Travesty

“ Every anguish-cry of my breast, every thought of my soul, every feeling of my young heart, was gathered into this one question, 'Why, why must I expiate what is no fault of mine that I am not a boy?' And, in every wound that was dealt me, the seed of revenge was strewn—the seed of revenge for my own wrongs and those of my sex—the seed of ambition to do all that can be achieved by that sex whose superiority was so insultingly, so brutally paraded before me. ”

“ He could allude to the victims of misfortune in terms of charity that would draw tears to all eyes, and plead for the innocence of childhood and the chastity of woman in strains of eloquence that would send the burning tinge of shame to the most gloating sensualist, or the most hardened trafficker in that which robs a man of his reason and affections. ”

“ For the matter of that, sir, this door has been opened to you, and, for aught I know, you may be one of those characters! Oh, sir, look indignant if you please, but whatever you may be, in my eyes your whole sex is hateful. You are all brimful of deceit, design, villainy, selfishness, and brutality! Had I my will, my door should be barred and double-locked against your entire gender!
Dam. Ah, you abusive woman! If we are villains, ’tis your abominable sex that makes us such. If you were not weak, we should not be wicked? ”

“ It is, indeed, much the same as if a lover should dig up the buried form of his mistress, and gaze upon relics which are any thing but herself, to wander among a few mouldy ruins, that are only imperfect indexes to lost volumes of glory, and meet at every step the more melancholy ruins of human nature—a degenerate race of stupid and shrivelled slaves, grovelling in the lowest depths of servility and superstition. ”

“ Why should I entertain any regard for a girl who, after all, was only a thief—a girl whose innocence had decoyed men, and caused women to betray the whereabouts of their jewels, so that her associates could rob them with impunity? ”

“ Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. ”

“ Cunning, ferocity, and drunkenness in all its stages, were there in their strongest aspects; and women—some with the last lingering tinge of their early freshness almost fading as you looked, and others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of profligacy and crime—some mere girls, others but young women, and none past the prime of life—formed the darkest and saddest portion of this dreary picture. ”

“ I would we could escape.”
“Escape!”
“Yet, fear not, son; they cannot torture me.”
“No; for art thou not a woman?”
“Oh, they would not fear to torture a woman. But look on my face, canst thou not read death there? Nay, cry not, ‘mother,’ as thou weepest. They shall come to bite their lips with anger; for they will find me dead.” ”

“ INDELICATE APPAREL.
As God may help me I am going to set forth the evil effects of improper dress or an excessive discipleship of costume. It is a simple truth that you all know, although the pulpit has not yet uttered it, that much of the womanly costume of our time is the cause of the temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. ”

“ I shall never love—not in this planet; in some other state of existence I may experience the ‘divine’ emotion. But the meannesses, vanities, contemptible jealousies, and low spites of women such as inhabit this earth fill me with disgust and repulsion,—besides, women are treacherous,—and I loathe treachery. ”

“ She had seen him flying from the house without waiting for the girl to recover consciousness. What finer scheme of vengeance could any woman hope for—and she had always heard that women were revengeful—than that which had been placed within her reach? ”

“ Thief, coward, blackguard, they are stamped upon his face, but under the face, under the evil outside? Is there no remnant of manhood—nothing tender, nothing, true? A woman has crept to the cross to kiss him: no evidence in his favour, my Lord? Love is blind-aye, to our faults. ”

“ She had almost had time to weary of the human scene; her own humanity at any rate, in the shape of a smutch on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she raised her eyes they rested on a high fair drapery by which smutches were put to shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without her noting its rustle. ”

“ Instead of the punishment, there is seen a false glitter of gaudy life,—a glitter which is damnably false,—and which, alas! has been more often portrayed in glowing colours, for the injury of young girls, than have those horrors which ought to deter, with the dark shadowings which belong to them. ”

“ Then if you will have it so, may all the curses light upon you, women ought to fear, and you deserve!—First, may the curse of loving play attend your sordid covetousness, and fortune cheat you, by trusting to her, as you have cheated me; the curse of pride, or a good reputation, fall on your lust; the curse of affectation on your beauty; the curse of your husband's company on your pleasures; and the curse of your gallant's disappointments in his absence; and the curse of scorn, jealousy, or despair on your love ”

“ Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably a drunken brute—of a husband, and at least nine children. ”

“ There was the usual, perhaps a little more than the usual, splendor of dress and diamonds; the same glare and crash and glitter and crowd and heat; the same buoyant light-heartedness among the young; the same corroding ennui of the old; taste in dress was criticised, looks were scanned, flirtations detected, quarrels discovered, fans were mislaid, hearts were lost, flounces were torn, and feelings hurt. There was the ordinary measure of what people call enjoyment, mixed up with the ordinary proportion of envy, shyness, pretension, sarcasm, coldness, and malice. ”

“ How can we elevate our history of retribution, for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce—not a young and lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by affliction—but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head! ”

“ No gleam of goodness throughout the whole for the heart to cling to,—no thought of remorseful penitence,—no spark of noble feeling; nothing but vice,—low, grovelling, brutal vice,—from the moment the curtain rises to display the obscene spectacle, to that which sees it fall between the fictitious infamy on one side, and the real impurity left on the other! ”

“ MOLL.
That’s not I yet!
PYE. And with most impudent prostitution show your naked bodies to the view of all beholders.
WIDDOW.
Our naked bodies? fie, for shame!
PYE.
Attend me: and your younger daughter be strocken dumb.
MOLL. Dumb? out, alas: tis the worst pain of all for a Woman. I’d rather be mad, or run naked, or any thing: dumb? ”

“ It were fine, methinks, To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts, And unclean brothels; sure 'twould fright the sinner And make him a good coward, put a reveller Out of his antic amble, And cloy an epicure with empty dishes. Here might a scornful and ambitious woman Look through and through herself; see, ladies, with false forms You deceive men but cannot deceive worms. ”

“ It is in such a scene, enacted in a close room, sometimes with the light extinguished, and the actors doing their work in the dark, that we can form an adequate idea of the true furor of robbery. Even a listener at the door would hear only the bodily contortions—the deep breathing—the muttered vengeance—all a deep bass to the stifled treble of a woman’s passion grasping at gold. ”

“ Do you dare to rob me of my soul, of my art that is my soul, and refuse me all restitution? You dare because, with the ineffable meanness of your sex, you know that you can trust to my honour as a gentleman not to enforce a return. ”

“ A dirty gaudy-coloured dress hung unfastened about her shoulders, coarse black hair unbrushed, uncombed, dangled about her face, over which her evil habits had spread a genuine bacchanalian glow, whilst in a loud masculine voice she uttered the most awful words that ever disgraced the mouth of man ten thousand times more awful when proceeding from a woman's lips. ”

“ But how greatly ought the women to thank that their instinctive repugnance of Nature to such a prostitution of their persons, if they consider those tortures, which, by the listening to that same repugnance, may at once be saved to their modesty, and to their personal feeling. ”

“ In the longer ones (Don Paez, Portia, &c.) treachery runs riot; we have the wife who deceives her husband, the mistress who deceives her lover, the countess who knows nothing about hers except that he has killed her old husband; we have brutal pleasure, to obtain which men hack and hew at each other, youthful sensuality which knows neither ruth nor shame, senile depravity which employs love potions and listens to the death-rattle with voluptuous pleasure; and, scattered about amongst all this, songs, fiery sparks of passion, savagery, and arrogance. ”

“ Have I not shocked you many times during this interview by my betrayal of woman's cause, my lack of feminine modesty, my reckless, passionate, most indecorous avowal, that I live only in the life of one who, perhaps, scorns and shudders at me? ”

“ When they doff their dress note which is the feather-suit of her whom thou lovest and take it, and it only, for this it is that carrieth her to her country, and when thou hast mastered it, thou hast mastered her. And beware lest she wile thee, saying, 'O thou who hast robbed my raiment, restore it to me, because here am I in thine hands and at thy mercy!' For, an thou give it her, she will kill thee and break down over us palace and pavilion and slay our sire: know, then, thy case and how thou shalt act. ”

“ Behold, I will deliver you into the hand of them whom you hate, into the hand of them from whom your soul is alienated; 23:29 and they shall deal with you in hatred, and shall take away all your labor, and shall leave you naked and bare; and the nakedness of your prostitution shall be uncovered, both your lewdness and your prostitution. 23:30 These things shall be done to you, because you have played the prostitute after the nations, and because you are polluted with their idols. ”

“ Since then, a morbid and mischievous spirit has led me—in vengeance, as it were—to make women my playthings and my toys, each after each to be won, thrown aside, and forgotten, when I tired of them—yea, thrown aside like flowers whose perfume is gone. ”

“ We are looking for some wretch capable of a blindly malignant revenge, or for homicidal madness, with its unreasoning thirst for blood; and here, here at these gates is a woman whom you suspect of madness, a woman who could have had access to the gardens at any hour, who knew the habits and hours of the servants, who would know how to elude observation. ”

“ And then she became dumb, and kissed me with the kisses she alone was able to give, and in comparison with which the caresses of any other woman were but an insipidity.
The constraint and the silence enhanced the furious tension of my nerves. Surprise, the joy of revenge, and, perhaps, a somewhat perverse jealousy inflamed my desires. The elastic firmness of her flesh and the supple violence of the movements wherewith she enveloped me demanded, promised, and deserved the most ardent caresses. ”

“ Ladies, the ornaments you wear upon your persons tonight are but the souvenirs of your mother's bondage. The chains around your necks; and the bracelets clasped upon your white arms by the thrilled hand of love, have been changed by the wand of civilization from iron to shining, glittering gold. Nearly every civilization in this world accounts for the devilment in it by the crimes of woman. ”

“ As years sped by, and each showed her more plainly the vacancy of her existence, this feeling deepened into a quenchless thirst for revenge. Was she to be the only victim? Man had a hundred means of quelling or forgetting a hapless passion. ”

“ Here were women disguised as men, and men in the attire of women, hiding vice of every vileness and crime of every enormity,—at once the most disgusting, the most appalling, and the most unnatural that the heart of man has conceived. ”

“ The innocent, tearful face of the young and lovely girl, whose look expresses the self-pity which must have swelled in her heart, as she thought, how she, from very horror of crime, was become a murderess, put to shame the dark eyes and pencilled brows of her, whose passion was devoid of tenderness. ”

“ No pitying eye beholds the hapless fair,
She’s left to Death, Diseases, and Despair!
Nature cries out, and hunger must be fed,
She now must turn a prostitute for bread;
Her name is blasted, friendless left, and poor,
Tell me what can she do?—why be a WHORE.
Lew’d scenes, and lew’d discourse, comes next in play ”

“ Men have been thy victims: now take the due reward of all thy wickedness. What art thou, that I should have idolized and gazed with rapture on that form?—something even more treacherous and perverted than myself. ”