The outcast woman: society’s chosen scapegoat

“ Later, the anti-social man was regarded as a pathological product—the victim of disease; and it is one of the fashions of to-day to regard him as 'a social product'—the victim of adverse social environment. ”

“ The hard hand of necessity had forced her into this quicksand of death; the indifference of a naturally generous community, robbed her of the light of intelligence, and left her a helpless victim in the hands of this cultivator of vice. How could she, orphan as she was called, and unencouraged, come to be a noble and generous-hearted woman? No one offered her the means to come up and ornament her sex; but tyrannical society neither forgets her misfortunes nor forgives her errors. Once seal the death-warrant of a woman's errors, and you have none to come forward and cancel it ”

“ She lives a social outcast, with broken, bleeding heart;
But each base seducer, in our social plan.
Makes poor, trusting woman bear the sins of Man!
Many men are now misjudged, and meet an awful fate,
Whose innocence is published, but alas, it is too late!
Many, too, are breathing freedom's precious air
Whose vile conduct merits prison dress and fare.
Only little rascals in your prisons die,
While stupendous villians liberty can buy!
Each one strives with fervor his neighbor to outshine,
And he who has the most of gold is reckoned half divine. ”

“ You cannot correct moral infirmity by confining the victim of it among criminals, for no greater punishment can be inflicted on the feelings of man; and punishment destroys rather than encourages the latent susceptibility of our better nature. ”

“ Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation, and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest building I [Pg 101] have ever been in. ”

“ The most excruciating torture that it is possible to inflict upon a sensitive and refined woman is to drag her into our modern courtroom and subject her to the quizzing process of shameless lawyers, who ply her with numberless questions that cut to the quick the sensitive heart and lacerate it as though some diabolical machine filled with knives of all shapes and sizes were making 72mince-meat of it. ”

“ She is as much afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a trial in the divorce-court. This woman—so free at a ball, so attractive out walking—is a slave at home; she is never independent but in perfect privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in her position as a lady. This is her task.
“For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the divine accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. ”

“ Well, then! there are streets, or ends of streets, there are houses, unknown for the most part to persons of social distinction, to which a woman of that class cannot go without causing cruel and very wounding things to be thought of her. ”

“ However pure her character, to turn her into the street, is to subject her to a stigma, if not to fasten upon her a disgrace. You may paint, in your imagination, the picture of a woman in distress, but you can know little of the heart-achings of the sufferer. ”

“ It ostracises her from what is called ‘good society,’ it points the finger of scorn at the child that calls her ‘mother.’ If that child be a boy there is a chance for it to win its way in the world, but if it be a girl then hard will it be for her to gain a foothold upon the steep and rugged pathway she will have to climb.
“How can a sensitive, womanly woman desire to confront a room filled with coarse, unsympathizing men and relate to them the stories of her woe? How can she tell of tears shed in the dead of night; of how her sacred womanhood has been abused ”

“ She told him all that had passed from the moment when the strange woman had come to her door, until now, when she herself sat in the vagabonds' hostel at Hånger.
He listened with all his soul, and was filled with sorrow for the desperate thing she had done, and all the misery she had brought on herself. He understood better than she did herself that, as she was, all ways in the world were closed to her now. That if she stayed in this world at all, she must be condemned by her own act to endless unrest, endless anxiety, endless penitence and shame. ”

“ Their minds contract a tinge of bitterness which manifests itself in their conversation, and in their manners; and the alarm which fills their heart, like the gas flame in a glass globe, lights up their countenances so plainly, that it accounts for their conduct.
Now a woman, who has twelve hours more than you have each day to reflect and to study you, reads the suspicion written upon your face at the very moment that it arises. ”

“ An outcast from the auspices of middle-class propriety, she was driven into the refuge of her queer fantastic world. She sought that refuge fanatically, it was a facet of her vindictiveness. From out of that world of shadows she should, some day, thrust the rapier of mischief into the paunch of their gross solidity. ”

“ Absolutely dependent on a man who was at that moment perhaps lamenting the wife whom he had deserted and lost, how long would it be before she found herself an outcast, without a friend to help her—with a reputation hopelessly lost—face to face with the temptation to drown herself or poison herself, as other women had drowned themselves or poisoned themselves, when the brightest future before them was rest in death? ”

“ How much better to provide for its innocent victims, its irresponsible offspring, than, as now, to permit the so frequent destruction of both. It is foolish to assert that by such provision we but pander to sin. In many of these instances the woman is innocent of intentional wrong, being led astray by her perfect confidence in the constancy and good faith of a lover, and in others she is, doubtless, ignorant of the true character of the act she is committing. ”

“ Turning his light to where the negro points, the detective casts a glance into the shadow, and there discovers the rags move. A dozen pair of glassy eyes are seen peering from out the filthy coverings, over which lean arms and blanched hands keep up an incessant motion. Here an emaciated and heart-sick Welsh girl, of thirteen (enciente) lays shivering on the broken floor; there an half-famished Scotch woman, two moaning children nestling at her heart, suffers uncovered upon a pallet of straw. The busy world without would seem not to have a care for her ”

“ Such are the cherished thoughts of a pure mind. Poverty may gnaw away at the hearthstone, cares and sorrow may fall thick in your path, the rich may frown upon you, and the vicious sport with your misfortunes, but virtue gives you power to overcome them all. In Maria's ear something whispers: Woman! hold fast to thy virtue, for if once it go neither gold nor false tongues can buy it back.
Anna sees the companion of her early life, and the sharer of her sufferings, shut up in a prison, a robber, doomed to the lash. ”

“ But if, as at present, the "unfortunate woman" be regarded as a necessity in those days of advanced thought and increased opportunities, then her status must be raised. She must not be an acknowledged necessity and a scorned outcast at the same time, as is the case now. ”

“ That nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide—your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on best, do you think, of two poor starving dressmakers—the woman who resists temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of that second woman’s fortune—it advertises her from length to breadth of good-humoured, charitable England—and she is relieved, as the breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as the keeper of it. ”

“ She stopped as if startled by her own reflections upon the subject of the social ostracism so long established and so harshly enforced that women seem to hold to it as through an instinct of self-preservation.
She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that the tradition that the unchaste woman should be an outcast from society rests upon a solid basis of experience, upon the [Pg 63] long struggle of a multitude of obscure women who, from one generation to another, were frantically determined to establish the paternity of their children and to force the father to a recognition of his obligations ”

“ Further conversation showed that she also realized that these stern memories inherited from the past have an undoubted social value and that it is a perilous undertaking upon which certain women of this generation are bent in their efforts to deal a belated justice to the fallen woman. It involves a clash within the very mass of inherited motives and impulses as well as a clash between old conventions and contemporary principles. ”

“ It adds to their difficulty that the individual women, driven to modify a harsh convention which has become unendurable to them, are perforce those most sensitive to injustice. The sharp struggle for social advance, which is always a struggle between ideas, long before it becomes embodied in contending social groups, may thus find its arena in the tender conscience of one woman who is pitilessly rent and pierced by her warring scruples and affections. ”

“ During the state of gestation the woman is therefore liable to thoughts, convictions even, that at other times she would turn from in disgust or dismay; and in this fact, that must be as familiar to herself as it is to the physician, we find her most valid excuse for the crime. ”

“ Monjoy said contemptuously; “you’d have more pity from me if your iggs didn’t always suit your own ends so pat. I know your head-knocking on walls; how much of it do you do when there’s nobody watching you? It goes down with women and fools that Ellah’s iggs must be humoured, but in two words, Ellah, my man, you’re a lazy devil, and if you can contrive it to live without working you will. I know your iggs; you’re the sort that shapes to drown themselves and puts their hands in the water first.” ”

“ I tell you my impression, in all its horror and in all its folly! That woman is destined (without knowing it herself) to be the evil genius of my life. Her innocent eyes saw hidden capabilities of wickedness in me that I was not aware of myself, until I felt them stirring under her look. If I commit faults in my life to come—if I am even guilty of crimes—she will bring the retribution, without (as I firmly believe) any conscious exercise of her own will. ”

“ To maintain the uncertain favour, to preserve the unwelcome friendship, of a woman abandoned even by the most common and intuitive virtues of her sex; whose frantic craving for revenge, confounded justice with treachery, innocence with guilt, helplessness with tyranny; whose claims of nation and relationship should have been forfeited in his estimation, by the openly-confessed malignity of her designs, at the fatal moment when she had communicated them to him in all their atrocity, before the walls of Rome. ”

“ The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame, and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview. ”

“ And if, a short time before, when she had hastily parted from Borgert, she had felt something like remorse,—something of shame in having abused the confidence placed in her by her husband,—she now regarded herself as a victim, and her fault only in the light of a just revenge for his heartless conduct.
For at no time is the heart of woman more susceptible to temptation than at the moment when she feels herself betrayed and outraged in her best feelings. ”

“ You have already but too dreadfully suffered, and a repetition of such scenes must necessarily increase the anguish of your situation."
This recital threw the hapless daughter of Monteblanco into that exquisite agony which falls to the lot of woman alone to feel: for man, far happier in the diversity of his pursuits; less susceptible in the refinement of sensibility; more divided in his intercourse with society, can never experience that poignancy of feeling excited by shame and disappointed love, which exert their baneful influence over the heart of forsaken woman! ”

“ Why would you save me from a sacrifice which I deem an immunity from mortal cares? In this life, a woman’s condition is one of endurance, of slavery, of pain; I would be glad to enter upon an existence where each and all are unknown.”
“You speak indeed like a feeble woman. Do you not know that, if your body is consumed with your husband’s on the funeral [Pg 34] pile, your soul will follow his to whatever destiny it may be appointed? This is a sad hazard, for he dies in the prime of manhood, when the blood is warm and the senses are all full of the glowing warmth of young and vigorous life. ”

“ The blue eyes would fill with tears, and the trembling lips confess such tales of woe as would blanch the roses on the health-glowing cheeks of the horrified girl, while the lips of the listener would answer: “Again! Again has marriage proven a failure! Is it ever, oh! is it ever, anything else?” Her lips would quiver, the dark eyes would fill with unshed tears as a fair face, a sunny smile, and eyes which seemed pure wells of truth, arose before her mental vision. Then she would question, “Are all men alike? Is it ever and always the fate of woman to be the slave of men?” ”

“ It is not clamorous blame, 'Tis righteous censure only which can wound. BURLEIGH. We know that holy justice cannot 'scape The voice of censure; and the public cry Is ever on the side of the unhappy: Envy pursues the laurelled conqueror; The sword of justice, which adorns the man, Is hateful in a woman's hand; the world Will give no credit to a woman's justice If woman be the victim. Vain that we, The judges, spoke what conscience dictated ”

“ It was as if the young mother of the grotesque Devil Baby, that victim of wrong doing on the part of others, had revealed to this tragic woman much more clearly than soft words had ever done, that the return of a deed of violence upon the head of the innocent is inevitable; as if she had realized that, although she was destined to walk all the days of her life with the piteous multitude who bear the undeserved wrongs of the world, she would walk henceforth with a sense of companionship. ”

“ At a crucial moment she had been able to estimate life, not in terms of her self-immolation but in relation to a hard pressed multitude of fellow workers.
As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman [Pg 93] broken through her devotion, she inevitably suggested the industrial wrongs and oppressions suffered by the women who, forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely drudgery upon which our industrial order depends. ”