That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in
children, and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of
everybody without regard to relationship or sex, and cannot bear to
hear the person they "love" speak favorably of anyone under any
circumstances (many women, for instance, are much more jealous of their
husbands' mothers and sisters than of unrelated women whom they suspect
him of fancying); but it is seldom possible to disentangle the two
passions in practice. Besides, jealousy is an inculcated passion,
forced by society on people in whom it would not occur spontaneously.
In Brieux's Bourgeois aux Champs, the benevolent hero finds himself
detested by the neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he
preserves game, and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal
rights over his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but
because, being an amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses to do
all this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of property in
his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial jealousy; the man
who does not at least pretend to feel it and behave as badly as if he
really felt it is despised and insulted; and many a man has shot or
stabbed a friend or been shot or stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced
himself and ruined his own wife in a divorce scandal, against his
conscience, against his instinct, and to the destruction of his home,
solely because Society conspired to drive him to keep its own lower
morality in countenance in this miserable and undignified manner.
Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a
jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who supply
that plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not jealous, and
refrains from assailing his rival with his fists, is regarded as a
ridiculous, contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And the laboring class
is divided into the respectable section which takes the tradesman's
view, and the disreputable section which enjoys the license of the
plutocracy without its money: creeping below the law as its exemplars
prance above it; cutting down all expenses of respectability and even
decency; and frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of
anarchic self-indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby,
between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan,
the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not
only between class and class and individual and individual, but in the
selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in which the
irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable the
irresistible, until none of us can say what our characters really are
in this respect.