The Keepers of the People

What makes the mutes more than local colour is that they are the book's argument in a single image, and the only element of it that Jepson never permits anyone to defend successfully. Prince Ralph's case — "they have never spoken; therefore they have lost nothing … At least, they are happy" — is put twice and is meant to be the answer, and then the novel spends a chapter demolishing it, because Vashti, the old Prince's best-beloved daughter and the most sympathetic person in the palace, falls in love and cannot say so, and the scene in which she tries (II.xv) is the most painful in the book. Government here requires that most people be unable to speak. The novel states the requirement, defends it, and then shows what it costs one woman, and does not reconcile the two.

HELPER

The word Prince Ralph uses for what he wants from a wife, and the hinge of the book's treatment of women. He produces it first in England, at the end of a conversation in which he has said that women are "a refreshment after work": "I have dreamed — dreamed — of a helper" (I.v). Ruth, who is the only person present with an ear for the difference, catches it at once — "Ah, a helper — that is a finer part … To be the helper of one doing great work. I would not ask for more."

A helper is not a consort, not a queen and not a partner; the position carries no share of the sceptre and is stated as a condition of marriage in advance, in terms, twice. Agnes Freshington accepts the terms in a garden in Sussex without hearing them, because she is looking at a crown, and the rest of her life is the consequence. Althea, who was never offered anything and never asked, becomes the thing Agnes wanted to be, by doing the work. Ruth arrives already equipped for it. The novel's whole verdict on the Woman Movement is compressed into the difference between a woman who demands the position and two who fill it, and whether that verdict is fair is the largest question a reader has to settle.