| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: GWENDOLEN. Perhaps this might be a favourable opportunity for my
mentioning who I am. My father is Lord Bracknell. You have never
heard of papa, I suppose?
CECILY. I don't think so.
GWENDOLEN. Outside the family circle, papa, I am glad to say, is
entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home
seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly
once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes
painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It
makes men so very attractive. Cecily, mamma, whose views on
education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: of the ancient, crude, physical labours of their sex, and without depending
on the slavery of, or any vast increase in the labour of, other classes of
females; but this condition has already been reached, or is tending to be
reached, by that large mass of women in civilised societies, who form the
intermediate class between poor and rich. During the next fifty years, so
rapid will undoubtedly be the spread of the material conditions of
civilisation, both in the societies at present civilised and in the
societies at present unpermeated by our material civilisation, that the
ancient forms of female, domestic, physical labour of even the women of the
poorest classes will be little required, their place being taken, not by
other females, but by always increasingly perfected labour-saving
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: I remember how long Terry balked at the evident unanimity
of these women--the most conspicuous feature of their whole
culture. "It's impossible!" he would insist. "Women cannot
cooperate--it's against nature."
When we urged the obvious facts he would say: "Fiddlesticks!"
or "Hang your facts--I tell you it can't be done!" And we never
succeeded in shutting him up till Jeff dragged in the hymenoptera.
"`Go to the ant, thou sluggard'--and learn something," he
said triumphantly. "Don't they cooperate pretty well? You can't
beat it. This place is just like an enormous anthill--you know an
anthill is nothing but a nursery. And how about bees? Don't they
Herland |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: As compound love to physic your cold breast.
'My parts had pow'r to charm a sacred nun,
Who, disciplin'd and dieted in grace,
Believ'd her eyes when they t oassail begun,
All vows and consecrations giving place.
O most potential love! vow, bond, nor space,
In thee hath neither sting, knot, nor confine,
For thou art all, and all things else are thine.
'When thou impressest, what are precepts worth
Of stale example? When thou wilt inflame,
How coldly those impediments stand forth,
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