Talk:Invincible Minnie

Information about this edition
Edition:	New York, George H. Doran Co., 1920
Source:	https://archive.org/details/invincibleminnie00hold & Project Gutenberg
Contributor(s):	shameless stealer
Level of progress:
Notes:	Thanks to "Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team."
Proofreaders:	penitent proofreader

Reviews

• The Bookman, July 1920:

FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

By Constance Murray Greene

IF "Invincible Minnie" had been written by a man instead of a woman he would probably have been lynched before this. The creation of Minnie equals if it does not surpass anything that our literature offers in the way of womanly viciousness, and would be insupportable coming from a man. As it is, however, these terrible revelations regarding womanhood are very pleasing—a triumph of provocative and thirst-producing reading so far as further work by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whose first novel this is, is concerned. It is good to find women who are courageous enough to lay bare the fullest horror of their sex, and let no one take up the defense of these monsters whom they portray. As a modern essayist has said, "some of the wickedest women in the world have been mothers". Which being true, prevents even Minnie's maternity from touching the properly minded person. This book is not for sentimentalists.

If you admit that such women as Minnie exist, the question is immediately hurled at you, whether they have masculine counterparts; and the next thing is to ferret out the man who can put one into fiction. It will be difficult to discover whether there actually are such people as Minnie because their greatest strength would lie in their ability to delude those nearest them. And it is this also which makes Mrs. Holding's book such a firebrand. You may have had a Minnie in your home for years without knowing it; but having chanced upon this book, the world will be changed. Death would be preferable to discovering a Minnie in your midst.

For this woman revealed to us is that most terrible of all,—the cold, plodding, self-deceived devil:

Minnie had, one might say, no sex at all, no trace of passion—she had nothing but her instincts and her cool temperament to protect her.... Hers was a conscience which imperiously required satisfaction, but as she was always certain that all her aims were beyond reproach, her conscience never refused to sanction whatever means she employed in arriving at them. She was more than a Jesuit. She did not so much believe that bad means were Justified by a worthy end; she was simply convinced that no means used by her were, or could possibly be, bad.

As a foil for Minnie, slovenly, lacking in charm, intellect and honor, we have the sister Frankie, strong, eager, alluring, and it is in the completeness of this contrast and the preserving of Minnie's invincibility in the face of it, that Mrs. Holding has made her tour de force. Only a degree less arresting than her character building, however, is the author's method of telling the story. After a normal start—man riding up to the' house and confronting the girl—the only normal thing about the book perhaps, there follows a series of leaps and bounds backward and forward, a zigzag of results followed by causes. This makes it impossible for the most infinitesimal bit of boredom to attend the reader's progress and offers him a chance to decide for himself, when he has seen the result, whether the cause is worth following up.

With us there was no doubt after the second page that the book would prove utterly captivating, for there Mr. Peterson is described as having a "long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat's"; and reading on a matter of two or three pages, we encountered that "ridiculously coy old skeleton", the Defoe horse. It is inconceivable that a person capable of immortalizing horses and moustaches at a stroke could fail to do superlatively well with human beings.

• The New Republic, 12 May 1920

MOST of the more violent and obviously disgraceful troubles of this world are blamed on the residual cave-man. cave-man. Civilization is supposed to be the business of putting him in his place. Polite society frowns on his hairy instincts, his fighting, snarling, club-swinging, food-snatching maleness, and education tries to show him the cooperative method of self-preservation. In the tumultuous difficulty of this task, there has been no time to bother much about the cave-woman. She has been let sprawl all over the nursery. Her instincts, being less noisy, haven't been sufficiently disciplined. In fact, she has been encouraged to show them off, the way the picturesque badnesses of spoiled children are encouraged by silly parents. "True to her instincts," a phrase that should be synonymous with "uncivilized," is offered to her as a compliment—and she takes it.

Invincible Minnie is a truthful story about a cave-woman, or, as Minnie would prefer to describe herself, a womanly woman. Miss Holding's unique merit is in seeing that the two are one and the same. For this reason her book is going to be disliked by three large divisions of the human race; one by the men in whom there is enough left of the cave-man to like their women womanly; two, by the Minnies, who naturally won't like to see their source of power attacked, and, three, by the ultra-feminists who won't admit that there are any Minnies, or that if there are it's all the fault of man. To these perhaps Mrs. Holding's book will be most irritating, because it is impossible to doubt its honest objectivity. Minnie exists.

We meet her first at Brownsville Landing, a little town on the banks of the Hudson, "a rather short, full-bosomed young woman of perhaps twenty, with a dark freckled face and an expression very pleasant and friendly." She is living on her grandmother's shabby little farm with her sister Frances. They are Defoes, but unfortunately their Defoe father died without leaving them a penny. Frances had wanted to be a doctor, "such a queer thing for a girl," Minnie told her, and Frances is quietly bullied to stay on the farm. Still she takes a secretarial position in New York City, greatly to her sister's horror. Minnie's instincts are all for the cave, she doesn't intend to jeopardize her chances of a genteel marriage by wandering too far from the hearth. Besides she knows, as the Minnies do know things, that is, "instinctively," that her talents are not the sort that make for independence. She hits on the perfectly ladylike scheme of advertising for a boarder, for a "literary man," who might care to spend the summer on a farm. He comes, but as a matrimonial prospect he is a complete failure, though not even his drunkenness would have stopped Minnie from marrying him, if he hadn't already been married. She reluctantly gives up the farm as a basis of operations, and when Frances comes home on a visit from New York, Minnie swings the club of duty so hard over her sister's head that Frances is forced to stay with the grandmother and Minnie goes off to New York where she has unearthed a mouldy aunt whose "companion" she intends to be.

She carries out her intention, of course, and a little more. Frances, bright, honest, civilized, independent Frances has left a fiancé in New York, Lionel Naylor, a weak and charming young Englishman. She writes him why she can't come back, and Lionel naturally goes to look for Minnie. He finds her, poor lad, and Minnie at once and instinctively falls in love with him.

"She didn't deceive herself. She admitted that she intended to get Lionel away from Frankie by hook or crook. Of course, being Minnie, she felt that it would be for his good and for Frankie's good, and that she was doing it largely for their sakes." But Lionel, though a simple youth, knows that he loves Frances, and Minnie's motherly arguments of his poverty and Frances's youth fail to stop him from trying to go to Brownsville Landing. Unfortunately he has to borrow the money from Minnie, and she insists on bringing it to his room the night before he is going. What follows is nothing less than the rape of Lionel. "He was like the innocent young heroine in a drama; he had a dim perception of something evil, he felt that he ought not to be there alone with Minnie." He was right. Minnie's instincts won the night, and, of course, after that, Lionel has to marry her, in order to make an honest man of himself.

Mrs. Holding now shows Minnie in her glory. She is the sort of wife who peels her husband's apple at breakfast and is fierce about his rubbers. She forces milk-pudding on him "to make him fat"; she leads him out to live in the suburbs in a cottage with "sets" of light oak furniture. "Because she was always busy and always wearing an apron, he believed that she must accomplish an incredible amount of work. There was a great deal of dust about, the meals were always late and often burned, but that all went to prove what a lot there was to be done. She was so hurried, so anxious, always thinking about his comfort."

The inevitable child comes. Before its birth Minnie doesn't particularly want it, except as an extra noose on Lionel, but afterwards she blazes into one ravenous maternal instinct. "She believed that the fact of having this child constituted a claim upon all the world. That whatever she did for its sake was fully justified. Because she loved it, she was licensed to take what she could for it, by any and all means to secure advantages for it. A sort of divine license given only to mothers, so that they could do no wrong; an unlimited indulgence." She proceeds at once to make use of this indulgence. Poor Lionel, choked by her clinging arms, goes almost completely to the dogs. Minnie realizes that something must be done. She takes the child and goes back to Brownsville Landing were she poses as a widow and gets a place as housekeeper for Mr. Petersen, a big, calm, intelligent Swede, who used to be their grandmother's unpaid landlord. The grandmother is long dead, and Frances has left for parts unknown. Minnie feels quite safe. Mr. Petersen soon proposes marriage to her, and she accepts, trusting to what her instinct tells her that this is the only way she can secure the money she needs for her beloved Lionel and their child.

Lionel turns up intending to denounce her, but, crushed by her infallible righteousness, stays on in Mr, Petersen's household. He is there when Minnie's child by Mr. Petersen is born. Things are rather in a muddle. Minnie's faithful but irrational housekeeping have made a pigsty of the immaculate Swedish house, and a. despairing man of the calm Swede. Lionel wants to "rehabilitate" himself by going to the war, and Minnie threatens to kill herself if he does. Into this muddle Frances comes like a clean straight stroke of lightning, and in the thunderstorm that follows it looks as if Minnie's mischief might be undone. Lionel goes to enlist, Minnie leaves precipitately, and the two innocent children are left with Mr. Petersen and Frances who takes miraculous care of them. Mr. Petersen and Frances marry, but not, as a banal novelist would have made them, for love. Theirs is a friendly alliance for the sake of the children. And then Minnie comes back, led by her wolfish maternal instinct. She stabs her sister and former "husband" with her legal claim to the children and takes them away, after having extracted a rich cheque from the still susceptible Mr. Petersen. He and Frances never fall in love with each other; they lead a decent, weary life. Lionel dies of tuberculosis.

But Minnie goes on invincibly. With the money she continues to squeeze out of Petersen she starts a boardinghouse in New York. There Petersen finds her when he comes to see his son. He never comes again. Minnie has neglected her daughter so that she is near consumption, and her unlimited indulgence has made a fat lazy slug of the boy. And she sits on the wrecks of five lives, plump and contentedly respectable, secure in the knowledge that she has always acted "for the best," that is, according to her sanctified instincts.

Invincible Minnie seems to be Mrs. Holding's first book. It has various minor faults. The scourge of revision has not been ruthlessly enough applied, and the style is marred here and there by a loose carelessness. The method of telling large chunks of each character's life,—leaving one in suspended curiosity about the others, is a little annoying, but quite legitimate. What makes one indifferent to these defects is her marvellous ability to record and analyze Minnie. Minnie may not be the artistic equal of Becky Sharp, but she is far nearer our common experience. So intense is Mrs. Holding's concentration on this portrait that the others are a little blurred. Frances is not much more than a pleasant brightness. Mrs. Holding even gets pessimistic about her. In one of her few amateurish "asides" she exclaims, "Perhaps those others with hearts, with brains, with souls, are not true women, only the freaks of nature."

This is an appalling "perhaps," and one not worthy of a book so unhysterical. There is no need to moralize about Minnie. She is a true woman, a true cave-woman, and having met her all we can say is for God's sake let's hurry up and educate her into a human being. She mustn't be encouraged by having sentimentality poured over her vices, and neither must her existence be denied. That is where the man-hating feminist makes her mistake. Minnie is the very core of the "woman" problem. Miss Holding has done an immense service by isolating a complete specimen of a Minnie and taking us right to the end of her unharnessed instincts. The results are not often so clear, and the specimens are seldom so complete. The Minnies are often neat, often beautiful, often have a little actual intelligence mixed with their craftiness, and they are not easily avoided by the unsophisticated. But sooner or later, like the devil's hoof, they give themselves away. They demand chivalry not because they may be weak, but because they are women. They trade on their womanhood. Crimes, lies, indecencies, and "the horrible doctrine of expediency," they justify if they can only creep under the umbrella of their instincts, their "womanly" instincts.

Not all women are Minnies, any more than every man is a cave-man, but more men have progressed a civilized distance from the cave. It doesn't matter whose fault it is that women have not; it only matters to begin walking. The first step is realization, and Mrs. Holding's book is a good long step.

• The Nation 29 May 1920:

The Eternal Feminine

THE young, the romantic, and the hopelessly will declare Minnie, to be incredible, and accuse Mrs. Holding of having maligned her sex. Others, a good deal wiser and therefore far more cheerful, will rise up and call her blessed. For she has increased the wisdom of nations and added a chapter to the moral history of mankind. She has provided the defenseless with a vision and a weapon. Hereafter no sentimental or pseudo-scientific guides need offer their services to young men on the thorny road to marriage. Let the young men but read of Minnie. If they avoid her, little is left to fear.

Mrs. Holding writes coldly, warily, ruthlessly. She is beyond any passionate concern in the matter. She has moments of & cosmic tolerance for Minnie. But how Minnie must have made her suffer! It is only when we get to the other shore of suffering that we can see with eyes so penetrating and so passionless. She purposely and frankly taxes the credulity of the ignorant toward the end of her story. But she declares that whether Minnie, in some incarnation one has met, "is actually guilty of such exploits, she is certainly capable of them. Capable of everything!" And that is, indeed, the fundamental truth of the matter. For consider Minnie's equipment, her impenetrable armor, and aes triplex. She has "no idea of values or proportion," no instinct for "accuracy and method." She permits no facts to penetrate her consciousness which would wound her vanity; the things she has to believe in order to be herself she simply—believes! No deterring or persuasive voice from without ever reaches her, for though she hears, she never listens. Since she is convinced that she is always doing right, it follows—to her mind—that she is "an infallible judge of what is best for everyone on earth," as well as for herself, and that she is totally unacquainted with remorse or regret. And this conviction of infallibility gives her the terrific advantage that no mere man can ever comprehend her moral processes. To her husband, whom she trapped by guile, and to her children she is "blindly devoted, without the least discretion or scruple." Of the moral wounds she inflicts she is, by her very nature, unconscious. Hence she destroys them all. But she has always done "right"; in her shadier transactions she only exercises what she feels to be the "divine license of motherhood." She passes on to a self-righteous old age—leaving a trail of blood and tears behind her. Yes, they are invincible, these Minnies, because "they force us to believe that their blind and ruinous maternal passion—a perverted instinct—is a sacred and a mystic thing, and hold up to us their animal jealousy of one man as 'love.'" And because they always use the phraseology and appeal to the emotional contents of the traditional moral order, they put their victims to a grotesque confusion and extort from them a monstrous pity. Consider well and you can see them, as Mrs. Holding does in her brief but masterly twenty-fifth chapter, under a cosmic aspect—blind charioteers driving the steeds of Wilfulness and Sex.

The subsidiary characters are not inferior to Minnie in truth and vividness—neither the grandmother nor poor Frankie, neither Petersen nor, above all, Lionel Naylor. The episodic Miss Eppendorfer is done with the same resolute certainty of touch. Her cousin, on the other hand—evidently a reminiscence of 1917—is a conventional caricature, a soft and sticky splotch on the thrice-burned enamel and hammered steel of the book's surface. Mrs. Holding's narrative technique is no less her own than her vision of her people. She gives us the morally astonishing situation and then fills in its background in action and passion. Yet this inverted method never conveys an unpleasant sense of retardation. The book is firm and muscular, ripe and complete. No first novel of such intellectual or creative energy has appeared in this country for some time. If it precipitates a purely personal experience, it may remain Mrs. Holding's strongest work. If observation and the creative imagination contributed to it, the author's future work should be, quite soberly speaking, of first-rate importance.