The Daughters of Danaus

by Mona Caird

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, 19th Century, Victorian, Scotland, Historical Fiction, Female Authors

421 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 1894

About the author

Mona Caird (née Mona Alison, also called Alice Mona Henryson Caird) (c. 1854 - 1932) was a Scottish novelist and essayist whose feminist views sparked controversy in the late 19th century.

Writings of Mona Caird
* Whom Nature Leadeth (1883) novel
* One That Wins (1887) novel
* Marriage (1888) essay
* The Wing Of Azrael (1889) novel
* The Emancipation of the Family (1890) essay
* A Romance Of The Moors (1891) stories
* The Yellow Drawing-Room (1892) story
* A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women (1892) essay
* The Daughters Of Danaus (1894) novel
* The Sanctuary Of Mercy 1895) essay
* A Sentimental View Of Vivisection (1895) essay
* Beyond the Pale: An Appeal on Behalf of the Victims of Vivisection (1897) extended essay
* The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (1897) essays
* The Pathway Of The Gods (1898) novel
* The Ethics of Vivisection (1900) essay
* The Logicians: An episode in dialogue (1902) play
* Romantic Cities Of Provence (1906) travel
* Militant Tactics and Woman's Suffrage (1908) essay
* The Stones Of Sacrifice (1915) essay
* The Great Wave (1931) novel

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daughters of Danaus is a good but not a great novel. For one thing, it’s melodramatic and predictable. The villains (Hubert & Henriette Temperley and Professor Theobald) are too villainous to be entirely believable, and the hero (Professor Fortescue, Hadria’s mentor) too saintly. Caird is capable, however, of creating complex characters as evidenced by Valeria Du Prel, a woman who lives the liberated life Hadria yearns for but desires the comforts of life she observes in more traditional women. The ultimate evidence is in the novel’s protagonist, Hadria, who – when we first meet her – is a young woman who dreams of becoming a musician and composer, and whose family is reasonably liberal. Unfortunately, that liberality only goes so far. It can tolerate Algitha, the older sister, leaving for the city and not marrying but two such pariahs is too many, and Hadria finds herself under enormous pressure to marry Hubert Temperley, who mouths progressive ideas but whose attitude – and that of his sister, who’s the real manipulator of the two – is thoroughly traditional.

The novel falls into three parts. The first introduces Hadria, her family and friends, and the invidious social milieu that promises to condemn her to a stultified, wasted life. The second part opens several years later. Hadria has married Hubert and has had a child. She evinces little affection for her son but she takes Martha, the illegitimate baby daughter of a dead woman, under her wing (scandalizing the locals, whose Christian charity has limits). Hadria and the child get a chance to escape these circumstances and they flee to France, where Hadria impresses the musical world with her talent and comes under the instruction of a famous composer.

Her idyll doesn’t last. Hadria’s mother falls ill, and her doctors strongly suggest that it’s because of Hadria’s actions. With all the doctors insisting that Hadria come back to England lest her mother die, she feels compelled to return, which opens the third part of the novel.

Caird piles on the tribulations now, the worst being the revelation that Professor Theobald is the father of Martha and he maliciously takes her from Hadria. For all the melodrama and the soap operatic quality of the story, the climactic scene where Hadria realizes that she’s lost her Muse and her life has been wasted is still gut wrenching. It’s Caird at her best, and I quote it here in full:

Today, for the first time, the final ordeal had to be gone through. And her imagination had never conceived its horror. She was to be taken at her word. The neglected gift was beginning to show signs of decay and enfeeblement. It had given fair warning for many a year, by the persistent appeal that it made, the persistent pain that it caused; but the famine had told upon it at last. It was dying. As this fact insinuated itself into the consciousness, in the teeth of a wild effort to deny it, despair flamed up, fierce and violent. She regretted that she had not thrown up everything long ago, rather than endure this lingering death; she cursed her hesitation, she cursed her fate, her training, her circumstances, she cursed herself. Whatever there was to curse, she cursed. What hideous nonsense to imagine herself ready to face this last insult of fate! She was like a martyr, who invites the stake and the faggot, and knows what he has undertaken only when the flames begin to curl about his feet. She had offered up her power, her imperious creative instance, to the Lares and Penates; those greedy little godlets whom there was no appeasing while an inch of one remained that they could tear to pieces. She clenched her hands, in agony. The whole being recoiled now, at the eleventh hour, as a fierce wild creature that one tries to buy alive. She looked back along the line of the past and saw, with too clear eyes, the whole insidious process, so stealthy that she had hardly detected it, at the time. She remembered those afternoons at the Priory, when the restless, ill-trained power would assert itself, free for the moment, from the fetters and the dismemberment that awaited it in ordinary life. But like a creature accustomed to the yoke, she had found it increasingly difficult to use the moments of opportunity when they came. The force of daily usage, the necessary bending of thoughts in certain habitual directions, had assisted the crippling process, and though the power still lay there, stiffer than of yore, yet the preliminary movements and readjustments used up time and strength, and then gradually, with the perpetual repetition of adverse habits, the whole process became slower, harder, crueler.

“Good heavens! are all doors going to be shut against me?”

It was more than she could bear! And yet it must be borne – unless – no, there was no “unless.” It was of no use to coquet with thoughts of suicide. She had thought all that out long ago, and had sought, at more than one crisis of desperate misery, for refuge from the horror and the insults of life. But there were always others to be considered. She could not strike them so terrible a blow. Retreat was ruthlessly cut off. Nothing remained but the endurance of a conscious slow decay; nothing but increasing loss and feebleness, as the surly years went by. They were going, going, these years of life, slipping away with their spoils. Youth was departing, everything was vanishing; her very self, bit by bit, slowly but surely, till the House of Life would grow narrow and shrunken to the sight, the roof descend. The gruesome old story of the imprisoned prince flashed into her mind; the wretched captive, young and life-loving, who used to wake up, each morning, to find that of the original seven windows of his dungeon, one had disappeared, while the walls had advanced a foot, and tomorrow yet another foot, till at length the last window had closed up, and the walls shrank together and crushed him to death.

“I can’t, I can’t endure it!”

Hadria had leaned forward against the keyboard, which gave forth a loud crash of discordant notes, strangely expressive of the fall and failure of her spirit. (pp. 396-7)

If Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen are the A students in the English class, Caird would be the B student. She writes well enough, with the occasional flash of brilliance. Well enough that I’m definitely interested in reading more of her work. So a guarded recommendation. If you like 19th century feminist authors (or feminist works in general), you may get some enjoyment out of reading The Daughters of Danaus. Even if you’re not looking for a new feminist author, I still think a reader can profit from this book.

[Leonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of Hadria, who has a genius for composing but thanks to domestic obligations, emotional manipulation and social norms is forced to suffocate her gift. The book starts with Hadria and her siblings holding a spirited debate over the power of an individual over circumstance: does the individual mould their circumstances, as Emerson claims, or might even a great individual be defeated by circumstance? Hadria’s part is to argue that these circumstances represent the lowest common denominator and therefore it is just the greatest individuals who are liable to fall foul of them. She is not, as yet, fully convinced of her own argument, but it’s the thesis of the novel. I do have such affection for these earnest Victorian novels which attack the “how to live?” questions as if they might thrash out the answers right here and now, undeterred by not being deathless geniuses. Caird takes very seriously the idea that life is a pitched battle between women and the patriarchy and the urgency of this seriousness helps compensate for some inevitable dullness in a novel where characters do little but explain their opinions to each other. Motherhood is the focus of Caird’s polemic. Hadria feels that motherhood as it exists in the current state of society and in history humiliatingly reduces women to animals, that it is not possible for women to meaningfully consent to motherhood under these circumstances and that they cannot be held responsible for the children produced.

Hadria looking out of the window: “Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood—Mother earth submissive to the dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her body and her soul abandoned supine to his caprice. The sight had an exasperating effect upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. It was, perhaps, the same in kind as the far stronger sensation of disgust that she felt when she first saw Lady Engleton with her new-born child, full of pride and exultation. It was as much as she could do to shake hands with the happy mother.”

“Throughout history, she reflected, children had been the unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. Who could stand against them? They had been able to force the most rebellious to their knees. An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so trumpeted and exalted! Women might harbour dreams and plan insurrections; but their children—little ambassadors of the established and expected—were argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics. Their helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt than regiments of armed soldiers.”

This is all very uncompromising but I felt Caird wimps out in excluding Hadria’s two children and her relationship with them from the narrative. When they are brought up, Hadria says “They represent to me the insult of society—my own private and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through them that I am to be subdued and humbled. Just once in a way, however, the thing does not quite ‘come off.’” and

“It gives me a keen, fierce pleasure to know that for all their training and constraining and incitement and starvation, I have not developed masses of treacly instinct in which mind and will and every human faculty struggle, in vain, to move leg or wing, like some poor fly doomed to a sweet and sticky death. At least the powers of the world shall not prevail with me by that old device. Mind and will and every human faculty may die, but they shall not drown, in the usual applauded fashion, in seas of tepid, bubbling, up-swelling instinct. I will dare anything rather than endure that. They must take the trouble to provide instruments of death from without; they must lay siege and starve me; they must attack in soldierly fashion; I will not save them the exertion by developing the means of destruction from within. There I stand at bay. They shall knock down the citadel of my mind and will, stone by stone.”

However, we hear nothing else on how she feels about living with them and caring for them, and as the novel is about how hard it is to get away from domestic claims this seems like a lacuna, whether Caird didn’t dare go so far in making Hadria unsympathetic as to show her in action not loving her children, or just didn’t want to have to deal with them. One of the parts of the novel I enjoyed most was Hadria’s setting out to live in France for a short time, leaving her home to pursue music. Her music is too new and difficult to win popularity, however, and she is getting very worried about money by the time her attempt to fulfil her potential is permanently cut short by her mother’s illness. Her mother will die if Hadria upsets her by pursuing her own happiness, and this enormity is beyond Hadria. The novel ends with Hadria grieving for the loss of her talent and hoping to find, somehow, some way to be useful. This question of what to do after the end of all your hopes is one you see more often in older books, I think. The novel doesn’t have as much “geniuses versus the plebs” lofty obnoxiousness as it might have done, since it’s keen for the plebs to stop wasting their potential, but it’s somewhat inherent in the premise.

[Van · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1894 in the age of the “New Woman,” The Daughters of Danaus by Mona Caird is a novel that protests marriage as an oppressive institution. Its message is surprising radical for its time, and even today, the number of women who openly critique the institution of marriage and the societal pressure to marry remains relatively low. The need to find a partner or to be coupled somehow continues to be an overwhelming pressure for women, even amongst many feminists whom I know in 2018. To this day, many people panic at the thought of living alone; many still equate independence with a kind of incompleteness. Reading this novel was therefore quite refreshing, because the protagonist doesn’t ever co-opt into the idea that marriage or motherhood is necessary or fulfilling, even when she takes on those roles. Caird’s novel takes you through the life of Hadria Fullerton, a spirited young woman who fully believes in female independence, but somehow gets entangled in a life of domesticity. The story narrates her continual struggle to defy social expectations about wives and mothers as Hadria attempts to carve out a space for herself as an individual and an artist.

Through Hadria, the novel envisions the fate of womankind as a generational cycle of oppression; young girls are led to believe that life is incomplete without husband or children, and later as grown women, they become the enforcers of their own oppression as they pass this ideology onto their children. Women who don’t align with these social expectations are cast as eccentric misfits, and that is what happens to Hadria. Neither her husband nor her own two sons can emotionally or mentally fulfil her, and the burden of domestic life gradually stifles all her creativity and imagination. The novel details her resistance to conformity through the years, and it is indeed depicted as a long, drawn-out struggle—a fight to not lose her conviction and to preserve the spirit of independence, despite the mechanical grinding of Time and Fate, which Hadria often imagines to be dragging women to an inert and sad ending.

The novel documents important stages of Hadria’s life in this feminist struggle. The first third of the novel witnesses Hadria’s independent and intelligent mind succumbing to marriage. Falling in love and getting married is so easy it almost feels like a trap, but that initial happiness just as easily wears off as the relationship increasingly becomes a labor. One’s husband might be a good person, but this goodness and stability doesn’t guarantee enduring contentment. Hadria, finding herself unbearably stifled, then flees from home with an orphan girl whom she has taken an interest in. She moves to France to begin life as an aspiring musician. Her artistry begins to develop, but money quickly runs out, and Hadria experiences the all-too-true experience of modern work as an anxiety-producing machine. The demands of money and career, always overreaching and always seeming to strangle one’s private time, produce a nervousness, anxiety, and despair in the experience of modern work life. I couldn’t help but think of Virginia Woolf, and the claim that for women to become fully-fledged artists, monetary resources are an absolute necessity. Rather chillingly, it also reminds me of Thoreau’s quote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Quiet desperation suitably describes Hadria’s experiences as a woman upon whom society heaps its never-ending expectations and critiques.

In the final stage, Hadria is forced to return to both home and husband after her mother falls ill. Husband and children are not the only agents that exert oppressive pressure; parents and their expectations can likewise maintain an iron grip over an individual that lasts a lifetime. Too often, Caird notes, the angers and frustrations from mothers, often stemming from their own unfulfilled dreams, double down on the lives of their own children; gendered oppression is often inherited and replicated in this way. Mothers expect their daughters to become future mothers in what is a cycle of unending, almost mechanical reproduction. The title of the novel alludes to the Greek myth about the daughters of Danaus, who killed their husbands at night and, as a result, were punished for eternity by having to carry water to a perforated container that always leaks said water—in other words, futility for eternity is woman’s fate.

Clamped down by the wishes of her mother, Hadria grows increasingly restless as a domesticated figure and it is this restlessness that leads to a flirtation with Professor Theobald. Caird here takes an innovative approach to narrative conventions. Too often, 19th century novels wrote the unhappiness of women through their love affairs, as if turning from one man (the husband) to another one (the lover) will somehow solve their life problems. Hadria recognizes this faulty logic and shuts down the flirtation before it becomes a disaster. It isn’t that she is afraid of having an extra-marital relationship; she boldly isn’t and says as much—that she has a right to her own feelings. But Hadria realizes that dallying in an affair will still not give her the feminist liberation she wants; the need for male affection is not the root of her problems and her transient interest in Professor Theobald was but a temporary distraction. The freedom to think, create, work, and live independently is what she truly desires. Hadria quickly turns Theobald away, but the stagnancy of domesticity remains looming.

The novel ends quite realistically: with Hadria still trapped in domestic life, but also still surviving it. Hadria finds life to be cruel and crushing, but the hope to continue onwards is best conveyed and championed by her friend Professor Fortescue, whose progressive and sympathetic qualities help to buoy Hadria through the many stages of her life. If Hadria represents the bleak realities women experience that can all too-often descend into cynicism and despair, then Professor Fortescue offers a beacon of hope. He is something of a “New Man”—progressive about women’s rights and even championing vegetarianism and animal rights, but at the same time, always sympathetic to and aware of the pain of others. Even when he is deeply hurt by his own wife, he remains forgiving and hopeful about the relations between the sexes—that it can and should be equal. At the end, he reminds Hadria to continue fighting for her beliefs and for the rights of women, to not yield to complacency or despair, and to remember that having sympathy for others is a good purpose to have in life. I feel as if everyone needs a Professor Fortescue around; he offers such a viable way of dealing with oppression and adversity, one that ultimately doesn’t drain a person of their spirit and end in crushing despair.

Another character of interest is Hadria’s other lifelong friend Valeria, the older novelist who has chosen an unmarried life. She brings up fascinating issues about the relationship between work and independence vs. marriage and family. If a woman chooses to be independent and to dedicate her life to her work, does she inevitably lead a lonelier life? Can women really have both? Or is it the case that, as Hadria asserts, marriage and children do somehow limit creative and imaginative possibilities? I’m not sure the novel ever answers these questions, but they are good questions to raise.

In terms of style, the novel can drag on sometimes with the dialogues between the characters, which often sound like mini-philosophical debates rather than actual conversations. These dialogues can be a bit overbearing and over-dramatic at times, to the disadvantage of a stronger plot line with more action and creative flair. Overall, however, the novel is quite radical and realistic in engaging with women’s issues on marriage and independence.

(This review was originally published from my blog post)
https://thispeaceofpaper.wordpress.co...

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hadria Fullerton is a willful young woman determined to challenge the expectations of 19th century society, where women were bred merely to become wives, forced to surrender their freedom and stifle the growth of any talents they may possess, in Hadria's case a talent for music.

Despite her radical views, she surprisingly marries Hubert Temperley, a man who shares her love of music but otherwise is in every way conventional, a 'starched specimen' as one of Hadria's brothers describes him.

Hadria refers to marriage as 'the blackmail that society levies on a woman: surrender of body and of soul'. At best for women it is merely a duty, at worst a tyranny. Either way it is little more than 'an institutionalised indignity'.

The author, Mona Caird, wrote a controversial essay on this point which I haven't read, but her views on the subject are exhaustingly expressed here. As such, this novel or ideas (or more accurately, of a single idea) has a tendency towards highly discursive dialogue, which becomes overly rhetorical and stiltedly poetic at times, though generally the writing is good, theme a brave and important one for the time.

But Caird's characters fail to give life to her theme. Hadria's husband does nothing wrong beyond the act of marrying her, which she consented to without compulsion. Because of this, her desertion of him and their two children, and the arguments she uses to defend her actions to her sister in law in chapter XXXVII, seem a little spiteful.

All the characters, Hadria included, are essentially little more than props or mouthpieces playing a role, they lack depth and motion. Nobody really does anything but talk, almost the entire novel is made up of one conversation after another.

In a novel of conversations, I can't recall a single conversation she has with her husband after they marry, nor a scene with her children, though an adopted daughter brings out the mother in her. Hadria's rebellious sentiments are admirable and ahead of their time, but the author's function for her robs her of all sympathy, for a contemporary reader anyway.

It's an important book though, I feel sure it must be considered an early feminist classic.