Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related by
McLean (I., 254-55): A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow
threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The other
females "evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting
the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down
their cheeks, and beating their breasts;" yet as soon as the rites
were ended, these women "were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had
returned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being "obliged by
custom" to mourn day and night.
"The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the
deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all
armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon
it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled
to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed
from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the
wretched creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was
thrust forward by her husband's relatives at the point of
their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture
until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself
almost scorched to death. Her relatives were present merely
to preserve her life; when no longer able to stand they
dragged her away, and this intervention often led to bloody
quarrels."
Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simply
a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival
of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or
otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the
world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old
Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the
Lithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African
countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New
Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various
other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.[126]
Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the men
to compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widely
accepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when he
declared regarding the Wends that
"they _preserve their conjugal love_ with such ardent zeal
that the wife refuses to survive her husband; and _she_ is
especially admired among women who takes her own life in
order to be burnt on the same pile with her master."
This view is the fourth of the mistakes I have undertaken to demolish
in this chapter.
In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is
advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their
husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in
question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that a
warrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; for
which reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons are
placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to be
useful to him in his new existence. His principal servant and provider
of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is
expected to follow him.
This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not the
whole truth. To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we must
realize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men,
extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to a
cruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow them
because of the promptings of affection, but either under physical
compulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral
reprobation and social persecution which made death preferable to
life. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed against
their will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and being
buried alive,
"the wife or servant who preferred life to the act of
martyrdom, which was to attest their fidelity, was an
object of general contempt, and devoted or doomed to a
life worse than death."