EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF

Personally, I do not think so much of self-expression as a noble yearning. I would not go so far as to suggest that it is a wave of feminine psychosis; but the suspicion grows in my mind that it may be a sort of hysteria peculiar to that class of people who have boastful souls and considerable mortal vanity, neither of which can be financed by the finer art of living privately. We notice it in women now, as we do other symptoms which were formerly characteristic only of men. Job had a notable case of it. He fretted his wife until at last she lost patience with his groaning vanity about his integrity and advised him to curse God and die. Carlyle made his wife miserable while he expressed himself like a winged leviathan in ‘Sartor Resartus.’ It is easier to write an epic than to live your own life becomingly with no audience to cheer the performance. Therefore we are a trifle long on epics and short on achieving a good record of ourselves in secret. Women have at last become infected with this disorder of the mind, a pathetic desire to cast themselves on the wide screen of the world in some rôle of self-expression.

My mail has been laden with letters from them for years asking advice about how to do it. They are either distracted spinsters or married women who are childless and unhappy. Their homes and their husbands have got on their nerves. They are the pseudo heroines of their own sorrows, futile egotists in tears who wish to publish their tears in a book. They have only a martyr illusion of themselves and no sense at all of other people. They are totally lacking in that quality of the medium without which there is no such thing as a truthful interpretation of any life. God himself could not teach such a woman to write an honest sentence about herself, much less her husband, concerning whom she is determined to reveal the worst.

Recently a mean little wife with a soul-pulling use of words sent in a long account of her grievances. She had married beneath her own position in life. Her husband was an honest man, but not--oh, not a gentleman! He did not understand or appreciate her. He was cruel, contemptuous, and overbearing. Judging by the way she praised herself, it was easy to infer that she was one of those women who make a damnable use of their virtues and would not lend one for any consideration to her husband. I suppose she wore that sad accusative look which provokes the worst in any man. She felt that it might relieve the tension if she could find some means of self-expression and she wanted advice about writing the revelations of her married life.

On account of being partly Irish, I am not always able to resist the temptation to use the shillalah of my wit upon these little Judases.

‘Do not write the record of your wrongs,’ I advised her; ‘but meet your husband with a smile the next time he comes in and strike him over the head with some blunt instrument. He will probably clean you up, which is precisely what you need. This will much more quickly relieve your nervous tension than writing a book, which is a drastic business and very hard on the nerves, even when you tell the truth.’

The women’s organizations have a less sensational way of cashing in these unhappy ones. They give them a task to perform in connection with their vast activities. They are doing everything, maintaining schools and clinics, they are lobbying for bills. They are the most rapacious collectors for charity on earth. They have their publicity departments and their propaganda. They are setting up monuments and preserving the memory of honorable men. They almost invariably do what they set out to do and they are the only corporations in this country that get their labor free of charge, that even collect dues from their workers--which will indicate the fierce passion in the women of our times to achieve worthy ends and to express themselves in honorable service before the world, whatever happens to their homes, husbands, and children.

No one respects them more than I do, but a burned child is afraid of fire. For so many years I did not have the use of my own life. It was controlled entirely by the rules of the Methodist Church and limited by the adversities of a circuit-rider’s life. Never in this world would I yield it to the executive committee of any kind of woman’s board. I am a woman myself and know very well how much greater our talent is for governing others than the most despotic form of government founded by men.

My idea is that the good little life, with no publicity screen in the background, leads with less confusion and certainly less embarrassment to peace and happiness.

The theory is excellent and does me credit written out in words. But a master mind could never put into words the web I have spun upon it to ensnare my own life, liberty, and happiness.

For years past I have felt my immortal spirit zooning in it like an insect with its legs tied. No woman ever longed for self-expression as I long now to escape from my own plan of happiness.