My Dear Cornelia/Book 3/Chapter 3
"Cornelia," I said after a moment of intense meditation, "I think—I am not sure, but I think you are making a mistake."
"I am sure!" she retorted. "I am not making a mistake. I know perfectly well what I am doing. I have never been more certain about anything in my life than that Oliver is wrong—utterly wrong. What mistake am I making?"
"You are making the mistake which nine tenths of the good people of our generation are making in dealing with their own children. You are making the mistake of trying to suppress the symptoms instead of diagnosing the disease. Knickers and the rest are symptoms. Of what? You ought to be thinking about that, but you are not. Cigarettes and bobbed hair are flags of revolt. You are interested only in capturing the flags and burning them. But what is the revolt about? That is what you ought to be thinking about; and you aren't thinking about it at all."
"I am thinking about it," she protested. "I am thinking about nothing else. I am not a simpleton. Personally I do abominate bobbed hair and cigarettes, but I am not afraid of them. What I am afraid of is the disease, or the revolt, of which they are the signals. It is the state of mind which goes along with them. It is the precious and irrecoverable things that disappear when these things appear."
"I don't quite follow you."
"I mean the sweetness and freshness of young girls—their bloom. Don't you care, don't you really care, even you—Oh, how shall I make you understand what I feel about the preciousness of the bloom on things, and on boys and girls who have been brought up happily and wisely in the right surroundings! Ever since I can remember I have had the strangest ecstatic sense about everything that has just come new into the world—dewy things, roses and morning glories early in the morning, little bits of babies, a pear tree all a soft mist of white blossoms, the slender little new moon in a green sky low in the west over treetops at nightfall, robin's eggs, just peeped at, in a lilac bush, the rosy-white tips of old grapevines, the silvery mist of plums before they are picked—anything, everything lovely before dust or heat has touched it and before anyone, anyone, has pawed it over. When I was a young girl my heart fairly ached with tenderness for this quality in things—and with a passionate desire to preserve it. When one grows older, the desire doesn't die out; it becomes only intenser, sharper, with years, till it goes through one like pain. And as I was walking over here this morning, I kept thinking of all these things that have it—have the bloom; and of my little Dorothy—who had it, till her own father brushed it off."
Cornelia uttered this speech swiftly and with a kind of soft, eager, glowing sincerity which terribly disquieted my judgment. But I somehow felt that I had slipped into the position of advocate for the rest of Cornelia's family, which stood at the moment in dire need of advocacy. I smothered my instinctive emotional response, and exclaimed:
"Nonsense! What you value in Dorothy can't be brushed off. Bloom is only the transient breath of qualities that extend in her from rind to core, like the red in a blood orange. You are reveling in a mood, or you yourself would recognize that bloom—intactness—is preserved only by unsuccessful, undiscovered, sterile things. If it remains, it becomes a badge of uselessness. It is meant only for a brief seasonal show, which we may enjoy while it lasts; but it is silly to grieve over it. Other beauties follow—the full moon, and birds that break the lovely blue shells to bits and sing. Dorothy is breaking through her shell. That is all."
Cornelia sighed: "If it only were! But you don't know anything about the revolution that takes place in a girl's mind, and in her character, the moment she puts on the badge of those who have ceased to care for 'intactness!'"
"I'm not sure that I do."
"Well, the next time that you see three girls with bobbed hair and knickers—abominable word!—and with cigarettes in their mouths, edge up to them and overhear if you can what they are talking about: some unmentionable novel, some unprintable verse, some unspeakable ideas of some outrageous 'reformer,' something revolting that is sanctioned in Europe but, alas, has not yet been sanctioned here, some silly 'martyr' who has got into jail for some offence against decency, some crazy girl who has ruined herself as completely as the heroine of the latest novel. Perhaps you will hear them discussing what I overheard a group of our modern maidens debating not long ago—whether if a man and a woman registered at a hotel as husband and wife, the laws of this state would not recognize them as such."
"These are 'strong' topics," I said. "I don't think they are the only topics that girls with bobbed hair discuss, though they doubtless are discussed by girls with bobbed hair—and also by some girls whose hair reaches to their knees. But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia, is that life is full of strong topics. We can't get away from them or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of evils which every one knows exist. What I should try to ascertain, if I edged up to a group of 'modern' girls in conclave on these themes, is the point of view from which they were speaking—the amount of common sense which they were bringing to bear upon the vices and follies of their contemporaries."
Cornelia likes the ad hominem form of argument. "If you had a daughter of seventeen," she said, "should you enjoy seeing her blow the smoke through her lips and hearing her wisely consider the legal consequences of registering at a hotel under the names of 'John Doe and Wife'?"
"If I had a daughter," I replied cautiously, "I have a sentimental notion that I should like to have one who at the age of seventeen would feel the æsthetic impropriety of smoking, and who at any rate would not feel her nerves on edge without tobacco. But suppose Heaven visited the sins of the father upon the child by giving me a—well, a 'modern' daughter. If my daughter, after emitting the smoke, ejaculated the word 'Geese!' with a good accent, and a clear cool sound of conviction, and a kind of contemptuous remoteness from Greenwich Village problems, why I think I should feel mightily reassured. I should be positively glad to have heard her express her mind on this strong topic. And if tobacco helped her to express her mind, as it helps me to express mine, I might even feel mildly grateful to the tobacco."
"You know you would not," said Cornelia.
"Perhaps you are right. But at any rate, I can conceive of no person more properly subject for satire than a man with the fifth cigar of the morning in his mouth taking up the battle axe to make war against the first cigarette of his wife or daughter."
"You are merely talking for argument. I hate you when you do that. You get so far away from me that I can't talk with you."
"No," I insisted, "I am not talking for argument. I am pleading in behalf of your sex, for equality of access to the good things of life, whatever we may finally decide are the good things. I am pleading for a little moral justice toward your sex, and for the necessity, if there is to be justice, of a little discrimination. You don't seem to discriminate at all among your 'modern' girls. It simply isn't true that they are all discussing suppressed novels and illicit love affairs. Many of them are far more interested in horseback riding, duck-shooting, hockey, golf, or hiking to Yellowstone Park. I am not sure what our girls are going to get out of their political activities; but I know what they are going to get out of their athletic activities. I am an uncompromising and enthusiastic adherent of athletic life for women—not Country Club women alone, but all women."
"I approve of women exercising," assented Cornelia, "if it can be done in a nice way. I don't care for Marathon runners and champion swimmers and that vulgar display of limbs in the newspapers."
"Cornelia," I said, "you use the word 'nice' too much; you overwork it. Your son told me the other day that, whenever he mentions a new girl acquaintance in your presence, you have only one question about her: 'Is she nice?' 'It gets on my nerves,' he says, 'to hear that everlasting: Is she nice?—Is she nice?—Is she nice?—till I don't care whether she is nice or not; and I feel like saying, No, she is horrid; but she sings like an angel, and she dances like a wave, and she makes a sparkling quip, and she has brains of her own, and she is attractive, and she is reasonable, and she is a good sport, and she doesn't squall when we get caught in the rain. I don't go around asking girls whether they are nice. How should I know? Mother means well and is perfectly fine herself, and all that. But somehow, you know, it strikes me as kind of nasty for a fellow to be always thinking whether a girl is nice.' And there, my dear Cornelia, you get a bit of the spirit of the younger generation, which is, I think, essentially sounder and healthier than the perpetual incensing of 'purity' by some earlier generations."
"In what way is it sounder and healthier?"
"Why, I mean that it isn't the presence of sexual characteristics and impulses in an adolescent or in an adult that renders him or her 'not nice.' That is a part of nature and of humanity. What is not nice is perpetual preoccupation with these impulses. And perpetual preoccupation with them results from isolation with them, and exclusion from anything else of equal or superior interest. I am convinced that many of your 'modern' girls are discovering that fact for themselves. And it is because they dread the bondage and guess the degradation of confinement to a single instinct—it is because of this that they are groping so eagerly for other interests. For many of them, bobbed hair and cigarettes are signs that they are filling and freeing their minds with advertising, real estate, journalism, medicine, law, field geology, geographical exploration, and political organization."