Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Read Free Book Online

one of self-sacrifice.” If she toed the mark, her home would become “the sweetest, brightest, dearest spot of earth.” If she transgressed, she might end up like the selfish mother, en route to Europe, whose vessel was “wrecked amid the icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland,” or the lazy housewife who suffered the even more dire fate of having her disappointed husband “migrate to California.”
Father O’Reilly
! I would mentally chide the author, as I rocked my daughter.
You never had a wife! You never had children
! How dare you tell my great-grandmother how to lead her life? How dare you tell ME?
    Father O’Reilly was damnably sure of himself, or maybe it just seemed that way because, at the time, I was so unsure of myself. I mocked his Victorian priggery, but I was secretly afraid that he was right about motherhood—that, in fact, my id was about to be permanently squashed by my superego. I was working at home as a writer; for the first time, George was the principal breadwinner. “Men are born to be the providers in the home: they are formed by nature and still further fitted by education for every species of toil,” I read. “Theirs is the battle of life on sea and land. The home with its quiet, its obscurity, its sanctities, is for woman: she is made to grow up in the shade.” What if I got stuck in that shade and never managed to crawl back out?
    Of course Father O’Reilly called us “the weaker sex,” but I got the feeling he was just bluffing. His heroines nurtured their children with enough motherlove to suffocate a small army. They ministered to lepers, adopted disfigured orphans, and brought bread to poor families “during the most inclement winter’s weather.” His men were sad sacks by comparison, forever courting disaster either through their own weakness (intemperance, adultery, dimwitted investments) or through rotten luck (maimed hands, amputated legs, paralytic rheumatism). But the wives unfalteringly stood by their men, coaxing them out of their vicious habits and compensating for their infermities by working ever harder themselves. My favorite O’Reilly anecdote involved a particularly churlish husband:
Coming home one day at his dinner hour, and finding that the meal was not ready, he flew into a furious passion, and began to upset and break the furniture in the dining-room. His wife—a holy woman—endeavored to pacify him, and, while urging the servants to hurry forward their preparations, she argued sweetly with her husband on the unseemliness of such displays of anger, and begged him to read a book, while she would go to aid the cook. He flung the book away from him, and stalked back and forth in a rage, while the lady hastened to her kitchen.
    After a while, chastened by his wife’s example (and perhaps by the eventual arrival of dinner), the husband picked up the book and began to read. By an amazing stroke of luck, it happened to be
The Lives of the Saints
. The husband reformed his character on the spot and “added one more name to the long role of Christian heroes, who owed, under Providence, their greatness and heroism to the irresistible influence of a saintly woman.”
    I’ve got your number, Father O’Reilly
, I thought.
It’s the old pedestal trick. We’re better than men, so we don’t need to be equal to them
. Of course, a little pedestal deployment wouldn’t
entirely
spoil my day. Once, looking up from a passage on the ideal wife, I asked George, “Do you consider me a peerless flower of beauty and spotless purity which has been laid upon your bosom?” George responded with a neutral, peace-preserving, but not quite affirmative grunt.
    F ive months ago, after our second child was born, I picked up
The Mirror of True Womanhood
again. It seemed to go with nursing a baby. This time I felt far more confident—motherhood had, in fact, turned out to be a source of joy that had shanghaied neither my brain nor my id—and, perhaps as a result, Father