| <The Saturday Review December 12, 1868>
| <Semi-detached Wives>
| <pb n="771">
| The first yawn of her spouse is, no doubt, a severe trial to 
| the vanity of a bride.  There are few girls who have not 
| built pretty castles in Spain of a felicity uninterrupted by 
| boredom or butchers' bills, and there are, without question, 
| some quiet people who fancy they attain to it.  The country 
| parsonage, for instance, often contains two beings who 
| smile benignly on each other for long tracts of years, whose 
| mornings and noons and nights are passed in one another's 
| society, and who reach threescore-and-ten without the 
| slightest suspicion of weariness or desire for a wider circle 
| of sympathy.  In other words, there are vegetables to whom 
| it is natural to vegetate, as there are women too whom it is 
| natural to live.  And life, if it means anything, means 
| variety and change.  It is odd to think how that one yawn 
| hangs the freedom of years to come.  It is the bugle that 
| sings truce.  It is a tacit convention which leaves the 
| husband his club and the wife her independence.  No 
| people can be more touchingly attentive to each other's 
| wants.  The spouse finds his breakfast on the table, his  
| <hi rend="italic"> Times </hi> out for him, his letters 
| arranged, his overcoat brushed in the hall, the time-table 
| open at the proper page.  The one return asked for is that of 
| absence for the day.  A sensible husband agrees with the 
| pretty reasoner before him that <q> </q>, that loitering at 
| home is hardly a manly thing, that constant association 
| blunts the edge of affection, that he <q> </q> and a world 
| to win for her, that if he entirely gives up his old friends she 
| shall never forgive herself.  The sensible man, we repeat, 
| takes his umbrella and leaves the pretty little reasoner his 
| name and her freedom.  Not that she has the least passion 
| for liberty.  To the world she sighs gently over the downfall 
| of her hopes.  Her one joy would be to have her husband 
| with her.  She would be delighted if he found more pleasure 
| in her drawing-room, more charms in her society.  She 
| regrets that while other people seem to find her attractive, 
| her attraction loses its power over the one heart in the 
| world for which she cares.  And sometimes in an evil hour 
| the one heart listens and believes.  He leaves his umbrella 
| idle in the hall.  The club sees him no more; men chat in the 
| billiard-room over his luxorieusness and the pretty little 
| face that prisons him at home.  Only the little face itself is 
| not quite so pretty as it was in the tenderness of its regret.  
| The resigned little martyr has no notion of being robbed of 
| the halo of martyrdom.  Insensibly the spouse finds it 
| harder and harder to remain at her feet.  He hates music and 
| he is whirled from opera to opera.  The piano is hard at 
| work throughout the day, and conversation will run on 
| nothing but Schumann and Weber.  He likes politics, and a 
| blank little face listens as well as it may to his stories of the 
| last division or his theories as to the possible Premier.  He 
| is used to his quiet evening at his club, to his cigar and his 
| piquet; and he finds a mob in the drawing-room, and the 
| smell of the divine weed absolutely insufferable to his wife.  
| In the long run he takes to his old life of isolation, and the 
| neglected being wins the sympathy of the other sex too.  
| Men wonder how Brown can treat his wife so badly, can 
| leave her to neglect and to a thousand temptations.  He has 
| but one defender, and that is the wife whom he abandons.  
| She could have wished it had been otherwise; that the 
| dreams of her girlhood had been realized; that a sympathy 
| of soul had bound them together.  As it is, she will only 
| accept just a very little perfectly innocent sympathy 
| elsewhere.  Friendship of the purest and highest kind may 
| be suffered to administer its inadequate consolations.  But 
| the litany of the church of Plato must be chanted without a 
| note of pity for herself or of blame for her spouse.  
| Between such clashing rocks the friend must steer his boat 
| into that sweet mysterious sea.  It is with a touching reserve 
| that the victim of his caprice accepts her liberty, for she is 
| after all a wife, and her ring gives her a liberty denied to 
| maidens.  She is musical, and can practise for whole 
| afternoons with that gallant young tenor in the Guards.  She 
| is artistic, and what can be more charming than a tete-a-tete 
| with that blushing Carmine over his sketch-book?  She has 
| a taste for poetry, and poets couch at her feet to read 
| sonnets in the tender light of the parting day.  The wide 
| circle of friendship opens before her.  She listens to the 
| confidences of happy and unhappy lovers.  Life becomes 
| varied, busy, interesting.  Her good temper, her vivacity, 
| her sunny happiness redress the wrongs of her home, and 
| society borrows a gentle light and sweetness from the 
| semi-detached wife.  The picture is pretty; but it has its
| terrible dangers.
| We wonder that, now the elections are over and the 
| quidounes of the clubs are busy with their gains and their 
| losses, <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> has attempted to 
| give a reason for what was after all the most remarkable 
| feature in the whole electoral struggle. It is true that woman 
| found stouter opponents than weeping Home Secretaries 
| and senile Commissioners of Police.  But it was not so 
| much the stoutness of the defence that was remarkable as 
| the utter breakdown of the attack.  Not that Miss Becker 
| broke down.  Face to face with the Revising Barrister she 
| brought into the sharpest relief the irreconcileable 
| antagonism of woman with the law.  <reg orig="No one"> 
| No-one </reg> could have brought home more forcibly to 
| her injured sisters that within the four seas woman is a 
| martyr and a slave.  The provoking part of the business was 
| that her sisters owned it, and went quietly on with their 
| crochet as before.  If Miss Becker, to reverse Mr. 
| Bouverie's epigram, is a leader who really leads, her fair 
| clients are certainly followers who don't follow.  Her 
| dauntless resolution, her eloquence, her energy, only made 
| more conspicuous the immobility of her sex.  She fell, not 
| before the obduracy of the British judge, but before the 
| apathy of the British matron.  It was in vain that her 
| strenuous advocate appealed to her sense of justice, her 
| sense of logic.  Next to the British Constitution itself the 
| most amusing instance of illogical compromise is to be 
| found in the British Wife.  She is the Uriah Heap of society, 
| humbling herself before the Church and the Law, 
| whispering sweetly her vow to honour and obey, hugging 
| her chains as a chattel and a slave.  With what a perfect 
| self-sacrifice she flings herself away at the altar, with what 
| an immense self-surrender she owns her lord at the 
| marriage breakfast!  And yet ~~ if one may penetrate that 
| heaving bosom and read the secrets of that shrinking heart 
| ~~ she has not the remotest doubt of her own infinite 
| superiority, or of the infinite superiority of her sex.  Miss 
| Becker may have over-stepped the bounds of feminine 
| propriety, but she represents fairly enough the mass of 
| feminine opinion.  Where she failed was in her attempt to 
| condense it, to give it a practical form, and to hurl it at the 
| park palings of the British Constitution.  She found herself 
| baffled by that masterly inactivity with which woman in 
| her time has baffled so many social deliverers.  From 
| George Sand down to Miss Hominy, from the Saint-Simonians
| to the Woman's Convention which is now in full 
| session at Boston, a thousand pretty preachers have been 
| denouncing the miserable bondage of the matrimonial 
| home.  Elective affinities, the freedom of the affections, the 
| mobile emotions of the heart, have been set against the 
| narrow limitations, the monotony, the degrading uniformity 
| of the common domestic relations of the world.  Woman 
| has been called to freedom, to Bohemianism, to art, to the 
| pulpit, to the stump.  Preachers of a different order, but 
| appealing to precisely the same instinct of revolt, have 
| spread before her the attractions of the crape and the 
| poke-bonnet, of the nunnery and the sisterhood.  And here and 
| there no doubt the poke-bonnet wins its votaries, as art and 
| Bohemianism win theirs.  But the great mass of womankind 
| go on with their crochet as before.  Theoretically, the 
| British matron owns that her individuality is lost, that her 
| energies are cramped in their development, that the free 
| play of her affections is checked by her domestic bondage.  
| But then theoretical considerations may be very 
| considerably modified by facts.  The theory of marriage 
| troubles her very little
| <pb n="772">
| so long as it stands in no awkward relation to her actual 
| existence.  Just as she is content to be her husband's chattel 
| while she has practically the control of her husband's purse, 
| so she has no objection in the world to the name of a slave 
| if she is absolute within the house as well as perfectly 
| independent out of it.  And this perfect independence, so 
| she smilingly assures the apostles of Free Love and the 
| missionaries of Bohemianism, she has secured without the 
| smallest sacrifice of morality or of decorum.  She has 
| discovered in marriage itself the true secret of that social 
| liberty for which they are outraging society and waging a 
| hopeless warfare against the traditions of the world.  The 
| enfranchisement of woman has been found in the simple 
| but exquisite invention of the semi-detached wife.
| It is easy to pass with a smile over the lighter phenomena of 
| our social life; but if they are straws on its surface they 
| have a certain value to the philosopher as indicating the set 
| of the current.  And in this case the set of the current is 
| hardly the matter for a smile.  Woman is winning her 
| independence, and she is winning it on the highest field of 
| all.  But she wins by the simple mode of untying the painter 
| and letting her little cock-boat drift quietly into the wake of 
| human progress.  Even in the untroubled union of the 
| vegetable life at which we glanced at the outset the British 
| wife reserves a refuge for her own individuality.  However 
| yielding it seems, the feminine Ego can always take refuge 
| in the sanctuaries of the faith.  What is the bold reasoner 
| who has sent his guinea to the Colenso fund, or thundered 
| against ritual, or denounced evangelicalism, to do with the 
| quiet silent being who declines discussion, and hands him 
| her <q> </q>, doubled down at <q> </q>.  It is a strange 
| rift this that is opening in modern society between the 
| convictions of the husband and the faith of the wife.  Is it to 
| come to this, that among ourselves, as across the Channel, 
| all the religion is to be left to the weaker sex?  The 
| missionary box, the little cross on the prayer-book, the 
| early matins, the embroidered slippers for the curate, the 
| pretty pictures of saints with saintly aureoles, the 
| well-thumbed poems by Kirke White, the ritualistic service, the 
| Evangelical newspaper ~~ this country so strange to 
| Englishmen is the country in which many English wives 
| live.  The poetry, the imaginativeness of their nature, finds 
| a sphere in sympathies, in prettinesses, that seem trivial, 
| unintelligible, unartistic to the minds of men.  To woman, 
| on the other hand, the jar of theological dispute, the rough 
| clash of creeds, the bare outlines of a philosophic faith 
| seem barren, coarse, secular, revolting.  A woman ceases to 
| be womanly when she rattles off the objections to the 
| authenticity of the Pentateuch.  A man feels manhood ebb 
| away from him as he busies himself in the millinery of the 
| Directorium.  Day by day the gulf grows deeper and wider.  
| Men detest sermons, and woman still clings to her popular 
| preacher.  Men cry for light and breadth and tolerance, and 
| woman still does her knitting beneath the thunders of 
| Exeter Hall.  The very charity of woman, her benevolence, 
| her self-sacrifice undoes the work of the Poor Laws, and 
| flings their conclusions in the face of the economists.  It is 
| hard for a man even to understand this frame of mind, to 
| comprehend how the quiet little wife, who never did a 
| conscious wrong to anybody, can weep over the vote that 
| he gives against the Irish Establishment, or how the heart 
| that never thought ill of the worst and vilest can harden 
| with bitterness at the cry of heresy.  It is hard now, and it 
| will become harder by and by.  The two worlds are 
| sheering further and further from one another, and 
| Englishmen may soon have to experience what they have 
| pictured in the Italian and the Frenchman ~~ a home 
| divided against itself on the highest of human interests.  It 
| is then, perhaps, that we may reap the full harvest of the 
| seed that we are sowing, and learn the ultimate import of 
| the social arrangement which is quietly creating for us the 
| semi-detached wife.