WHEN WOMEN WRITE ABOUT MEN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19531, 14 July 1925, Page 5

WHEN WOMEN WRITE ABOUT MEN.

“The feminist writer dealing with the social and economic relationships of the sexes is always, it will bo noticed, much more concerned with woman than -with her tyrant, and oppressor, man. The more ‘ad-vanced’—-in the popular sonso—a woman’s idea, the more, it would seem, is the sociologically interested in herself. Whereas the more male, an old-fashioned, unprogressivo being, as the feminist regards him, is frankly and simply interested in women ‘as sich,’ ” says a Church Times reviewer. “When we turn to imaginative literature, it is striking to note how much higher is tlio tribute paid by man to women than that paid by woman to man. Though woman is the more spiritual being of the two, what woman has over spiritualised her love for husband or lover as Dante spiritualised his love for Beatrice? “Chaucer wrote no Legend of Good Men as a companion-book to his Legend of Good Women. Shakespeare, os Ruslan points out, has no heroes, only heroines: ‘The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there bo any, is by the wisdom and virtue, of. a woman, and, failrng that, there is none.’ “Among the leading characters of the Waverley novels, wo find for the most part that it is the women rather than the men who are -of the truly heroic type. Vanity Fair, which Thackeray considered his crown of achievement, is ‘a novel without a hero. But those contemporaries of Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, whom feminists regards as ‘dans le mouvement, what poor creatures are their men as compared with their women; and the same maybe said of the creations of many another feminine novelist. . . ~ “Perhaps the psychologist would ascribe to a ‘sex-in feriority-complex’ the fact that, in the w-orld of letters, woman, as a rule shows herself less blind to the faults and far less blind to the virtues of the male sex than man does to hers.”