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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
peace and incessant life, there is none to atter them that they are not very poor
and very mean.
A position, which so constantly admonishes, may be of inestimable benet.
The person may gain, undistracted by other relationships, a closer communion
with the One. Such a use is made of it by saints and sibyls. Or she may be one of
the lay sisters of charity, or more humbly only the useful drudge of all men, or the
intellectual interpreter of the varied life she sees.
Or she may combine all these. Not “needing to care that she may please a
husband,” a frail and limited being, all her thoughts may turn to the centre, and by
steadfast contemplation enter into the secret of truth and love, use it for the use of
all men, instead of a chosen few, and interpret through it all the forms of life.
Saints and geniuses have often chosen a lonely position, in the faith that, if
undisturbed by the pressure of near ties they could give themselves up to the
inspiring spirit, it would enable them to understand and reproduce life better than
actual experience could.
How many old maids take this high stand, we cannot say; it is an unhappy
fact that too many of those who come before the eye are gossips rather, and not
always good-natured gossips. But, if these abuse, and none make the best of their
vocation, yet, it has nor failed to produce some good fruit. It has been seen by
others, if not by themselves, that beings likely to be left alone need to be fortied
and furnished within themselves, and education and thought have tended more
and more to regard beings as related to absolute Being, as well as to other men. It
has been seen that as the loss of no bond ought to destroy a human being, so ought
the missing of none to hinder him from growing. And thus a circumstance of the
time has helped to put woman on the true platform. Perhaps the next generation
will look deeper into this matter, and nd that contempt is put on old maids, or
old women at all, merely because they do not use the elixir which will keep the soul
always young. No one thinks of Michael Angelo’s Persican Sibyl , or St. Theresa , or
Tasso’s Leonora , or the Greek Electra as an old maid, though all had reached the
period in life’s course appointed to take that degree.
Even among the North American Indians, a race of men as completely engaged in
mere instinctive life as almost any in the world, and where each chief, keeping many
wives as useful servants, of course looks with no kind eye on celibacy in woman, it
was excused in the following instance mentioned by Mrs. Jameson. A woman dreamt
in youth that she was betrothed to the sun. She built her a wigwam apart, lled it
with emblems of her alliance and means of an independent life. There she passed her
days, sustained by her own exertions, and true to her supposed engagement.
In any tribe, we believe, a woman, who lived as if she was betrothed to the sun,
would be tolerated, and the rays which made her youth blossom sweetly would
crown her with a halo in age.
There is on this subject a nobler view than heretofore, if not the noblest, and
we greet improvement here, as much as on the subject of marriage. Both are fertile
themes, but time permits not here to explore them.
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