| <The Saturday Review August 8, 1868>
| <The Fashionable Woman>
| <pb n="184">
| Among the many odd products of a mature civilization, the 
| fashionable women is one of the oddest.  From first to last 
| she is a thoroughly amazing spectacle; and if we take 
| human life in any earnestness at all, whether individually, 
| as the passage to an eternal existence the condition of 
| which depends on what we are here, or collectively, as the 
| highest thing we know, we can only look in blank 
| astonishment at the fashionable woman and her career.  She 
| is the one sole capable member of the human family 
| without duties and without useful occupation; the one sole 
| being who might be swept out of existence altogether, 
| without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or 
| upsetting the ordained balance.  We know of no other 
| organic creation of
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| which this could be said; but the fashionable woman is not 
| as other creatures, being, fortunately, <f> </f> and of a type 
| not existing elsewhere.  If we take the mere ordering of her 
| days and the employment of her time as the sign of her 
| mental state, we may perhaps measure to a certain extent, 
| but not fully, the depth of inanity into which she has fallen, 
| and the immensity of her folly.  Considering her as a being 
| with the potentiality of reason, of usefulness, and of 
| thought, the actual result is surely the saddest and the 
| strangest thing under heaven.
| She goes to bed at dawn, and does not attempt to rise till 
| about noon.  For the most part she breakfasts in bed and 
| then amuses herself with a cursory glance at the morning 
| paper, if she has sufficient energy for so great a mental 
| exertion; if she has not, she lies for another hour or two in 
| that half-slumberness state which is so destructive to mind 
| and body, weakening both fibre and resolution, both muscle 
| and good principle.  At last she rises languidly, to be 
| dressed in time for luncheon and her visitors, if she 
| receives generally; or for the one or two intimates, if she is 
| at home only to the favoured.  Somewhere about four she 
| dresses again for her drive ~~ for the first part of the day's 
| serious business; for paying visits and leaving cards; for 
| buying jewellery and dresses, and ordering all sorts of 
| unnecessary things at her milliner's' for this grand lady's 
| afternoon tea, and that grand lady's afternoon at home, with 
| music for her final slow parade in the Park, where she sees 
| her friends as in an open-air drawing-room, makes private 
| appointments, and carries on flirtations, and hears and 
| retails gossip and scandal of a fuller flavour.  Then home, 
| to dress again for dinner; to be followed by the opera or a 
| concert, a soiree, or perhaps a ball or two whence she 
| returns towards morning, flushed with excitement or worn 
| out with fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had 
| pleasure and success, or disappointment and annoyance.  
| This is her outside life, and this is no fancy picture and no 
| exaggeration.  After a certain time of such an existence, can 
| we wonder if her complexion fades and her eyes grow dim? 
| and if that inexpressible air of haggard weariness creeps 
| over her, which ages even a young girl, and makes a mature 
| woman substantially an old one.  It is then that she has 
| recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which we 
| have heard more than enough in these latter days.  She will 
| not try simplicity of living, natural hours, wholesome 
| occupation, unselfish endeavour, but ruses off for help to 
| paints and cosmetics, to stimulants and drugs, and attempts 
| to restore the tarnished freshness of her beauty by the very 
| means which further corrode it.  Every now and then, for 
| very idleness, she feigns herself sick, and has the favourite 
| physician to attend her.  In fact the funniest thing about her 
| is the ease with which she takes to her bed on the slightest 
| provocation, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in 
| what is a penance to most women.  You meet her in heated, 
| crowded, noisy room, looking just as she always looks, 
| whatever her normal state of health may be; and in answer 
| to your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours ago 
| left her bed to come here, having been confined to her room 
| for a week, or so many days, with Dr. Blank in close 
| attendance.  If you are an intimate female friend she will 
| whisper you the name of her malady, which is sure to be 
| something terrific, and which, if true, would have kept her 
| a real invalid for weeks instead of days; but if you are only 
| a man she will  make herself out to have been very ill 
| indeed in a more mysterious way, and leave you to wonder 
| at the extraordinary physique of fashionable women, which 
| enables them to live on the most friendly touch-and-go 
| terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies by an 
| effort of the will and the delights of a ducal ball.  The 
| favorite physician has a hard time of it with these ladies; 
| and the more popular he is the harder his work.  It is well 
| for his generation when he is a man of honour and integrity, 
| and knows how to add self-respect and moral power to the 
| qualities which have made him the general favourite.  For 
| his influence over that idle woman is for the time almost 
| unlimited ~~ like nothing so much as that of the handsome 
| Abbe and the fascinating Director of Catholic countries; 
| and if he chooses to abuse it, and to turn it to evil issues, he 
| can.  And, however great the merit in him that he does not, 
| it does not lessen the demerit of the woman that he could.  
| Sometimes the fashionable woman takes up with the 
| clergyman instead of the physician, and coquets with 
| religious exercises rather than with drugs; but neither 
| clergyman nor physician can really change her mode of 
| life, or give her truth or common sense.  Sometimes there is 
| a fluttering show of art patronage, and the fashionable 
| woman has a handsome painter or well-bred musician in 
| her train, whom she pets publicly and patronizes 
| graciously.  Sometimes it is a young poet or a rising 
| novelist, considerably honoured by the association, who 
| dedicates his next novel to her, or writes verses in her 
| praise, with such a fervency of gratitude as sets the base 
| Philistines on the scent of the secret, and perhaps guessing 
| not far amiss.  For the fashionable woman has always some 
| love affair on hand, more or less platonic according to her 
| own temperament or the boldness of the man ~~ a love 
| affair in which the least ingredient is love in any real or 
| wholesome sense; a love affair which is vanity, idleness, a 
| dissolute imagination, and contempt of such prosaic things 
| as morals; a love affair not even to be excused by the tragic 
| frenzy of earnest passion, and which may be guilty and yet 
| not true.  The physical effects of such a life as this are as 
| bad as the mental, and both are as bad as can be.  A 
| feverish, overstrained condition of health either prevents 
| the fashionable woman from being a mother at all, or 
| makes her the mother of nervous, sickly children.  Many a 
| woman of high rank is at this moment paying bitterly for 
| the disappointment of which she herself, in her illimitable 
| folly, has been and is the sole and only cause.  And, 
| whether women like to hear it or not, it is none the less a 
| truth that part of the reason for their being born at all is that 
| they may in their turn bear children.  The unnatural feeling 
| against maternity existing among fashionable women is one 
| of the worst mental signs of their state, as their frequent 
| inability to be mothers at all is one of the worst physical 
| results.  This is a condition of things which no false 
| modesty or timid reserve should keep in the background, 
| for it is a question of national importance, and will soon 
| become one of national disaster unless checked by a 
| healthier current and more natural circumstances.
| Dress, dissipation, and flirting make up the questionable 
| lines which enclose the life of the fashionable woman, and 
| which enclose nothing useful, nothing good, nothing deep 
| or true or holly.  Her piety is a pastime; her art the poorest 
| pretence; her pleasure consists only in hurry and 
| excitement, alternating with debasing sloth, in heartless 
| coquetry or in lawless indulgence, as nature made her more 
| vain or more sensual.  As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty 
| in any grand or loving sense, for the most part regarding 
| her husband only as a banker or an adjunct, according to 
| the terms of her marriage settlement; as a mother she is a 
| stranger to her children, to whom nurse and governess 
| supply her place, and give such poor makeshift for maternal 
| love as they are enabled or inclined.  In no domestic 
| relation is she of the smallest value, and of none in any 
| social circumstance beside the mere adoring of a room ~~ 
| if she is pretty ~~ and the help she gives to trade through 
| her expenditure.  She lives only in the gaslight, and her 
| nature at last becomes as artificial as her habits.  As years 
| go on, and she changes from the acknowledged belle to the 
| <hi rend="italic"> femme passee, </hi> she goes through a 
| period of frantic endeavour to retain her youth; and even 
| when time has clutched her with too firm a hand to be 
| shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities which she 
| still puts out all her strength to conceal, even then she 
| grasps at the departing shadow, and fresh daubs the 
| crumbling ruin, in the belief that the world's eyes are dim, 
| and that stucco may pass for marble for another year or two 
| longer.  Or she becomes a Belgravian mother, with 
| daughters to sell to the highest bidder; and then the aim of 
| her life is to secure the purchaser.  Her daughters are never 
| objects of real love with the fashionable woman.  They are 
| essentially her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life in 
| theirs, of forgetting herself in them, occurs to her only as a 
| forecast of death.  Even from her sons she shrinks rather 
| than not, as living evidences of the lapse of time which she 
| cannot deny, an awkward at fixing dates; and there is not a 
| home presided over by a fashionable woman where the 
| family is more than a mere name, a mere social convention 
| loosely held together by circumstances, not by  love.  
| Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured end, when 
| the miserable made-up old creature totters down into the 
| grave, where paint and padding, and glossy plaits cut from 
| some fresh young head, are of no more avail; and where 
| death, which makes all things real, reduces her life of lies 
| to the nothingness it has been from the beginning.  What 
| does she leave behind her?  A memory by which her 
| children may order their own lives in proud assurance that 
| so they will order them best for virtue and for honour?  Or 
| a memory which speaks to them of time misused, of duties 
| unfulfilled, of love discarded for pleasure, and of a 
| life-long sacrifice of all things good and pure for selfishness?  
| We all know examples of the worldly old woman clinging 
| to the last, batlike, to the old roofs and rafters; and we all 
| know how heartily we despise her, and how we ridicule her 
| in our hearts, if not by our words.  If the reigning queens of 
| fashion, at present young and beautiful would but 
| remember that they are only that worldly old woman in 
| embryo, and that in a very few years they will be her exact 
| likeness,  unhappily repeated for the scorn of the world 
| once more to follow!  The traditional skeleton at the feast 
| had a wonderfully wise meaning, crude and gross as it was 
| in form.  For tough its <hi rend="italic"> memento mori, 
| </hi> too constantly before us, would either sadden or 
| brutalize, as we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good 
| to see the end of ourselves, and to study the meaning and 
| lesson of our lives in those of our prototypes and elder 
| likenesses.  The pleasures of the world are, as we all know, 
| very potent and very alluring, but nothing can be more 
| unsatisfying if taken as the main purpose of life.  While we 
| are young, the mere stirring of the blood stands instead of 
| anything more real; but as we go on, and the pulse flags, 
| and pleasurable occasions get rare and more rare, we find 
| that we have been like the prodigal son, and that our food 
| and his have been out of much the same trough, and come 
| in the main to about the same thing.  This is a time of 
| extraordinary wealth and of corresponding extraordinary 
| luxury, of unparalleled restlessness, the self-indulgence, the 
| want of high morality, and the insolent luxury at all times 
| characteristic of her were never seen displayed with more 
| cynical effrontery than at present, and never called for more 
| severe condemnation.  The fashionable women of Greece 
| and Rome and of the age of Louis XIV have left behind 
| them names which the world has made typical of the vices 
| naturally engendered by idleness and luxury.  But do we 
| wish that our women should become subjects for an 
| English Juvenal? and that fashion should create a race of 
| Laises and Phrynes out of the stock which once gave us 
| Lucy  Hutchinson and Elizabeth Fry?  Once the name of 
| Englishwoman carried with it a grave and noble echo as the 
| name
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| of women known for their gentle bearing and their 
| blameless honour ~~ of women who loved their husbands, 
| and brought up about their own knees the children they 
| were not reluctant to bear and not ashamed to love.  Now, it 
| too often means a girl of the period, a frisky matron, a 
| fashionable woman ~~ a thing of paints and pads, 
| consorting with dealers of no doubtful calling for the 
| purchase of what she grimly calls <p> "beauty," </p> 
| making pleasure her only good, and the world her highest 
| god; it too often means a woman who is not ashamed to 
| supplement her husband with a lover, but who is unwilling 
| to become the honest mother of that husband's children; it 
| too often means a hybrid creature, perverted out of the 
| natural way altogether, affecting the license but ignorant of 
| the strength of a man, alike as girl or woman valueless for 
| her highest natural duties, and talking largely of liberty 
| while showing at every turn how much she fails in that
| co-essential of liberty ~~ knowledge how to use it.