The French Lieutenant's Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

a warm bed on a winter's night. She imagined herself for
a truly sinful moment as someone wicked--a dancer, an actress. And
then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something very
curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in
profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And
she hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.
    For what had crossed her
mind--a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch
her eye in the mirror--was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of
dimly glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her
profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her;
it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require,
and which seemed to deny all that gentleness of gesture and
discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles.
She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her
mind.
    Thus she had evolved a
kind of private commandment-- those inaudible words were simply "I
must not"--whenever the physical female implications of her
body, sexual, menstrual, parturitional, tried to force an entry into
her consciousness. But though one may keep the wolves from one's
door, they still howl out there in the darkness. Ernestina wanted a
husband, wanted Charles to be that husband, wanted children; but the
payment she vaguely divined she would have to make for them seemed
excessive. She sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a
bestial version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing. Most women
of her period felt the same; so did most men; and it is no wonder
that duty has become such a key concept in our understanding of the
Victorian age--or for that matter, such a wet blanket in our own.*
[* The stanzas from
In Metnoriam I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter are very
relevant here. Surely the oddest of all the odd arguments in that
celebrated anthology of after-life anxiety is stated in this poem
(xxxv). To claim that love can only be satyr-shaped if there is no
immortality of the soul is clearly a panic flight from Freud. Heaven
for the Victorians was very largely heaven because the body was left
behind--along with the Id.]
    Having quelled the
wolves Ernestina went to her dressing table, unlocked a drawer and
there pulled out her diary, in black morocco with a gold clasp. From
another drawer she took a hidden key and unlocked the book. She
turned immediately to the back page. There she had written out, on
the day of her betrothal to Charles, the dates of all the months and
days that lay between it and her marriage. Neat lines were drawn
already through two months; some ninety numbers remained; and now
Ernestina took the ivory-topped pencil from the top of the diary and
struck through March 26th. It still had nine hours to run, but she
habitually allowed herself this little cheat. Then she turned to the
front of the book, or nearly to the front, because the book had been
a Christmas present. Some fifteen pages in, pages of close
handwriting, there came a blank, upon which she had pressed a sprig
of jasmine. She stared at it a moment, then bent to smell it. Her
loosened hair fell over the page, and she closed her eyes to see if
once again she could summon up the most delicious, the day she had
thought she would die of joy, had cried endlessly, the ineffable . ..
    But she heard Aunt
Tranter's feet on the stairs, hastily put the book away, and began to
comb her lithe brown hair.
 

    6
Ah Maud, you
milk-white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife.
-- Tennyson, Maud (1855)
    Mrs. Poulteney's
face, that afternoon when the vicar made his return and announcement,
expressed a notable ignorance. And with ladies of her kind, an
unsuccessful appeal to knowledge is more often than not a successful
appeal to disapproval. Her face was admirably suited to the latter
sentiment; it had eyes that were not Tennyson's "homes of silent
prayer" at all, and lower cheeks,