| <The Saturday Review June 13, 1868>
| <Feminine Affectations>
| <pb n="776">
| The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a 
| die-away fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady 
| known by the name of the vapours, or one, no less obscure, 
| called the spleen.  Sometimes it was an etherialized being 
| who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed her 
| life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part 
| expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave 
| more satisfaction to herself than to her friends.  She was 
| probably an Italian scholar, and could quote Petrarch and 
| Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she might even be a 
| Della Cruscan by honourable election, with her own 
| peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way 
| she was <p> "a sister of the Muses," </p> and had 
| something to do with Apollo and Minerva, whom she was 
| sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical.  Probably she 
| had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does 
| not in an age affect the <p> "sea-born," </p> save in a hazy 
| sentimental way that bears no fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet 
| or a clever bit of counterpoint being to her worth all the 
| manly love or fireside home delights that the world can 
| give.  What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the 
| rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of 
| being a sister of the Muses, and one of the beloved of 
| Apollo?  The Della Cruscan of former days, or her modern 
| avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and 
| bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a 
| prison, and babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and 
| that house-hold duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting 
| to the empyrean.  This was the Etherial Being of last 
| generation ~~ the Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, 
| with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in 
| disheveled cascades about her neck.  She dropped her 
| mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the Della 
| Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times.  
| We still have ethereal begins who, as the practical outcome 
| of their etherialization, rave about music and poetry, and 
| Halle and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the 
| weekly bills.
| A favourite form of feminine affection among certain 
| opposers of the prevalent fast type is in an intense 
| womanliness, an aggravating intensity of womanliness, that 
| makes one long for a little roughness, just to take off the 
| cloying excess of sweetness.  This kind is generally found 
| with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by 
| which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a 
| certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty 
| thought, that is very effective.  It does not destroy the 
| effectiveness that the real cause of the darkened lids and 
| cavernous orbits is  most probably internal disease, when 
| not antimony; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and 
| loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, 
| and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the 
| simulation does quite as well as truth.  The main 
| characteristic of these women is self-consciousness.  They 
| live before a moral mirror, and pass their time in 
| attitudinizing to what they think the best advantage.  They 
| can do nothing simply, nothing spontaneously and without 
| the fullest consciousness as to how they do it, and how they 
| look while they are doing it.  In every action of their lives 
| they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as 
| impersonations of poetic images or thoughts.  If they give 
| you a glass of water, or take your cup from you, they are 
| Youth and Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the 
| case may be; if they bring you a photographic album, they 
| are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle 
| modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are 
| Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love, though they 
| never saw, the little creature before, and care for it no more 
| than for the puppy in the mews; if they do any small 
| personal office, or attempt to do it, making believe to tie a 
| shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are 
| Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them 
| both charitable and graceful.  Nine times out of
| <pb n="777">
| ten they can neither tie a string nor fasten a button with 
| ordinary deftness, for they have a trick of using only the 
| ends of their fingers when they do anything with their 
| hands, as being more graceful, and altogether fitting in 
| better than would a firmer grasp with the delicate 
| womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more 
| commonplace woman who does not attitudinize morally, 
| and never parades her womanliness, eats them out of the 
| field for real helpfulness, and  is the Charity which the 
| other only plays at being.  This kind too affects, in theory, 
| wonderful submissiveness to man.  It upholds Griselda as 
| the type of feminine perfection, and ~~ still in theory ~~ 
| between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in 
| for the tyranny.  <q> </q>, said one before she married, 
| who, after she was married, managed to get entire 
| possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that 
| her nominal lord should be her practical slave.  For, 
| notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the 
| intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack 
| of getting her own way and imposing her own will on 
| others.  The real tyrant among women is not the one who 
| flounces and splutters, and declares that nothing shall make 
| her obey, but the soft-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely 
| womanly person, who says that Griselda is her ideal, and 
| that the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning 
| obedience to man.
| In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish 
| woman ~~ the woman who wears a double-breasted coat 
| with big buttons, of which she flings back the lapels with 
| an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest 
| and the  need of unchecked breathing; who wears 
| unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain 
| ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, 
| like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, 
| in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the attitude 
| is comfortable because it is manlike.  If the excessively 
| womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the 
| mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness.  
| She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above 
| children of all ages.  She boasts of how good a marksman 
| she is ~~ she does not call herself markswoman ~~ and 
| how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds 
| flying.  When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the 
| glass between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, 
| and tosses it off, throwing her head well back ~~ she would 
| disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of ordinary 
| women.  She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup 
| and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of 
| sweets or of effervescing wines.  She rounds her elbows 
| and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and 
| turn their wrists outward.  She is fond of carpentry, she 
| says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw; for 
| charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet 
| a big knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast 
| with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of 
| her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does 
| anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a 
| needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her 
| fingers.  All of which is affectation ~~ from first to last 
| affectation; a mere assumption of virile fashions utterly 
| inharmonious to the whole being, physical and mental, of a 
| woman.
| Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken 
| propriety and orthodoxy under her special protection, and 
| who regards it as a personal insult when her friends and 
| acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of her mental 
| sphere.  This is the woman who assumes to be the 
| antiseptic element in society, who makes believe that 
| without her the world and human nature would go to the 
| dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and 
| destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of 
| man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavour and 
| patient seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the 
| world's if she did not spread her own petty preserving nets, 
| and mark out the boundary lines within which she would 
| confine the range of thought and speculation.  She knows 
| that this assumption of spiritual beadle-dome is a mere 
| affection, and that other minds have as much right to their 
| own boundary lines as she claims for herself; but it seems 
| to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the 
| consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of 
| all women, is most specially consecrated.  As an offshoot 
| of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity ~~ the 
| woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who 
| poses herself as a mere nobody when the world is ringing 
| with her praises.  <q> </q>? said one of this class with 
| prettily affected <hi rend="italic"> <f> naivete </f> </hi> 
| at a time when all England was astir about her, and when 
| colours and fashions went by her name to make them take 
| with the public at large.  <reg orig="No one"> No-one 
| </reg> knew better than the fair <hi rend="italic"> <f> 
| ingenue </f> </hi> in question how far and wide her fame 
| had spread, but she thought it looked modest and simple to 
| assume ignorance of her own value, and to declare that she 
| was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that she 
| was a soaring butterfly.
| There is a certain like kind of affectation very common 
| among pretty women; and this is the affectation of not 
| knowing that they are pretty, and not recognising the effect 
| of their beauty on men.  Take a woman with bewildering 
| eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with 
| long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows 
| that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire 
| burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick 
| she has with them ~~ the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid, 
| and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's 
| eyes.  She has practised it often in the glass, and knows to a 
| mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must 
| be raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze.  She knows the 
| whole meaning of the look, and the stirring of men's blood 
| that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her 
| trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence and protests 
| her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or 
| mean; and if you press her hard she will look at you in the 
| same say for your own benefit, and deny at the very 
| moment of offence.  Various other tricks has she with those 
| bewildering eyes of hers ~~ each more perilous than the 
| other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no 
| matter what the result.  For this is the woman who flirts to 
| the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she 
| meant nothing.  Step by step she has led you on, with looks 
| and smiles, and pretty doubtful phrases always susceptible 
| of two meanings, the one for the ear by mere word, the 
| other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and 
| manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn 
| you deeper and deeper into the maze where she has gone 
| before as your decoy; then, when she has you safe, she 
| raises her eyes for the last time, complains that you have 
| mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more 
| than <reg orig="one"> anyone </reg> else might mean; and 
| what can she do to repair her mistake?  Love you? marry 
| you?  No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his 
| thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had 
| not seen this all along, and that you should have so 
| misunderstood her!  Of all the many affectations of women, 
| this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, 
| and of their innocence of design when they practise their 
| arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and 
| the most disastrous.  But what can one say to them?  The 
| very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and 
| blinds his perception until too late.  That men love though 
| they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt, and condonation; 
| and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practised.  
| Another affectation of the same family is the extreme 
| friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in 
| their manners towards men.  Young girls affect an almost 
| maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so 
| older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, 
| declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may 
| not be natural.  This form of affectation, one begun, 
| continues through life, being too convenient to be lightly 
| discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens 
| assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age 
| counseling giddy youth, and that might by chance be 
| dangerous even then if the <p> "Indian summer" </p> was 
| specially bright and warm.
| Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the 
| mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the 
| drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness 
| of attitude that by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the 
| thousand little <hi rend="italic"> <f> minauderies </f> 
| </hi> and coquetries of the sex known to us all.  And there 
| is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere 
| show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk 
| and look as if they were not quite certain of their company, 
| and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage 
| or civilized.  And there is the affectation of the maternal 
| passion with women who are never by any chance seen 
| with their children, but who speak of them as if they were 
| never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration 
| with women who are to be met about the world with every 
| man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful 
| husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead 
| a thoroughly self-enjoying life from end to end and the 
| affectation of political fervour in those who would not give 
| up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal 
| revolution.  Go where we will, affectation of being 
| something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we 
| cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away.  In the holiest 
| and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating 
| everywhere ~~ even in church, and at her prayers, when the 
| pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes 
| and looks about her furtively to see who has noticed her 
| self-abasement and to whom her picturesque piety has 
| commended itself.  All sorts and patterns of good girls and 
| pleasant woman are very dear and delightful; but the pearl 
| of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected 
| woman ~~ that is, the woman who is truthful to her core, 
| and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she 
| would dare to tell a lie.