Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
enjoyed well worth the honors of chivalry? They intelligently shared the ideal life
of their nation.
Generally, we are told of these nations, that women occupied there a very
subordinate position in actual life. It is dicult to believe this, when we see such
range and dignity of thought on the subject in the mythologies, and nd the poets
producing such ideals as Cassandra , Iphigenia , Antigone , Macaria , (though it
is not unlike our own day, that men should revere those heroines of their great
princely houses at theatres from which their women were excluded,) where
Sibylline priestesses told the oracle of the highest god, and he could not be content
to reign with a court of less than nine Muses. Even Victory wore a female form.
But whatever were the facts of daily life, I cannot complain of the age and
nation, which represents its thought by such a symbol as I see before me at this
moment. It is a zodiac of the busts of gods and goddesses, arranged in pairs. The
circle breathes the music of a heavenly order. Male and female heads are distinct in
expression, but equal in beauty, strength, and calmness. Each male head is that of
a brother and a king, each female of a sister and a queen. Could the thought, thus
expressed, be lived out, there would be nothing more to be desired. There would be
unison in variety, congeniality in dierence.
Coming nearer our own time, we nd religion and poetry no less true in their
revelations. The rude man, but just disengaged from the sod, the Adam, accuses
woman to his God, and records her disgrace to their posterity. He is not ashamed
to write that he could be drawn from heaven by one beneath him. But in the same
nation, educated by time, instructed by successive prophets, we nd woman in as
high a position as she has ever occupied. And no gure, that has ever arisen to greet
our eyes, has been received with more fervent reverence than that of the Madonna.
Heine calls her the Dame du Comptoir of the Catholic Church, and this jeer well
expresses a serious truth.
And not only this holy and signicant image was worshipped by the pilgrim,
and the favorite subject of the artist, but it exercised an immediate inuence on
the destiny of the sex. The empresses, who embraced the cross, converted sons
and husbands. Whole calendars of female saints, heroic dames of chivalry, binding
the emblem of faith on the heart of the best beloved, and wasting the bloom of
youth in separation and loneliness, for the sake of duties they thought it religion
to assume, with innumerable forms of poesy, trace their lineage to this one. Nor,
however imperfect may be the action, in our day, of the faith thus expressed, and
though we can scarcely think it nearer this ideal than that of India or Greece was
near their ideal, is it in vain that the truth has been recognised, that woman is not
only a part of man, bone of his bone and esh of his esh, born that men might
not be lonely, but in themselves possessors of and possessed by immortal souls.
This truth undoubtedly received a greater outward stability from the belief of the
church, that the earthly parent of the Saviour of souls was a woman.
The Assumption of the Virgin, as painted by sublime artists, Petrarch’s Hymn
to the Madonna , cannot have spoken to the world wholly without result, yet
oftentimes those who had ears heard not.
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