Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
from her imagination in her early years, as we, who knew her only when world affairs
had claimed her for their own, had supposed’. The diary suggested that someone had
enlisted her affection, only to disappoint her by ‘his worthlessness’. In her second
novel (Tender and True), she depicts the heroine of the sub-plot (Rose Lancaster)
undergoing just such an experience: Rosa discovers that the sub-plot’s Byronic hero
(Miles Davanent), to whom she has given her heart, has a wife and a child, both of
whom he disposes of in a thoroughly unfeeling fashion. The theme recurs in various
forms, in later novels as well, though without the moral judgement conveyed in
Tender and True. Perhaps Jeanne Young was right. Perhaps Spence’s autobiographical
comment was made from the pain-absorbing distance of an old age fulfilled in other
ways. Disappointment may have prompted a later diary entry in which Spence wrote,
‘ “C … and A … contend that if I do really not wish for marriage, I should talk much
less about it, for my talking gives to people an entirely wrong impression” ’. She went
on to admonish herself: ‘ “Let your ideas never dare to fancy what may happen in case
of marriage; that is the forbidden subject. Place the garrett steadily before you and
endeavour to train your mind so as to be a useful and amiable member of society and
no one’s wife, and no one’s mother” ’. 77
However, the portrayal of the ‘love disappointment’ in Tender and True carries
very little conviction. Indeed, it sails so close to parody that it suggests strongly that
Spence was employing a favourite device of romantic novelists with very little imaginative
sympathy. Perhaps, then, her diary expressed a positive decision at least as
much as a hard-won renunciation of a dream. In an age when, as she has Margaret
Elliot tell Clara Morison in her first novel, spinsters were objects of mockery and condescension,
it was a formidable resolution. In that novel, the same two characters discuss
vocation. Clara’s is, Margaret tells her, marriage. Margaret is unsure of what her
own is, but she knows it is not marriage: her unwillingness to suppress her own opinions,
to defer to any man simply because he is a man, her range of interests and her
independence, make her, she recognises, an unsuitable partner for any man in search
of a wife. 78 Spence was, during her early years in South Australia, bitterly resentful
of the injustice of ‘a world made comfortable for the exclusive development of men’.
Before yielding to a belief in the inferiority of women, she told her diary, she would
discipline her mind, ‘ “to manly virtues, to manly strength, and to manly studies,
that I may learn to live without leaning on anyone” ’. 79 This was a clear decision – to
face the whole world, not merely part of it, and to face it directly, without any of the
constraints, the mediations, or the protections to be gained from having a husband.
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