Free How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore Page A

nursing his water and frugal supper. Making no attempt to join the conversation, since the topic was not to his taste, he remained aloof throughout the meal. Gregarious and effusive as ever, Darwin assumed that Edgeworth’s gruff young friend was truly the misanthrope he had played in the drama. It was only when the diners got up to leave and the conversation turned to a more philosophical topic that Day suddenly sprang to life and launched into one of his monologues. Darwin was impressed by the knowledge and eloquence of the nineteen-year-old youth and extended an open invitation to visit him in Lichfield. A new recruit had been drawn into the orbit of the Lunar group.
    For now, Edgeworth, Day and Dick pressed on to Ireland. When the three weary travelers finally dismounted from the phaeton in front of Edgeworthstown House, the family’s mansion on the edge of the village of Edgeworthstown in County Longford, they created quite a spectacle—certainly in the eyes of Edgeworth’s reserved father and sophisticated sister. Having last seen Dick as a one-year-old, they discovered that he had turned into an unruly, spoiled little boy who answered to none but his father. Returning home after more than three years’ absence, Edgeworth was evidently as unconventional and rebellious as ever. And then therewas the pocked, shy, ungainly and disheveled youth whom Edgeworth brought with him. Of the three odd houseguests it was Day, of course, who would create the most upsets.
    Quite why Day came to the conclusion during the course of that summer that Margaret might slip smoothly into the role of his ideal wife is beyond comprehension. With her aristocratic manner, her busy social calendar and her taste for fine clothes and fine food, Margaret was not only the complete opposite of the humble country maiden he had been seeking, she was also utterly different from the meek and simple girl that Rousseau had conjured as a soulmate for Émile. Nonetheless, with Rousseau’s Émile as his trusty manual, Day came to believe that he could mold Margaret to suit her allotted role.
    Rousseau had recognized as he wrote Émile that the free-thinking young man he created would need a very special partner to share his life. In typically contradictory style, he warns his readers not to imagine “a model of perfection who cannot exist” and then he tantalizes them by doing just that. “It is not good for man to be alone,” he writes, in a direct reference to the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, then adds, “We have promised him a companion. She has to be given to him.” And with a playful nod to his fellow philosophes, he names his ideal woman Sophie, from the Greek word for wisdom.
    In the quest to find Sophie, Rousseau sends Émile into polite urban society, to spend a year amid the despised temptations of Paris, before he airily reveals “we have looked for her where I was quite sure she was not to be found.” Instead Émile must scour the countryside to track down Sophie. Tramping over hills and fields on foot, Émile finally finds the girl of his dreams living with her parents in a modest mountainside house in the heart of provincial France. “Let us give Émile his Sophie,” announces Rousseau. “Let us bring this sweet girl to life.” Four years younger than Émile, sixteen-year-old Sophie belongs to a well-born family living a simple but virtuous pastoral life. Bright but not overly intelligent, Sophie is sweet-natured, hardworking and chaste. Pleasing to look at but not exceptionally beautiful, Sophie dresses modestly, sings sweetly, cooks plainly and dances tolerably well. Émile, of course, falls in love with herimmediately. But before she can assume her destined role in life—as a household drudge in a country hovel devoted to her husband’s whims—Sophie obviously requires a customized education of her own.
    Rousseau has no hesitation in asserting that women are born equal to men. “In everything not connected