The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
And these Shakespearian women, though all radiations from one great
ideal of womanhood, are at the same time intensely individualized. Each
has a separate soul, and the processes of intellect as well as emotion
are different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with the faculty,
and is steeped in the atmosphere, of imagination; but who could mistake
the imagination of Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen?--the
loitering, lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating whatever
it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency, the flash and the
bolt, of the other? Imogen is perhaps the most completely expressed of
Shakespeare's women; for in her every faculty and affection is fused
with imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is combined with
vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind darts in an instant to the
ultimate of everything. After she has parted with her husband, she does
not merely say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged, and
in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up, she goes up; she would
have charged him, she says,
"At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
T'encounter me with orisons, for then
_I am in heaven for him_."
When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possible object of his
sensual whim is at once consumed in the fire that leaps from her
impassioned lips,--
"Some jay of Italy,
Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him."
Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive action of
Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, "smothers her with
painting." Now Imogen's wrath first reduces the light woman to the most
contemptible of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and
then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, annihilates her
very being with the swift thought that the paint on her cheeks is her
mother,--that she is nothing but the mere creation of painting, a
phantom born of a color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to
show that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women are as
individual as their dispositions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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