Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 115, 5 August 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings

The Modern Girl as a Heroine

The trouble with the modern girl, as a heroine, is that she has not the same spacious chances that the earlier girl had. Not so many years ago almost any novel ended with wedding-bells, whereas now it begins with them, or, if there is a hurry, at a registry office. The girl is, therefore, not called upon to be a heroine until she is a married woman, or has experiences enough to be regarded as one. Sweet 17! It suggested a demure picture, like a rose awakening one

morning with the sun, and wondering whether it would open to it or wait until another morning. But Sweet seventeen is now a smart little lass, high-heeled, silk-stockinged, shortskirted, and, if not shingled, certainly bobbed. She is pretty sure of herself, untroubled by doubts about others, intelligent in a direct, practical way, altogether a most capable little person. Hpr qualities are clear and good, plain sense and no nonsense, but wonder does not burn in her, as it did in the old Aliss Sweet Seventeen. She knows what she wants and gets it, or takes it, and, ‘being thus satisfied, has no vague dreams for impossible things. The Victorian girl travelled hopefully, even if she did not arrive, while the new Georgian girl travels confidently and quite gracefully, and does arrive. No renascence of wonder for her —she does not need it! INFLUENCE OF THE CINEMA Now, the thing to notice here is that we have two very different sets of conditions, and that one makes for girl heroinism, and the other for woman heroinism. The modern girl is the companion of the modern young man, and oft£n a far better person. She .fills out his life that way, while to her he is a sort of esquire without sentiment Is it dancing? Then they are “partners” more interested in the subtle steps of the tango or the charleston than in each other. Is it motoring? Then she may have a car in which she takes him along, and ten to one she drives it. Life is compact and well arranged for Aliss Sweet Seventeen and Alaster Twenty-one. The coming of the cinema has had a good deal to do with the passing of the girl heroine whom Aliss Braddon and ever so many other writers of Old England delighted to honour. You could not, in a moving picture, have Phyllida in her baby hat philandering with the sun for long. A “movie” is a “movie,” and something has got to happen, or people who have paid good money for admission will know the reason why. There must be action when love’s young dream is put on the screen’, not merely poetic sentiment. A knockabout business is demanded, and, indeed, real life is a knock-about, and all that does not fit the young girl. She must have the grip of a wedding ring on her finger, and the knowledge which it brings is in her mind and heart. THE YOUNG MARRIED WOMAN What happens, then, is that we have the maiden no more, or very little, as a heroine in our novels, and the young married woman much. Of course, there are novelists who greet her as a fullblown woman, even if she has no ring, but they don’t play the game as she herself sees it, and so may be left out of count. She looks without her wedding ring upon a comely man, as the old ballad has it. and then a story begins to unfold. Obviously there is more then to write about in a woman’s life than when she is 17. Obviously, also, if truth to reality be the test of honest romance, there is a great deal to say for the Georgian novel, only again it pretty well leaves out the girl heroine. She was a rather helpless but charming figure of the yester-years, because, thank goodness, dependence and innocence were always the elements which attract, if, possibly, they fail to hold. Her successor is equally charming and not less “nice,” though old maids and other spiteful people sometimes say things. YVe need not, therefore, lament the change which has taken place, but gallantly salute it. “Once aboard the motor and the girl is mine,” goes the Georgian slogan, but one does wonder whether a \ery modern novelist, even Air. Alichael Arlen, might not make quite a hit if he were, once in a way, to bring back the blushing, confused, damask - eheeked maiden who cried bravely, yet pitifully, to the bold, bad man, “L"nhand me, sirrah, or I’ll scream.”