But if Maggie had been that young lady you would probably have known nothing about her; her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
The clause between the two is an apt comment on the art of the novel, and applies as well to men.
Though there are things like Mrs. Dalloway.
By now, Maggie has renounced renunciation.
She wants to be happy.
She wants "love, beauty, and delight."
The Mill on the Floss, The Great Temptation, chapter 3.
Chapter 4 of this Book shows up the extraordinary subjection of women in its picture of Maggie's relationship with Tom.
So far are the relations between the sexes determined by nothing but upper body strength and relative size.
Eliot is such a wit I would have loved to have lunch with her.
In chapter 6 of this book she writes,
"Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - "character is destiny."
But not the whole of our destiny.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence.
But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.
Also in chapter 6, this that shows, I think, the fact of it.
"Do take my arm," he said, in a low tone as if it were a secret.
There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm: the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help - the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs - meets a continual want of the imagination.
Update.
Somewhere, recently, on the Internet, I read that men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.
A propos.
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