The Man‐Made World
Robert Ellesmere was a popular book—but not because of its heart interest.
Uncle Tom‘s Cabin appealed to the entire world, more widely than any work of fiction that was ever written; but if anybody fell in love and married in it they have been forgotten. There was plenty of love in that book, love of family, love of friends, love of master for servant and servant for master; love of mother for child; love of married people for each other; love of humanity and love of God.
It was extremely popular. Some say it was not literature. That opinion will live, like the name of Empedocles.
The art of fiction is being re‐born in these days. Life is discovered to be longer, wider, deeper, richer, than these monotonous players of one June would have us believe.
The humanizing of woman of itself opens five distinctly fresh fields of fiction: First the position of the young woman who is called upon to give up her “career”—her humanness—for marriage, and who objects to it; second, the middle‐aged woman who at last discovers that her discontent is social starvation—that it is not more love that she wants, but more business in life: Third the interrelation of women with women—a thing we could never write about before because we never had it before: except in harems and convents: Fourth the inter‐action between mothers and children; this not the eternal “mother and child,” wherein the child is always a baby, but the long drama of personal relationship; the love and hope, the patience and power, the lasting joy and triumph, the slow eating disappointment which must never be owned to a living soul—here are grounds for novels that a million mothers and many million children would eagerly read: Fifth the new attitude of the full‐grown woman who faces the demands of love with the high standards of conscious motherhood.
There are other fields, broad and brilliantly promising, but this chapter is meant merely to show that our one‐sided culture has, in this art, most disproportionately overestimated the dominant
instincts of the male—Love and War—an offense against art and truth, and an injury to life.