BENIGNA MACHIAVELLI
Benigna Machiavelli (1914) was also first featured in The Forerunner, before being published in novel form at a much later date in the 1990’s. Unsurprisingly given its publication history it is one of Gilman’s lesser known and least popular works. The author’s magazine had a circulation of over 1,500 subscribers at its peak and included readers from Europe, Asia and Australia. Gilman financed the publication herself and viewed it as an important source for enlightening women about the limitations forced upon them and the possibilities of a life with much greater freedom and opportunity. This novel centres on the little Benigna, who notices in fiction that the villains are intelligent, inventive and active, while the heroes are dull, docile and passive. She determines to become a ‘good’ villain, and to use her wiles for helping people.
The young girl chooses to be creative and to conceal her real nature and take as much control over her life as possible. She is full of invention and yet exerts a vigorous discipline on herself. Benigna’s family includes a caring and sweet sister, and a loving, if passive and self-sacrificing mother, while her cruel father — an alcoholic, tyrannical and verbally abusive man — is eventually banished from her life. The novel follows her throughout her childhood until she reaches twenty-one and begins her romantic life. Benigna wishes to find a partner that will allow her to keep her identity and form a relationship based on equality. Gilman created a work that demonstrates how it was possible for young women to overcome obstacles and build a fulfilling life based on intelligence, agency and mutually supportive relationships.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER ONE
When I was a very young girl I heard a New Year’s Prayer given by our minister, the Rev. William V. Cutter, a liberal and a learned man, with a great command of language. He was sort of intoning, as people do in prayer. And, by the way, how do Christian ministers reconcile it with their consciences to pray so when the Bible distinctly forbids us to make long prayers in public?
But they do make them, and this one went droning along with “Thou knowest” this, and “Thou knowest” that, to fill in. It used to puzzle me a good deal, these “Thou knowests.” I was always taught it was vulgar to say “you know” all the time in conversation, and I couldn’t see why it was any better in King James’s English than Queen Victoria’s.
“Thou knowest, O Lord,” he went on in a sort of chant, “how many good resolutions we made a year ago today, and how we have broken them all; how many noble determinations we recorded, and how utterly we have failed to keep them.”
It was all I could do to sit still in the pew. I wanted to get up and tell that worthy man that there was one person at least in his church who had made good resolutions a year ago that day and kept them — every one. There weren’t but three. The year before there were only two. And the year before that only one. That’s the way to keep good resolutions — be economical with them.
People don’t seem to use any judgment about their resolutions. They aspire by jerks to all sorts of perfection, make a jump for it, miss it, and then complain of the futility of human effort. Just look at the personal revelation books, those people who wail to us from Paris and St. Petersburg and Butte, Montana, always fussing and lamenting and blaming Providence or Fate or something. The utmost of their effort seems to be to arouse the sympathy of a listening world in their melancholy failures. I should think they would be ashamed. Why don’t they do things? Look at Jean Valjean — when he was a convict, a poor, crushed, helpless prisoner — he set to work and learned wonderful gymnastic tricks — how to crawl up in the corner of a room by pushing against the wall, and things like that. There is always something you can do if you are any good.
I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairy stories have some point to them — the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains always went to work with their brains and accomplished something. To be sure they were “foiled” in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book — and they always tumbled.
It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn’t they ever read anything? Couldn’t they learn anything from what they read — ever? It appeared not.
And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it.
“A good villain. That’s what we need!” I said to myself. “Why don’t they write about them? Aren’t there any?”
I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one.
My sister Peggy was over a year older than I. She was a dear, good child, and people liked her. They liked her before they liked me, because she was so pretty. And I saw that because so many people liked Peggy they did nice things for her, so I made up my mind to be liked too. I couldn’t be as pretty, but then people like other things; it wasn’t hard to find out how to please them.
At first I got into trouble more than Peggy did, from being more enterprising, and I got her in trouble too, sometimes. But I never got into the same trouble twice. You can learn things even from being naughty. Indeed I found that you learn, by being naughty, the things you have to practise to be good. You learn what not to do — and how not to.
Mother used to make the loveliest gingersnaps, and keep them in a tight tin box in the sideboard, and we were forbidden to touch them, of course. But when I got them out Peggy would eat some, naturally. One day Mother caught us, very crumby and sticky-fingered, and smelling of ginger and molasses.
“What have my little girls been doing?” Mother asked.
We protested that we’d been doing nothing. Then Mother led us to a mirror and pointed out our crumby, sticky little mouths and hands. Peggy, being six, was wise enough to not attempt concealment.
“We’ve been... eating... gingersnaps,” she owned.
“That’s a good little girl, to confess it,” Mother said.
And then Peggy, encouraged, added, “And I wouldn’t have done it Mama, truly, but Ben took ’em out and gave me some.”
“Oh, but that’s naughty — to tell tales of little sister. Mama must punish you both.”
We were promptly put to bed to meditate on our sins, and I meditated to some purpose. “Crumbs” was one subject of my study. “When you eat anything that you shouldn’t, you should always be sure to wash your face and hands.”
“Confess” was another. I thought about this most earnestly.
“Mama,” I asked, when she was kissing us goodnight, “what is ‘confess’?”
And she took advantage of the occasion to explain the nature and virtue of confession at some length.
“Is it confession if I tell you! — Oh Mama! — I broke a kitty yesterday — stepped on it and broke it!” I cried, eager to partake of the new virtue. But Mother was suspicious, as we hadn’t any kitty at the time, and explained to me the evil nature of lying, as well as the value of confession and repentance.
Then I made a plan.
A few days after, Mother being in the kitchen, I again helped myself to
gingersnaps and even induced Peggy to partake, explaining to her that we could wash our faces and hands and nobody would ever know. This we did, and went unsuspected, but later on, I “confessed” with great freedom and fervor, but carefully said nothing at all about Peggy’s part of the misdemeanor. Under questioning she was made to admit her share in the offense, and this time I had great credit — both for confessing and for not telling tales; indeed Peggy got all the punishment for once, for Mother said she was older than I and more to blame.
She was over a year older, but that didn’t count for much even then, to my active mind. Mother put the gingersnaps on the top shelf of the closet, but I didn’t care; I had learned a lot from those sweetmeats.
The most awful thing in my world at that time was the behavior of Father, especially to Mother. Of course I didn’t know then what it was all about, but I could hear how he talked and scolded until Mother would break down and cry, and then he would be severe with us too.
One of the strongest impressions of all my very early childhood is that of being awoken out of my first sleep one night by one of these quarrels. I sat up, big-eyed and frightened, in my crib. It was like an awful dream. Father came home just drunk enough to be ugly — of course I didn’t know that then — and he was saying fierce, loud things to Mother, and Mother was crying.
“Answer me that, woman!” he was shouting at her when I woke up. “Answer me that! Are you dumb — or foolish — or both!”
She was crying so she couldn’t answer, and he grabbed her by the arm, and she cried out, and I was so scared I fell out of bed. I was too frightened to cry, and they were both frightened because I lay so still, and Mother ran and Father ran and they picked me up and felt my arms and collarbones, and put liniment on my forehead, and comforted me when I did cry at last, and I went to sleep holding a hand of each, and Father humming “The Land o’ the Leal.”
Afterward I thought and thought about it, marveling at the sudden stop to that quarrel. And next time I saw Father being disagreeable to Mother I created a diversion by tipping over a small worktable. But to my surprise Father spanked me and even Mother was cross, and I was sent to bed prematurely.
I could hear them still quarreling, while Mother picked up the spools and things. He told her she didn’t know how to bring up children. I remember that because I resented it so, even then.
So I meditated on the success of falling out of bed that time, and the failure of tipping over the worktable.
“It isn’t the noise,” I said to myself. “It was being scared. They thought I was hurt — dead maybe! That’s it!” and the next time they had a real quarrel I fell down stairs — just as bumpy as I could and crying awfully. That worked all right. They ran and picked me up and got the liniment; but Father was still cross. He went away and slammed the door pretty soon, and I think Mother must have had her suspicions, for I didn’t hear any more real quarrels for some years. If any seemed impending, Peggy and I were sent off in charge of Alison MacNab, and all doors were shut. Alison would tell us stories until bedtime, always about Scotland.
You see, my grandfather was Scotch; Andrew Angus MacAvelly was his name, and Father was named after him. Mother was a Quaker from Pennsylvania, Benigna Chesterton, and I was named after her. But Grandpa MacAvelly’s wife was an Italian woman — this is the most important part of it — a splendid, big, handsome Italian woman, and a lineal descendant of the famous Machiavelli family.
That’s where I come in. I’m a Machiavelli, and proud of it. The Scotch name I have to wear outside, like a sort of raincoat, but my real name I always feel is Machiavelli, Benigna Machiavelli. I mean never to marry and change it.
Grandpa had a theory, Father told me, that his family, the MacAvellys, were the progenitors of the Italian Machiavellis, and he’d quote a lot of medieval history to prove it; he was a very learned man. But Grandma never would agree to it. You couldn’t shake Grandpa in an opinion, though; he was Scotcher than Scotch, and argumentative. You ought to have heard my father tell of the arguments they had and how obstinate Grandpa was! I used to think it took two to be as obstinate as all that, but I didn’t say so to Father.
You see, Grandpa was one of those long-nosed, long-upperlipped, long-foreheaded Scotch, learned, conceited, pragmatical and pigheaded to the last degree. I’ve seen his picture, and I know, because I’ve heard Father talk so much about him, when Peggy and I were little and Father was sometimes sober and good-natured.
Father thought the world of Scotland. To hear him talk you’d think it was the finest country on earth, and Edinburgh the finest city. He’d tell about Princess Street and the Castle until I could fairly see the green gulf with the hidden railroad, the steep “Auld Toon” and Arthur’s Seat and even Holy Rood.
He told us about Grandma, too, a tall, statuesque creature, dumbly rebellious, hating Scotland, always intriguing to get back to Italy — but Grandpa wouldn’t go. Finally she ran away. He didn’t say a word or stir a foot, didn’t mention it, just sat down and went on without her as if she’d never been there. Also he grew so cruelly disagreeable, Father said, that he ran away, too, to America, and when the old man died he left nothing but an unsalable little rocky place, too sterile for anything but a sheep run, too small for a hunting box. Old Hughie MacNab, Alison’s father, lived on it somehow, and sent over about five pounds a year. You should have heard Father boast of the income from his estate in Scotland!
All he really inherited was his mother’s good looks and a taste for scheming, and his father’s unlimited capacity for argument — and usquebaugh [whiskey]. He didn’t drink so much as to be an offense in public, but he drank a little all the time and was a continual offense in private.
I was about ten when I found out what was the matter with him. Yes, I was ten the June before, and this was in the winter sometime, because the cars were heated. I remember how hot the seat was under me, and my feet seemed too big for my rubbers. The cars were full; it was a rainy night, and I was squeezed up against Mother, and a man was squeezed up against me. He was pretty red in the face and was disputing incessantly, first with one passenger and then another.
“Mama,” I whispered, “is it polite to talk loud in the car?”
“Sh!” she said, looking frightened. “No, dear, it isn’t. But keep still — don’t notice him.”
I couldn’t help noticing, however, he made so much disturbance, and he smelled so, too. Presently he began to harangue a stern-looking woman with a short skirt and a man’s soft hat, and she promptly replied, “Better be quiet, my man, else we shall think you’re drunk.”
He was still for a minute, looking rather redder, and then said: “Why did you think I’m drunk, madam?”
“Because I can smell the whiskey on your breath,” she answered, quite confidentially. “And because you talk too much. Just keep still and the others may not notice it.”
He kept still, and so did I, but I was thinking hard. I knew the smell — I had often noticed it when I kissed Father — and I knew the color, and I knew the talk but I had never known what it came from before. Whiskey I had read about in Sunday School books, and drunkenness, and lovely little girls who had reformed their fathers, and a glorious ambition surged through me. I felt quite proud to have a Drunken Father like those heroes of fiction, and determined then and there to reform him. But on consulting the books I found that the literary variety of intoxicated parents either became violent and beat their families, in which case the angelic daughter took the blow and died like little Eva, or he lay breathing stertoriously on railroad tracks, and the angel daughter flagged the train with a flannel petticoat and again died gloriously — the agonized and repentant parent signing the pledge on the spot.
I could smell my father’s breath most any evening, and I watched eagerly for a chance to save Mother from his violence. But there wasn’t anything dramatic about Father’s drinking; it didn’t focus. All he did was talk and talk and talk, argue and dispute and wear Mother out.
Finally I tho
ught it looked bad enough to give me a chance. Mother was quite broken down and ready to cry; Father was getting closer and closer and talking louder and louder. They didn’t either of them know I was in the room. But I was sitting in the bay window, reading as long as it was light, and then thinking, and they didn’t see me at all when the lights were lit. I was behind the curtain.
So I mustered all my courage, and rushed forward. It usually said in the stories: “She threw herself between them.” I never quite mastered the mechanics of this throwing oneself, but I just ran between them and put my arms around Mother’s neck, and said, “Talk to me, Father, not to Mother!” Well, he did. He talked to me for what seemed hours and hours.
I cried enough for twenty, but it didn’t seem to help Mother a bit — she cried, too.
“You conceited little ass!” Father said. “You precocious little monster, with your brains all addled with preposterous story books! Why should I not talk to your mother, Miss Interference? Answer me that!”
It wasn’t any use to answer, or to explain. Father went right on. I don’t remember that he had ever really turned that caustic tongue of his and those interminable arguments on me before, and one thing I determined, as I stood scorching there, and that was that he never should again.
Mother told me afterward how wrong and foolish it was for me to criticize a parent, but she needn’t have. I had learned my lesson.
It took me several months to win back Father’s favor. He used to tease me cruelly about my “rescue work,” but I took it all as medicine, and, though the course was severe, it was useful; I made it useful. You see, I had read about that Spartan boy with the fox gnawing his vitals, and envied him his grit even while I disbelieved the story. Also the Spartan spear story — training the boys to use extra big ones, so that the real spear, to the man’s hand, should seem “as a feather.” And the savages, too, with their awful ordeals — the things they used to do to the boys when they were admitted among the men.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 85