotism of heart and conduct) to be the peculiar Wrongs of Woman, because they degrade the mind. What are termed great misfortunes, may more forcibly impress the mind of common readers; they have more of what may justly be termed stage-effect; but it is the delineation of finer sensations, which, in my opinion, constitutes the merit of our best novels. This is what I have in view; and to show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various.
CHAPTER 1
ABODES OF HORROR have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring to recall her scattered thoughts!
Surprise, astonishment, that bordered on distraction, seemed to have suspended her faculties, till, waking by degrees to a keen sense of anguish, a whirlwind of rage and indignation roused her torpid pulse. One recollection with frightful velocity following another, threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the terrific inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial sounds of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, which amuse while they affright; but such tones of misery as carry a dreadful certainty directly to the heart. What effect must they then have produced on one, true to the touch of sympathy, and tortured by maternal apprehension!
Her infant’s image was continually floating on Maria’s sight, and the first smile of intelligence remembered, as none but a mother, an unhappy mother, can conceive. She heard her half speaking half cooing, and felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom—a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain. From a stranger she could indeed receive the maternal aliment, Maria was grieved at the thought—but who would watch her with a mother’s tenderness, a mother’s self-denial?
The retreating shadows of former sorrows rushed back in a gloomy train, and seemed to be pictured on the walls of her prison, magnified by the state of mind in which they were viewed—Still she mourned for her child, lamented she was a daughter, and anticipated the aggravated ills of life that her sex rendered almost inevitable, even while dreading she was no more. To think that she was blotted out of existence was agony, when the imagination had been long employed to expand her faculties; yet to suppose her turned adrift on an unknown sea, was scarcely less afflicting.
After being two days the prey of impetuous, varying emotions, Maria began to reflect more calmly on her present situation, for she had actually been rendered incapable of sober reflection, by the discovery of the act of atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point the dart of anguish, and suppressed the heart heavings of indignant nature merely by the force of contempt. Now she endeavoured to brace her mind to fortitude, and to ask herself what was to be her employment in her dreary cell? Was it not to effect her escape, to fly to the succour of her child, and to baffle the selfish schemes of her tyrant—her husband?
These thoughts roused her sleeping spirit, and the self-possession returned, that seemed to have abandoned her in the infernal solitude into which she had been precipitated. The first emotions of overwhelming impatience began to subside, and resentment gave place to tenderness, and more tranquil meditation; though anger once more stopt the calm current of reflection when she attempted to move her manacled arms. But this was an outrage that could only excite momentary feelings of scorn, which evaporated in a faint smile; for Maria was far from thinking a personal insult the most difficult to endure with magnanimous indifference.
She approached the small grated window of her chamber, and for a considerable time only regarded the blue expanse; though it commanded a view of a desolate garden, and of part of a huge pile of buildings, that, after having been suffered, for half a century, to fall to decay, had undergone some clumsy repairs, merely to render it habitable. The ivy had been torn off the turrets, and the stones not wanted to patch up the breaches of time, and exclude the warring elements, left in heaps in the disordered court. Maria contemplated this scene she knew not how long; or rather gazed on the walls, and pondered on her situation. To the master of this most horrid of prisons, she had, soon after her entrance, raved of injustice, in accents that would have justified his treatment, had not a malignant smile, when she appealed to his judgment, with a dreadful conviction stifled her remonstrating complaints. By force, or openly, what could be done? But surely some expedient might occur to an active mind, without any other employment, and possessed of sufficient resolution to put the risk of life into the balance with the chance of freedom.
A woman entered in the midst of these reflections, with a firm, deliberate step, strongly marked features, and large black eyes, which she fixed steadily on Maria’s, as if she designed to intimidate her, saying at the same time “You had better sit down and eat your dinner, than look at the clouds.”
“I have no appetite,” replied Maria, who had previously determined to speak mildly; “why then should I eat?”
“But, in spite of that, you must and shall eat something. I have had many ladies under my care, who have resolved to starve themselves; but, soon or late, they gave up their intent, as they recovered their senses.”
“Do you really think me mad?” asked Maria, meeting the searching glance of her eye.
“Not just now. But what does that prove?—Only that you must be the more carefully watched, for appearing at times so reasonable. You have not touched a morsel since you entered the house.”—Maria sighed intelligibly.—“Could any thing but madness produce such a disgust for food?”
“Yes, grief; you would not ask the question if you knew what it was.” The attendant shook her head; and a ghastly smile of desperate fortitude served as a forcible reply, and made Maria pause, before she added—“Yet I will take some refreshment: I mean not to die.—No; I will preserve my senses; and convince even you, sooner than you are aware of, that my intellects have never been disturbed, though the exertion of them may have been suspended by some infernal drug.”
Doubt gathered still thicker on the brow of her guard, as she attempted to convict her of mistake.
“Have patience!” exclaimed Maria, with a solemnity that inspired awe. “My God! how have I been schooled into the practice!” A suffocation of voice betrayed the agonizing emotions she was labouring to keep down; and conquering a qualm of disgust, she calmly endeavoured to eat enough to prove her docility, perpetually turning to the suspicious female, whose observation she courted, while she was making the bed and adjusting the room.
“Come to me often,” said Maria, with a tone of persuasion, in consequence of a vague plan that she had hastily adopted, when, after surveying this woman’s form and features, she felt convinced that she had an understanding above the common standard, “and believe me mad, till you are obliged to acknowledge the contrary.” The woman was no fool, that is, she was superior to her class; nor had misery quite petrified the life’s-blood of humanity, to which reflections on our own misfortunes only give a more orderly course. The manner, rather than the expostulations, of Maria made a slight suspicion dart into her mind with corresponding sympathy, which various other avocations, and the habit of banishing compunction, prevented her, for the present, from examining more minutely.
But when she was told that no person, excepting the physician appointed by her family, was to be permitted to see the lady at the end of the gallery, she opened her keen eyes still wider, and uttered a—“hem!” before she enquired—“Why?” She was briefly told, in reply, that the malady was hereditary, and the fits not occurring but at very long and irregular intervals, she must be carefully watched; for the length of these lucid periods only rendered her more mischievous, when any vexation or caprice brought on the paroxysm of phrensy.
Had her master trusted her, it is probable that neither pity nor curiosity would have made her swerve from the straight line of her interest; for she had suffered too much in her intercourse with mankind, not to determine to look for support, rather to humouring their passions, than courting their approbation by the integrity of her conduct. A deadly blight had met her at the very threshold of existence; and the wretchedness of her mother seemed a heavy weight fastened on her innocent neck, to drag her down to perdition. She could not heroically determine to succour an unfortunate; but, offended at the bare supposition that she could be deceived with the same ease as a common servant, she no longer curbed her curiosity; and, though she never seriously fathomed her own intentions, she would sit, every moment she could steal from observation, listening to the tale, which Maria was eager to relate with all the persuasive eloquence of grief.
It is so cheering to see a human face, even if little of the divinity of virtue beam in it, that Maria anxiously expected the return of the attendant, as of a gleam of light to break the gloom of idleness. Indulged sorrow, she perceived, must blunt or sharpen the faculties to the two opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination. She sunk into one state, after being fatigued by the other: till the want of occupation became even more painful than the actual pressure or apprehension of sorrow; and the confinement that froze her into a nook of existence, with an unvaried prospect before her, the most insupportable of evils. The lamp of life seemed to be spending itself to chase the vapours of a dungeon which no art could dissipate.—And to what purpose did she rally all her energy?—Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?
Though she failed immediately to rouse a lively sense of injustice in the mind of her guard, because it had been sophisticated into misanthropy, she touched her heart. Jemima (she had only a claim to a Christian name, which had not procured her any Christian privileges) could patiently hear of Maria’s confinement on false pretences; she had felt the crushing hand of power, hardened by the exercise of injustice, and ceased to wonder at the perversions of the understanding, which systematize oppression; but, when told that her child, only four months old, had been torn from her, even while she was discharging the tenderest maternal office, the woman awoke in a bosom long estranged from feminine emotions, and Jemima determined to alleviate all in her power, without hazarding the loss of her place, the sufferings of a wretched mother, apparently injured, and certainly unhappy. A sense of right seems to result from the simplest act of reason, and to preside over the faculties of the mind, like the master-sense of feeling, to rectify the rest; but (for the comparison may be carried still farther) how often is the exquisite sensibility of both weakened or destroyed by the vulgar occupations, and ignoble pleasures of life?
The preserving her situation was, indeed, an important object to Jemima, who had been hunted from hole to hole, as if she had been a beast of prey, or infected with a moral plague. The wages she received, the greater part of which she hoarded, as her only chance for independence, were much more considerable than she could reckon on obtaining any where else, were it possible that she, an outcast from society, could be permitted to earn a subsistence in a reputable family. Hearing Maria perpetually complain of listlessness, and the not being able to beguile grief by resuming her customary pursuits, she was easily prevailed on, by compassion, and that involuntary respect for abilities, which those who possess them can never eradicate, to bring her some books and implements for writing. Maria’s conversation had amused and interested her, and the natural consequence was a desire, scarcely observed by herself, of obtaining the esteem of a person she admired. The remembrance of better days was rendered more lively; and the sentiments then acquired appearing less romantic than they had for a long period, a spark of hope roused her mind to new activity.
How grateful was her attention to Maria! Oppressed by a dead weight of existence, or preyed on by the gnawing worm of discontent, with what eagerness did she endeavour to shorten the long days, which left no traces behind! She seemed to be sailing on the vast ocean of life, without seeing any land-mark to indicate the progress of time; to find employment was then to find variety, the animating principle of nature.
CHAPTER 2
EARNESTLY as Maria endeavoured to soothe, by reading, the anguish of her wounded mind, her thoughts would often wander from the subject she was led to discuss, and tears of maternal tenderness obscured the reasoning page. She descanted on “the ills which flesh is heir to,” with bitterness, when the recollection of her babe was revived by a tale of fictitious woe, that bore any resemblance to her own; and her imagination was continually employed, to conjure up and embody the various phantoms of misery, which folly and vice had let loose on the world. The loss of her babe was the tender string; against other cruel remembrances she laboured to steel her bosom; and even a ray of hope, in the midst of her gloomy reveries, would sometimes gleam on the dark horizon of futurity, while persuading herself that she ought to cease to hope, since happiness was no where to be found.—But of her child, debilitated by the grief with which its mother had been assailed before it saw the light, she could not think without an impatient struggle.
“I, alone, by my active tenderness, could have saved,” she would exclaim, “from an early blight, this sweet blossom; and, cherishing it, I should have had something still to love.”
In proportion as other expectations were torn from her, this tender one had been fondly clung to, and knit into her heart.
The books she had obtained, were soon devoured, by one who had no other resource to escape from sorrow, and the feverish dreams of ideal wretchedness or felicity, which equally weaken the intoxicated sensibility. Writing was then the only alternative, and she wrote some rhapsodies descriptive of the state of her mind; but the events of her past life pressing on her, she resolved circumstantially to relate them, with the sentiments that experience, and more matured reason, would naturally suggest. They might perhaps instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, her mother knew not how to avoid.
This thought gave life to her diction, her soul flowed into it, and she soon found the task of recollecting almost obliterated impressions very interesting. She lived again in the revived emotions of youth, and forgot her present in the retrospect of sorrows that had assumed an unalterable character.
Though this employment lightened the weight of time, yet, never losing sight of her main object, Maria did not allow any opportunity to slip of winning on the affections of Jemima; for she discovered in her a strength of mind, that excited her esteem, clouded as it was by the misanthropy of despair.
An insulated being, from the misfortune of her birth, she despised and preyed on the society by which she had been oppressed, and loved not her fellow-creatures, because she had never been beloved. No mother had ever fondled her, no father or brother had protected her from outrage; and the man who had plunged her into infamy, and deserted her when she stood in greatest need of support, deigned not to smooth with kindness the road to ruin. Thus degraded, was she let loose on the world; and virtue, never nurtured by affection, assumed the stern aspect of selfish independence.
This general view of her life, Maria gathered from her exclamations and dry remarks. Jemima indeed displayed a strange mixture of interest and suspicion; for she would listen to her with earnestness, and then suddenly interrupt the conversation, as if afraid of resigning, by giving way to her sympathy, her dear-bought knowledge of the world.
Maria alluded to the possibility of an escape, and mentioned a compensation, or reward; but the style in which she was repulsed made her cautious, and determine not to renew the subject, till she knew more of the character she had to work on. Jemima’s countenance, and dark hints, seemed to say, “You are an extraordinary woman; but let me consider, this may only be one of your lucid intervals.” Nay, the very energy of Maria’s character, made her suspect that the extraordinary animation she perceived might be the effect of madness. “Should her husband then substantiate his charge, and get possession of her estate, from whence would come the promised annuity, or more desired protection? Besides, might not a woman, anxious to escape, conceal some of the circumstances which made against her? Was truth to be expected from one who had been entrapped, kidnapped, in the most fraudulent manner?”
In this train Jemima continued to argue, the moment after compassion and respect seemed to make her swerve; and she still resolved not to be wrought on to do more than soften the rigour of confinement, till she could advance on surer ground.
Maria was not permitted to walk in the garden; but sometimes, from her window, she turned her eyes from the gloomy walls, in which she pined life away, on the poor wretches who strayed along the walks, and contemplated the most terrific of ruins—that of a human soul. What is the view of the fallen column, the mouldering arch, of the most exquisite workmanship, when compared with this living memento of the fragility, the instability, of reason, and the wild luxuriancy of noxious passions? Enthusiasm turned adrift, like some rich stream overflowing its banks, rushes forward with destructive velocity, inspiring a sublime concentration of thought. Thus thought Maria—These are the ravages over which humanity must ever mournfully ponder, with a degree of anguish not excited by crumbling marble, or cankering brass, unfaithful to the trust of monumental fame. It is not over the decaying productions of the mind, embodied with the happiest art, we grieve most bitterly. The view of what has been done by man, produces a melancholy, yet aggrandizing, sense of what remains to be achieved by human intellect; but a mental convulsion, which, like the devastation of an earthquake, throws all the elements of thought and imagination into confusion, makes contemplation giddy, and we fearfully ask on what ground we ourselves stand.
Melancholy and imbecility marked the features of the wretches allowed to breathe at large; for the frantic, those who in a strong imagination had lost a sense of woe, were closely confined. The playful tricks and mischievous devices of their disturbed fancy, that suddenly broke out, could not be guarded against, when they were permitted to enjoy any portion of freedom; for, so active was their imagination, that every new object which accidentally struck their senses, awoke to phrenzy their restless passions; as Maria learned from the burden of their incessant ravings.
Sometimes, with a strict injunction of silence, Jemima would allow Maria, at the close of evening, to stray along the narrow avenues that separated the dungeon-like apartments, leaning on her arm. What a change of scene! Maria wished to pass the threshold of her prison, yet, when by chance she met the eye of rage glaring on her, yet unfaithful to its office, she shrunk back with more horror and affright, than if she had stumbled over a mangled corpse. Her busy fancy pictured the misery of a fond heart, watching over a friend thus estranged, absent, though present—over a poor wretch lost to reason and the social joys of existence; and losing all consciousness of misery in its excess. What a task, to watch the light of reason quivering in the eye, or with agonizing expectation to catch the beam of recollection; tantalized by hope, only to feel despair more keenly, at finding a much loved face or voice, suddenly remembered, or pathetically implored, only to be immediately forgotten, or viewed with indifference or abhorrence!
The heart-rending sigh of melancholy sunk into her soul; and when she retired to rest, the petrified figures she had encountered, the only human forms she was doomed to observe, haunting her dreams with tales of mysterious wrongs, made her wish to sleep to dream no more.
Day after day rolled away, and tedious as the present moment appeared, they passed in such an unvaried tenor, Maria was surprised to find that she had already been six weeks buried alive, and yet had such faint hopes of effecting her enlargement. She was, earnestly as she had sought for employment, now angry with herself for having been amused by writing her narrative; and grieved to think that she had for an instant thought of any thing, but contriving to escape.
Jemima had evidently pleasure in her society: still, though she often left her with a glow of kindness, she returned with the same chilling air; and, when her heart appeared for a moment to open, some suggestion of reason forcibly closed it, before she could give utterance to the confidence Maria’s conversation inspired.
Discouraged by these changes, Maria relapsed into despondency, when she was cheered by the alacrity with which Jemima brought her a fresh parcel of books; assuring her, that she had taken some pains to obtain them from one of the keepers, who attended a gentleman confined in the opposite corner of the gallery.
Maria took up the books with emotion. “They come,” said she, “perhaps, from a wretch condemned, like me, to reason on the nature of madness, by having wrecked minds continually under his eye; and almost to wish himself—as I do—mad, to escape from the contemplation of it.” Her heart throbbed with sympathetic alarm; and she turned over the leaves with awe, as if they had become sacred from passing through the hands of an unfortunate being, oppressed by a similar fate.
Dryden’s Fables, Milton’s Paradise Lost, with several modern productions, composed the collection. It was a mine of treasure. Some marginal notes, in Dryden’s Fables, caught her attention: they were written with force and taste; and, in one of the modern pamphlets, there was a fragment left, containing various observations on the present state of society and government, with a comparative view of the politics of Europe and America. These remarks were written with a degree of generous warmth, when alluding to the enslaved state of the labouring majority, perfectly in unison with Maria’s mode of thinking.
She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous fancy, began to sketch a character, congenial with her own, from these shadowy outlines.—“Was he mad?” She reperused the marginal notes, and they seemed the production of an animated, but not of a disturbed imagination. Confined to this speculation, every time she re-read them, some fresh refinement of sentiment, or acuteness of thought impressed her, which she was astonished at herself for not having before observed.
What a creative power has an affectionate heart! There are beings who cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel the electric spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiment or grace. Maria had often thought, when disciplining her wayward heart, “that to charm, was to be virtuous.” “They who make me wish to appear the most amiable and good in their eyes, must possess in a degree,” she would exclaim, “the graces and virtues they call into action.”
She took up a book on the powers of the human mind; but, her attention strayed from cold arguments on the nature of what she felt, while she was feeling, and she snapt the chain of the theory to read Dryden’s Guiscard and Sigismunda.
Maria, in the course of the ensuing day, returned some of the books, with the hope of getting others—and more marginal notes. Thus shut out from human intercourse, and compelled to view nothing but the prison of vexed spirits, to meet a wretch in the same situation, was more surely to find a friend, than to imagine a countryman one, in a strange land, where the human voice conveys no information to the eager ear.
“Did you ever see the unfortunate being to whom these books belong?” asked Maria, when Jemima brought her slipper. “Yes. He sometimes walks out, between five and six, before the family is stirring, in the morning, with two keepers; but even then his hands are confined.”
“What! is he so unruly?” enquired Maria, with an accent of disappointment.
“No, not that I perceive,” replied Jemima; “but he has an untamed look, a vehemence of eye, that excites apprehension. Were his hands free, he looks as if he could soon manage both his guards: yet he appears tranquil.”
“If he be so strong, he must be young,” observed Maria.
“Three or four and thirty, I suppose; but there is no judging of a person in his situation.”
“Are you sure that he is mad?” interrupted Maria with eagerness. Jemima quitted the room, without replying.
“No, no, he certainly is not!” exclaimed Maria, answering herself; “the man who could write those observations was not disordered in his intellects.”
She sat musing, gazing at the moon, and watching its motion as it seemed to glide under the clouds. Then, preparing for bed, she thought, “Of what use could I be to him, or he to me, if it be true that he is unjustly confined?—Could he aid me to escape, who is himself more closely watched?—Still I should like to see him.” She went to bed, dreamed of her child, yet woke exactly at half after five o’clock, and starting up, only wrapped a gown around her, and ran to the window. The morning was chill, it was the latter end of September; yet she did not retire to warm herself and think in bed, till the sound of the servants, moving about the house, convinced her that the unknown would not walk in the garden that morning. She was ashamed at feeling disappointed; and began to reflect, as an excuse to herself, on the little objects which attract attention when there is nothing to divert the mind; and how difficult it was for women to avoid growing romantic, who have no active duties or pursuits.
At breakfast, Jemima enquired whether she understood French? for, unless she did, the stranger’s stock of books was exhausted. Maria replied in the affirmative; but forbore to ask any more questions respecting the person to whom they belonged. And Jemima gave her a new subject for contemplation, by describing the person of a lovely maniac, just brought into an adjoining chamber. She was singing the pathetic ballad of old Rob* with the most heart-melting falls and pauses. Jemima had half-opened the door, when she distinguished her voice, and Maria stood close to it, scarcely daring to respire, lest a modulation should escape her, so exquisitely sweet, so passionately wild. She began with sympathy to pourtray to herself another victim, when the lovely warbler flew, as it were, from the spray, and a torrent of unconnected exclamations and questions burst from her, interrupted by fits of laughter, so horrid, that Maria shut the door, and, turning her eyes up to heaven, exclaimed—“Gracious God!”
Several minutes elapsed before Maria could enquire respecting the rumour of the house (for this poor wretch was obviously not confined without a cause); and then Jemima could only tell her, that it was said, “she had been married, against her inclination, to a rich old man, extremely jealous (no wonder, for she was a charming creature); and that, in consequence of his treatment, or something which hung on her mind, she had, during her first lying-in, lost her senses.”
What a subject of meditation—even to the very confines of madness.
“Woman, fragile flower! why were you suffered to adorn a world exposed to the inroad of such stormy elements?” thought Maria, while the poor maniac’s strain was still breathing on her ear, and sinking into her very soul.
Towards the evening, Jemima brought her Rousseau’s Heloise; and she sat reading with eyes and heart, till the return of her guard to extinguish the light. One instance of her kindness was, the permitting Maria to have one, till her own hour of retiring to rest. She had read this work long since; but now it seemed to open a new world to her—the only one worth inhabiting. Sleep was not to be wooed; yet, far from being fatigued by the restless rotation of thought, she rose and opened her window, just as the thin watery clouds of twilight made the long silent shadows visible. The air swept across her face with a voluptuous freshness that thrilled to her heart, awakening indefinable emotions; and the sound of a waving branch, or the twittering of a startled bird, alone broke the stillness of reposing nature. Absorbed by the sublime sensibility which renders the consciousness of existence felicity, Maria was happy, till an autumnal scent, wafted by the breeze of morn from the fallen leaves of the adjacent wood, made her recollect that the season had changed since her confinement; yet life afforded no variety to solace an afflicted heart. She returned dispirited to her couch, and thought of her child till the broad glare of day again invited her to the window. She looked not for the unknown, still how great was her vexation at perceiving the back of a man, certainly he, with his two attendants, as he turned into a side-path which led to the house! A confused recollection of having seen somebody who resembled him, immediately occurred, to puzzle and torment her with endless conjectures. Five minutes sooner, and she should have seen his face, and been out of suspense—was ever any thing so unlucky! His steady, bold step, and the whole air of his person, bursting as it were from a cloud, pleased her, and gave an outline to the imagination to sketch the individual form she wished to recognize.
Feeling the disappointment more severely than she was willing to believe, she flew to Rousseau, as her only refuge from the idea of him, who might prove a friend, could she but find a way to interest him in her fate; still the personification of Saint Preux, or of an ideal lover far superior, was after this imperfect model, of which merely a glance had been caught, even to the minutiae of the coat and hat of the stranger. But if she lent St. Preux, or the demi-god of her fancy, his form, she richly repaid him by the donation of all St. Preux’s sentiments and feelings, culled to gratify her own, to which he seemed to have an undoubted right, when she read on the margin of an impassioned letter, written in the well-known hand—“Rousseau alone, the true Prometheus of sentiment, possessed the fire of genius necessary to pourtray the passion, the truth of which goes so directly to the heart.”
Maria was again true to the hour, yet had finished Rousseau, and begun to transcribe some selected passages; unable to quit either the author or the window, before she had a glimpse of the countenance she daily longed to see; and, when seen, it conveyed no distinct idea to her mind where she had seen it before. He must have been a transient acquaintance; but to discover an acquaintance was fortunate, could she contrive to attract his attention, and excite his sympathy.
Every glance afforded colouring for the picture she was delineating on her heart; and once, when the window was half open, the sound of his voice reached her. Conviction flashed on her; she had certainly, in a moment of distress, heard the same accents. They were manly, and characteristic of a noble mind; nay, even sweet—or sweet they seemed to her attentive ear.
She started back, trembling, alarmed at the emotion a strange coincidence of circumstances inspired, and wondering why she thought so much of a stranger, obliged as she had been by his timely interference; [for she recollected, by degrees all the circumstances of their former meeting.] She found however that she could think of nothing else; or, if she thought of her daughter, it was to wish that she had a father whom her mother could respect and love.
CHAPTER 3
WHEN PERUSING the first parcel of books, Maria had, with her pencil, written in one of them a few exclamations, expressive of compassion and sympathy, which she scarcely remembered, till turning over the leaves of one of the volumes, lately brought to her, a slip of paper dropped out, which Jemima hastily snatched up.
“Let me see it,” demanded Maria impatiently, “You surely are not afraid of trusting me with the effusions of a madman?” “I must consider,” replied Jemima; and withdrew, with the paper in her hand.
In a life of such seclusion, the passions gain undue force; Maria therefore felt a great degree of resentment and vexation, which she had not time to subdue, before Jemima, returning, delivered the paper.
By the most pressing intreaties, Maria prevailed on Jemima to permit her to write a reply to this note. Another and another succeeded, in which explanations were not allowed relative to their present situation; but Maria, with sufficient explicitness, alluded to a former obligation; and they insensibly entered on an interchange of sentiments on the most important subjects. To write these letters was the business of the day, and to receive them the moment of sunshine. By some means, Darnford having discovered Maria’s window, when she next appeared at it, he made her, behind his keepers, a profound bow of respect and recognition.
