THE POOR HEROINE WHO CAN'T WORK.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12063, 19 July 1917, Page 8

THE POOR HEROINE WHO CAN'T WORK.

Once upon a time. 5-ays a. writer in Muuscv's Magazine," the working woman in fiction was there for pathetic purposes, like the drunkard's child or the gambler's wife. If she was a. heroine, work—wage-earning work—would cease for her, along with all other hnrds!hips, at. the ringing; of the wedding belli;. She was generally a governed, looking, wit.h 1110 single rose in her hair, lorcb'er than nil the proud, non-working beauties with their gems- But. as soon as she captured her man—or was caplured by him, for this form of heroine flourished chiefly in the unilluminated days belore Mr Bernard Shaw had set. the world right 011 the question of pursued and pursuer—she stopped work. Cinderella- cleaned no more hearths after th" Prince had put. the glass slipper on her foot, .! a lie Eyre, accepted no lurther positions in gentlemen's households once Rochester had been mode matrimonially available, even though somewhat shop-worn. Little Dorrit, Kate. Xickieby—all the temporarily employed young women of Dickens •-—gave up their remunerative- positions immediately upon acquiring a wedding ring. Labour outside the domestic, circle was a condition of servitude, and the nineteenth century heroines, no longer menaced by tho dragons, kidnappers and lordly ruffians of an elder day, had to be rescued from it as from the chief fictional misfortune remaining open to them. liOw they would all stare askance, al-t-he heroine ol the twentieth century novel, and bow they would state their conviction that, she is moist, unjustly treated by her maker I

I'or that young woman is coming more and more, to be a, person whose, hardship consists in being forced to live comfortably :thin the domestic circle. The reader is not invited to shed a. sympathetic tear when Pose or Lily ha.s to go out to work. Chi the contrary, it is when Koso or Lily has a family so ben.ghtcdly \ict.onan as to desire, her to remait. at homo in luxury that, tho reader's tears are bespoken. The conscientious author's task—which must, everlastingly bo to bring his heroine out of woe into happiness,—is nowadays to rescue, her from home and servants, from frocks and friends, from love itself, and to set her up in a. shop, or a, law office, or an astronomical tower, or what. not.

A few years there was tho admirably drawn iieroine of " Tlie Blue; Arch," by Alice Duer Miller, pointing; the way. It. is as a worker in an ob-servatory-—to which congenial haven she victoriously retires alter a battle for family consult —that i-ho stumbles upon romance; and there, is no hint' that, having; discovered it, sho loses her interest in celestial mathematics and becomes happily absorbed in household accounts instead.

There is the inspiriting Emma M Chesney with whom we are never asked to sympathise because she sells petticoats. In Henry Sydnor Harrison's early success, " Quoed," the heroine, is "employed"—genteelly, to be sure, but mntter-of-factly. And m the same, writer's later novel, ''Angela s Business, ' ho hap gone forward a. stop along tho new road and strongly contrasts Angela, the eternal, makebelieve " womanly," using the home as a spider uses its web for the ensnaring of helpless prey, with Mary, the truly womanly, independent principal of a school.

In '' Life a,nd Gabriella," Ellen Glasgow does not adopt tho attitude of Rosa Nouehette Carey toward her heroine, obliged to take to dressmaking, and bespeak for her the reader's pity. On the contrary, it is Gabrielle's entrance into trade that makes her character as well as her prosperity. And Henry Kitchell Webster, in " Tho Great Adventure," not only makes his heroine run away from luxury, from an adoring husband whom she loves, and from her children, to find herself and her self-respect in work, but he mak«s her husband and her world accept her decision at tho end.

In brief, if one can judge the. current American novelist's interpretation of modern life, it is high time that someone revised the venerable lines, once quoted with such respect:

Mini's love is of man's life a. thins nr 3l ' l ; 'Tis woman's v,-ho!e rxistpucp.