WOMEN OF HASTINGS & ST. LEONARDS
THE BATTLE OF LIFE: SOME WOMEN
by R.J. Cruikshank (1949)
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The Victorians, who tackled many big problems successfully, made a
fearful hash of the problem of woman. Their moral dualism, their besetting
weakness of dreaming of one thing and doing another, might be amusing
in architecture or painting, but it involved endless cruelty towards flesh
and blood. Woman in the abstract was as radiant as an angel, as dainty as a fairy - she was a picture on the wall, a statue in a temple, a being whose physical processes were an inscrutable mystery. She was wrapped by the Victorians in folds on folds, and layers on layers of clothes, as though she were a Hindu idol. She was hidden in the mysteries of petticoats; her natural lines were hidden behind a barricade of hoops and stays; her dress throughout the century emphasised her divorce from reality. She was a daughter of the gods divinely fair and most divinely tall; she was queen rose of the rose-bud garden of girls; she was Helen, Beatrice, the Blessed Damozel, the Lady of Shalott. A romanticism as feverish as that could only bring unhappiness to its objects. |
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