1805: Mabel Anetis deMallard
Private papers
I have just concluded the Collected Sermons of the Reverend Watervale, that celebrated pulpit philosopher whose fans—if one may borrow from the vocabulary of the theatre—sit on their straight-backed pews as if he might, any moment, declare the Second Coming scheduled for Thursday fortnight. The first volume, Of the Gentle Virtues of the Domestic Garden, was less horticultural than matrimonial, and the second, Meditations Upon the Female Soul and Its Proper Adornments, I confess I read with an expression somewhere between awe and a desire to throw the book into the fire. But it is his final sermon, “Why, if Men Love Women, Do They Not Consider Them Equal?” that has detained me most, in the way a moth is detained by a candle flame.
I can almost hear his earnest tones resonating through the rafters of St. Eudora’s Chapel, his hands folded devoutly upon a manuscript he has copied, no doubt, from some earlier divine who himself cribbed it from St. Paul and a faint memory of his own mother’s disapproval. The Reverend’s answer—perhaps unsurprisingly—is that love, being a higher sentiment, must descend; that the station of woman is to receive love as dew receives the sun, humbly and without ambition to evaporate heavenward. Thus men love because they are strong, and women receive because they are beloved. To reverse this, he assures us, would be “the very undoing of the natural order”—as though that order were not already a little undone judging by his sermons.
Now, I am no philosopher (though I could out-argue most who claim to be), but it occurred to me, somewhere between his reflection on “the weaker vessel” and his rhapsody on “the tender conscience of Eve,” that he has set the inquiry upon the wrong footing. For why should the question be why men, if they love women, do not deem them equal? That, I think, bestows upon men a certain proprietorship of moral judgment—love becomes the wand by which they pronounce others fit to stand beside them. The truer question might be: If men love women, why do women not consider men their equals?
For I assure you, love, as I observe it in the world and in the parlour—those twin laboratories of folly—is no guarantee of equality but often the very currency by which inequality is purchased. Women love men with a sort of tragic extravagance, like patrons devoted to a bad artist, and men accept this devotion with the benign air of one who is certain he deserves it. I watch it every day in drawing rooms and ballrooms, in the admiring tilt of an eyelash, the way a girl will adjust her mind as though it were a ribbon to suit the taste of whatever gentleman happens to be present.
Yet I cannot be too severe. The fault, if one must apportion it, lies perhaps in the education we are denied, the books we are told will unsex us. Reverend Watervale would surely consign me to the theological stocks if he saw my night-table: The Wit of the Ancients, Letters from a Sensible Parisienne, and that most improper delight, The Treatises of Hypatia Restored, smuggled to me by Cousin George, who insists on my reading anything so long as I promise not to write him into my diary. (He forgets that all the world writes him into theirs.)
Still, I should reserve some gratitude for the Reverend; he has provided a morning’s entertainment and an afternoon’s provocation, which is more than most men do. I have annotated his page on “the feminine virtues of silence and decorum” with such vigour that the margin now looks like a hedgerow in battle. I suppose it is unladylike to fence with a sermon, but then, I was never fond of the kind of ladyhood that bruises only inwardly.
Ah, how magnificent to imagine—forgive the heresy—a church where the pulpit belonged, not to the Reverend Watervale, but to one of his parishioners, say Mrs. Fenton or even myself, sermonising in return: “Why, if women love men, do they not pity them for their singular delusion that superiority is a form of virtue?” I daresay the congregation would be cured of religion or love or both before Evensong.
And so I close his Collected Sermons with the solemnity of one shutting the lid on a well-trimmed coffin: reverent, amused, and entirely unpersuaded.
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