MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
The chief objection that will be urged against my views is that they
cannot possibly be valid for all women. For some, or even for the
majority, they will be accepted as true, but for the rest----
It was not my original intention to deal with the different kinds of
women. Women may be regarded from many different points of view, and, of
course, care must be taken not to press too hardly what is true for one
extreme type. If the word character be accepted in its common, empirical
signification, then there are differences in women’s characters. All the
properties of the male character find remarkable analogies in the female
sex (an interesting case will be dealt with later on in this chapter);
but in the male the character is always deeply rooted in the sphere of
the intelligible, from which there has come about the lamentable
confusion between the doctrine of the soul and characterology. The
characterological differences amongst women are not rooted so deeply
that they can develop into individuality; and probably there is no
female quality that in the course of the life of a woman cannot be
modified, repressed, or annihilated by the will of a man.
How far such differences in character may exist in cases that have the
same degree of masculinity or of femininity I have not yet been at the
pains to inquire. I have refrained deliberately from this task, because
in my desire to prepare the way for a true orientation of all the
difficult problems connected with my subject I have been anxious not to
raise side issues or to burden the argument with collateral details.
The detailed characterology of women must wait for a detailed treatment,
but even this work has not totally neglected the differences that exist
amongst women; I shall hope to be acquitted of false generalisations if
it be remembered that what I have been saying relates to the female
element, and is true in the same proportion that women possess that
element. However, as it is quite certain that a particular type of woman
will be brought forward in opposition to my conclusions, it is necessary
to consider carefully that type and its contrasting type.
To all the bad and defamatory things that I have said about women, the
conception of woman as a mother will certainly be opposed. But those who
adduce this argument will admit the justice of a simultaneous
consideration of the type that is at the opposite pole from motherhood,
as only in this way is it possible to define clearly in what motherhood
consists and to delimit it from other types.
The type standing at the pole opposite to motherhood is the prostitute.
The contrast is not any more inevitable than the contrast between man
and woman, and certain limits and restrictions will have to be made. But
allowing for these, women will now be treated as falling into two types,
sometimes having in them more of the one type, sometimes more of the
other.
This dichotomy may be misunderstood if I do not distinguish it from a
contrast that is popularly made. It is often said that a woman should be
both mother and mistress. I do not see the sense or the utility of the
distinction involved in the phrase. Is no more meant by “mistress” than
the condition which of necessity must precede motherhood? If that is so,
then no lasting characterological property is involved. For the word
“mistress” tells us nothing about a woman except that she is in a
certain relation to a man. It has nothing to do with her real being; it
is something imposed on her from without. The conception of being loved
tells us nothing about the nature of the person who is loved. The
condition of being loved, whether as mother or mistress, is a merely
accidental, external designation of the individual, whereas the quality
of motherhood is something born in a woman, something deep-seated in her
nature. It is this something that we must investigate.
That motherhood and prostitution are at extreme poles appears probable
simply from the fact that motherly women bear far more children, whilst
the frivolous have few children, and prostitutes are practically
sterile. It must be remembered, of course, that it is not only
prostitutes who belong to the prostitute type; very many so-called
respectable girls and married women belong to it. Accurate analysis of
the type will show that it reaches far beyond the mere women of the
streets. The street-walker differs from the respectable coquette and the
celebrated hetaira only through her incapacity for differentiation, her
complete want of memory, and her habit of living from moment to moment.
If there were but one man and one woman on the earth, the prostitute
type would reveal itself in the relations of the woman to the man.
This fact of limited fertility ought by itself to relieve me from the
necessity of comparing my view of prostitution with the popular view
that would derive what is really deep-seated in the nature of women from
mere social conditions, from the poverty of women and the economic
stress of a society arranged by males, from the difficulty of women
succeeding in a respectable career, or from the existence of a large
bachelor class with the consequent demand for a system of prostitution.
To these suggestions it may well be replied that prostitution is by no
means confined to the poorer classes; that women without any economic
necessity have frequently given way to its appeal; that there are many
situations in shops, offices, post-offices, the telegraph and telephone
services, wherever mere mechanical ability is required, where women are
preferred because, from their lower degree of differentiation, their
demands are smaller; and business men having discovered this in
anticipation of science, readily employ them at a lower rate of wages.
Young prostitutes have often quite as hard an economic battle to fight,
as they must wear expensive clothes, and as they are always charged
excessively high rates for food and lodging. Prostitution is not a
result of social conditions, but of some cause deep in the nature of
women; prostitutes who have been “reclaimed” frequently, even if
provided for, return to their old way of life. It is a curious
circumstance that prostitutes appear to be relatively immune to certain
diseases which readily affect other types of women. I may note finally,
that prostitution is not a modern growth; it has been known from the
earliest times, and even was a part of some ancient religions, as, for
instance, among the Phœnicians.
Prostitution cannot be considered as a state into which men have seduced
women. The man may occasionally be to blame, as, for instance, when a
servant is discharged and finds herself deserted. But where there is no
inclination for a certain course, the course will not be adopted.
Prostitution is foreign to the male element, although the lives of men
are often more laborious and unpleasant than those of women, and male
prostitutes (such as are found amongst waiters, barbers, and so on) are
always advanced sexually intermediate forms. The disposition for and
inclination to prostitution is as organic in a woman as is the capacity
for motherhood.
Of course, I do not mean to suggest that, when any woman becomes a
prostitute, it is because of an irresistible, inborn craving. Probably
most women have both possibilities in them, the mother and the
prostitute. What is to happen in cases of doubt depends on the man who
is able to make the woman a mother, not merely by the physical act but
by a single look at her. Schopenhauer said that a man’s existence dates
from the moment when his father and mother fell in love. That is not
true. The birth of a human being, ideally considered, dates from the
moment when the mother first saw or heard the voice of the father of her
child. Biological and medical science, under the influence of Johannes
Müller, Th. Bischoff, and Darwin have been completely opposed, for the
last sixty years, to the theory of “impression.” I may later attempt to
develop such a theory. For the present I shall remark only that it is
not fatal to the theory of impression that it does not agree with the
view which regards the union of an ovum and spermatazoon as the only
beginning of a new individual; and science will have to deal with it
instead of regarding it as being opposed to all experience and so
rejecting it. In an _a priori_ science such as mathematics, I may take
it for granted that even on the planet Jupiter 2 and 2 could not make 5,
but biology deals only with propositions of relative universality.
Although I support the theory of the existence of such a power of
impression, it must not be supposed that I think that all malformations
and abnormalities, or even any large number of them, are due to it. I go
no further than to say that it is possible for the progeny to be
influenced by a man, although physical relations between him and the
mother have not taken place. And just as Schopenhauer and Goethe were
correct in their theory of colour, although they were in opposition to
all the physicists of the past, present, and future, so Ibsen (in “The
Lady from the Sea”) and Goethe (in “Elective Affinities”) may be right
against all the scientific men who deal with the problems of inheritance
on a purely physical basis.
If a man has an influence on a woman so great that her children of whom
he is not the father resemble him, he must be the absolute sexual
complement of the woman in question. If such cases are very rare, it is
only because there is not much chance of the absolute sexual complements
meeting, and this is no argument against the truth of the views of
Goethe and Ibsen to which I have just referred.
It is a rare chance if a woman meets a man so completely her sexual
complement that his mere presence makes him the father of her children.
And so it is conceivable in the case of many mothers and prostitutes
that their fates have been reversed by accident. On the other hand,
there must be many cases in which the woman remains true to the maternal
type without meeting the necessary man, and also cases where a woman,
even although she meets the man, may be driven none the less into the
prostitute type by her natural instincts.
We have not to face the general occurrence of women as one or other of
two distinct inborn types, the maternal type and the prostitute. The
reality is found between the two. There are certainly no women
absolutely devoid of the prostitute instinct to covet being sexually
excited by any stranger. And there are equally certainly no women
absolutely devoid of all maternal instincts, although I confess that I
have found more cases approaching the absolute prostitute than the
absolute mother.
The essence of motherhood consists, as the most superficial
investigation will reveal, in that the getting of the child is the chief
object of life, whereas in the prostitute sexual relations in themselves
are the end. The investigation of the subject must be pursued by
considering the relation of each type to the child and to sexual
congress.
Consider the relation to the child first. The absolute prostitute thinks
only of the man; the absolute mother thinks only of the child. The best
test case is the relation to the daughter. It is only when there is no
jealousy about her youth or greater beauty, no grudging about the
admiration she wins, but an identification of herself with her daughter
so complete that she is as pleased about her child’s admirers as if they
were her own, that a woman has a claim to the title of perfect mother.
The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only about the child,
would become a mother by any man. It will be found that women who were
devoted to dolls when they were children, and were kind and attentive to
children in their own childhood, are least particular about their
husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match who takes
any notice of them and who satisfies their parents and relatives. When
such a maiden has become a mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to
pay any attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on the
other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children; later on,
she may pretend to care for them as a means of attracting men through
the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please
all men; and since there is no such thing as an ideally perfect type of
mother, there are traces of this desire to please in every woman, as
every man of the world will admit.
Here we can trace at least a formal resemblance between the two types.
Both are careless as to the individuality of their sexual complement.
The one accepts any possible man who can make her a mother, and once
that has been achieved asks nothing more; on this ground only is she to
be described as monogamous. The other is ready to yield herself to any
man who stimulates her erotic desires; that is her only object. From
this description of the two extreme types we may hope to gain some
knowledge of the nature of actual women.
I have to admit that the popular opinion as to the monogamous nature of
women as opposed to the essential polygamy of the male, an opinion I
long held, is erroneous. The contrary is the case. One must not be
misled by the fact that a woman will wait very long for a particular
man, and where possible will choose him who can bestow most value on
her, the most noble, the most famous, the ideal prince. Woman is
distinguished by this desire for value from the animals, who have no
regard for value either for themselves and through themselves, as in the
case of a man, or for another and through another, as in the case of a
woman. But this could be brought forward only by fools as in any way to
the credit of woman, since, indeed, it shows most strongly that she is
devoid of a feeling of personal value. The desire for this demands to be
satisfied, but does not find satisfaction in the moral idea of monogamy.
The man is able to pour forth value, to confer it on the woman; he can
give it, he wishes to give it, but he cannot receive it. The woman seeks
to create as much personal value as possible for herself, and so adheres
to the man who can give her most of it; faithfulness of the man,
however, rests on other grounds. He regards it as the completion of
ideal love, as a fulfilment, even although it is questionable if that
could be attained. His faithfulness springs from the purely masculine
conception of truth, the continuity demanded by the intelligible ego.
One often hears it said that women are more faithful than men; but man’s
faithfulness is a coercion which he exercises on himself, of his own
free will, and with full consciousness. He may not adhere to this
self-imposed contract, but his falling away from it will seem as a wrong
to himself. When he breaks his faith he has suppressed the promptings of
his real nature. For the woman unfaithfulness is an exciting game, in
which the thought of morality plays no part, but which is controlled
only by the desire for safety and reputation. There is no wife who has
not been untrue to her husband in thought, and yet no woman reproaches
herself with this. For a woman pledges her faith lightly and without any
full consciousness of what she does, and breaks it just as lightly and
thoughtlessly as she pledged it. The motive for honouring a pledge can
be found only in man; for a woman does not understand the binding force
of a given word. The examples of female faithfulness that can be adduced
against this are of little value. They are either the slow result of the
habit of sexual acquiescence, or a condition of actual slavery,
dog-like, attentive, full of instinctive tenacious attachment,
comparable with that necessity for actual contact which marks female
sympathy.
The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises
from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by
time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same
person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and
finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of the Catholic
Church. I am not going to discuss the question of marriage or free-love.
Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the
highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the
world with marriage.
None the less marriage could have been invented only by man. No
proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order
into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man’s desire
for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the
history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but
the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.
The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their
child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute
element is strong will perceive her son’s manhood and always stand in a
sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother,
there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For
this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not
to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known
physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her
children and of a wife to her husband.
Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a
woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of
her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her
own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and
unjust in the event of a quarrel.
The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl
is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards
that man who will afterwards become the father of her child; in fact, in
a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the
mother-type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving
wife; the mothers form the enduring root-stock of our race from which
the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his
own impermanence. It is this idea which enables the man to see in the
mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which
gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring
security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence
of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence. In such minutes there
may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious
silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he
is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his
beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, understands him, and
takes care of him (Siegfried and Brünnhilde, Act III.). But this does
not last long. (Siegfried tears himself from Brünnhilde). For a man only
comes to his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises
himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a
man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him.
The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books
that have been written, the chapter on “Death and its Relation to the
Indestructibility of our Nature,” in Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will
and Idea,” is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species
is set down as the only real permanence.
It is the permanence of the race that gives the mother her courage and
fearlessness in contrast with the cowardliness and fear of the
prostitute. It is not the courage of individuality, the moral courage
arising from an inner sense of freedom and personal value, but rather
the desire that the race should be maintained which, acting through the
mother, protects the husband and child. As courage and cowardice belong
respectively to the mother and the prostitute, so is it with that other
pair of contrasting ideas, hope and fear. The absolute mother stands in
a persisting relation to hope; as she lives on through the race, she
does not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting fear of
it.
The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man; she knows
herself to be his anchor; as she is in a secure place, linked in the
chain of the generations, she may be likened to a harbour from which
each new individual sails forth to wander on the high seas. From the
moment of conception onwards the mother is psychically and physically
ready to feed and protect her child. And this protective superiority
extends itself to her lover; she understands all that is simple and
naïve and childlike in him, whilst the prostitute understands best his
caprices and refinements. The mother has the craving to teach her child,
to give him everything, even when the child is represented by the lover;
the prostitute strives to impose herself on the man, to receive
everything from him. The mother as the upholder of the race is friendly
to all its members; it is only when there is an exclusive choice to be
made between her child and others that she becomes hard and relentless;
and so she can be both more full of love and more bitter than the
prostitute.
The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of the race; the
prostitute is completely outside it. The mother is the sole advocate and
priestess of the race. The will of the race to live is embodied in her,
whilst the existence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was
pushing a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality had
relation only to the future generation. That the mother cares only for
the life of her own race is plain from the absence of consideration for
animals shown by the best of mothers. A good mother, with the greatest
peace of mind and content, will slaughter fowl after fowl for her
family. The mother of children is a cruel step-mother to all other
living things.
Another striking aspect of the mother’s relation to the preservation of
the race reveals itself in the matter of food. She cannot bear to see
food wasted, however little may be left over; whilst the prostitute
wilfully squanders the quantities of food and drink she demands. The
mother is stingy and mean; the prostitute open-handed and lavish. The
mother’s object in life is to preserve the race, and her delight is to
see her children eat and to encourage their appetites. And so she
becomes the good housekeeper. Ceres was a good mother, a fact expressed
in her Greek name, Demeter. The mother takes care of the body, but does
not trouble about the mind.[15] The relation between mother and child
remains material from the kissing and hugging of childhood to the
protective care of maturity. All her devotion is for the success and
prosperity of her child in material things.
[15] Compare the conversation in Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” Act ii., between
the father of Solveig and Aase (perhaps the best-drawn mother in all
literature) when they were discussing the search for their son:
Aase. “We shall find him.”
Her Husband. “And save his soul.”
Aase. “And his body.”
Maternal love, then, cannot be truly represented as resting on moral
grounds. Let any one ask himself if he does not believe that his
mother’s love would not be just as great for him if he were a totally
different person. The individuality of the child has no part in the
maternal love; the mere fact of its being her own child is sufficient,
and so the love cannot be regarded as moral. In the love of a man for a
woman, or between persons of the same sex, there is always some
reference to the personal qualities of the individual; a mother’s love
extends itself indifferently to anything that she has borne. It destroys
the moral conception if we realise that the love of a mother for her
child remains the same whether the child becomes a saint or a sinner, a
king or a beggar, an angel or a fiend. Precisely the same conclusion
will be reached from reflecting how children think that they have a
claim on their mother’s love simply because she is their mother.
Maternal love is non-moral because it has no relation to the
individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an
ethical relation only between two individualities. The relation of
mother and child is always a kind of physical reflex. If the little one
suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in the next room, she will
at once rush to it as if she herself had been hurt; and, as the children
grow up, every wish or trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared
by the mother as if they were her own. There is an unbreakable link
between the mother and child, physical, like the cord that united the
two before childbirth. This is the real nature of the maternal relation;
and, for my part, I protest against the fashion in which it is praised,
its very indiscriminate character being made a merit. I believe myself
that many great artists have recognised this, but have chosen to be
silent about it. The extraordinary over-praising of Raphael is losing
ground, and the singers of maternal love are no higher than Fischart or
Richepin.
Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess
it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to
show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin; for all
morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having
no free will, do not possess. The ethical imperative can be heard only
by a rational creature; there is no such thing as natural morality, for
all morality must be self-conscious.
Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that
she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain
of beings that passes through her, place the prostitute in a sense above
the mother, so far at least as it is possible to speak of higher or
lower from the ethical point of view when women are being discussed.
The matron whose whole time is taken up in looking after her husband and
children, who is working in, or superintending the work of, the house,
garden, or other forms of labour, ranks intellectually very low. The
most highly-developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in
poetry, belong to the prostitute category; to these, the Aspasia-type,
must be added the women of the romantic school, foremost among whom must
be placed Karoline Michaelis-Böhmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling.
It coincides with what has been said that only those men are sexually
attracted by the mother-type who have no desire for mental productivity.
The man whose fatherhood is confined to the children of his loins is he
whom we should expect to choose the motherly productive woman. Great men
have always preferred women of the prostitute type.[16] Their choice
falls on the sterile woman, and, if there is issue, it is unfit and
soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood has as little to do with morality as
motherhood. It is non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv.; and it is
illogical, because it deals with illusions. No man ever knows to what
extent he is the father of his own child. And its duration is short and
fleeting; every generation and every race of human beings soon
disappears.
[16] Wherever I am using this term I refer, of course, not merely to
mercenary women of the streets.
The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the motherly woman, the type
most upheld as the one and only possible one for women, is accordingly
quite unjustified. Although most men are certain that every woman can
have her consummation only in motherhood, I must confess that the
prostitute--not as a person, but as a phenomenon--is much more estimable
in my opinion.
There are various causes of this universal reverence for the mother.
One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother seems to the man
nearer his ideal of chastity; but the woman who desires children is no
more chaste than the man-coveting prostitute.
The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in the maternal type
by raising her morally (although with no reason) and socially over the
prostitute type. The latter does not submit to any valuations of the man
nor to the ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman; secretly,
as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or flagrantly
as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in opposition to them.
This is the explanation of the social ostracisms, the practical outlawry
which is the present almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother
readily submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because she is
interested only in the child and the preservation of the race.
It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her own life
exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring with it the
punishment of exclusion from society. She is not so brave as the mother,
it is true, being thoroughly cowardly; but she has the correlative of
cowardice, impudence, and she is not ashamed of her shamelessness. She
is naturally inclined to polygamy, and always ready to attract more men
than the one who would suffice as the founder of a family. She gives
free play to the fulfilment of her desire, and feels a queen, and her
most ardent wish is for more power. It is easy to grieve or shock the
motherly woman; no one can injure or offend the prostitute; for the
mother has her honour to defend as the guardian of the species, whilst
the prostitute has forsworn all social respect, and prides herself in
her freedom. The only thought that disturbs her is the possibility of
losing her power. She expects, and cannot think otherwise than that
every man wishes to possess her, that they think of nothing but her, and
live for her. And certainly she possesses the greatest power over men,
the only influence that has a strong effect on the life of humanity that
is not ordered by the regulations of men.
In this lies the analogy between the prostitute and men who have been
famous in politics. As it is only once in many centuries that a great
conqueror arises, like Napoleon or Alexander, so it is with the great
courtesan; but when she does appear she marches triumphantly across the
world.
There is a relationship between such men and courtesans (every
politician is to a certain extent a tribune of the people, and that in
itself implies a kind of prostitution). They have the same feeling for
power, the same demand to be in relations with all men, even the
humblest. Just as the great conqueror believes that he confers a favour
on any one to whom he talks, so also with the prostitute. Observe her as
she talks to a policeman, or buys something in a shop, you see the sense
of conferring a favour explicit in her. And men most readily accept this
view that they are receiving favours from the politician or prostitute
(one may recall how a great genius like Goethe regarded his meeting with
Napoleon at Erfurt; and on the other side we have the myth of Pandora,
and the story of the birth of Venus).
I may now return to the subject of great men of action which I opened
in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man as Carlyle has exalted the man of
action, as, for instance, in his chapter on “The Hero as King.” I have
already shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here that all
great men of action, even the greatest of them, such as Cæsar, Cromwell,
Napoleon, have not hesitated to employ falsehood; that Alexander the
Great did not hesitate to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But
untruthfulness is incompatible with genius. The “Memoirs of Napoleon,”
written at St. Helena, are full of misstatements and watery sophistry,
and his last words, that “he had loved only France,” were an altruistic
pose. Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof
that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses.
One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with
which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the
conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater
than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in
stifling the disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition
was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man may
honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame but personal
ambition will not be his aim. He will not try to knit the whole world to
himself by superficial, transitory bonds, to heap up all the things of
the world in a pyramid over his name. The man of action shares with the
epileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around
him, to make them appanages of his petty self. The great man feels
himself defined and separate from the world, a monad amongst monads,
and, as a true microcosm, he feels the world already within him; he
realises in the fullest sense of personal experience that he has a
definite, assured, intelligible relation to the world whole. The great
tribune and the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off
from the world; they merge with it, and demand it all as decoration or
adornment of their empirical persons, and they are incapable of love,
affection, or friendship.
The king of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the stars is the
perfect image of the conqueror. The great genius honours himself, and
has not to live in a condition of give and take with the populace, as is
necessary for the politician. The great politician makes his voice
resound in the world, but he has also to sing in the streets; he may
make the world his chessboard, but he has also to strut in a booth; he
is no more a despot than he is a beggar for alms. He has to court the
populace, and here he joins with the prostitute. The politician is a man
of the streets. He must be completed by the public. It is the masses
that he requires, not real individualities. If he is not clever he tries
to be rid of the great men, or if, like Napoleon, he is cunning, he
pretends to honour them in order that he may make them harmless. His
dependence on the public makes some such course necessary. A politician
cannot do all that he wishes, even if he is a Napoleon, and if, unlike
Napoleon, he actually wished to realise ideals, he would soon be taught
better by the public, his real master. The will of him who covets power
is bound.
Every emperor is conscious of this relation between himself and the
masses, and has an almost instinctive love of great assemblages of his
people, or his army, or of his electors. Not Marcus Aurelius or
Diocletian, but Kleo, Mark Antony, Themistocles, and Mirabeau are the
embodiments of the real politician. Ambition means going amongst the
people. The tribune has to follow the prostitute in this respect.
According to Emerson, Napoleon used to go _incognito_ amongst the people
to excite their hurrahs and praise. Schiller imagined the same course
for his Wallenstein.
Hitherto the phenomena of the great man of action have been regarded
even by artists and philosophers as unique. I think that my analysis has
shown that there is the strongest resemblance between them and
prostitutes. To see an analogy between Antonius (Cæsar) and Cleopatra
may appear at first far-fetched, but none the less it exists. The great
man of action has to despise his inner life, in order that he may live
altogether “in the world,” and he must perish, like the things of the
world. The prostitute abandons the lasting purpose of her sex, to live
in the instincts of the moment. The great prostitute and the great
tribune are firebrands causing destruction all around them, leaving
death and devastation in their paths, and pass like meteors unconnected
with the course of human life, indifferent to its objects, and soon
disappearing, whilst the genius and the mother work for the future in
silence. The prostitute and the tribune may be called the enemies of
God; they are both anti-moral phenomena.
Great men of action, then, must be excluded from the category of genius.
The true genius, whether he be an artist or a philosopher, is always
strongly marked by his relation to the constructive side of the world.
The motive that actuates the prostitute requires further investigation.
The purpose of the motherly woman was easy to understand; she is the
upholder of the race. But the fundamental idea of prostitution is much
more mysterious, and no one can have meditated long on the subject
without often doubting if it were possible to get an explanation.
Perhaps the relation of the two types to the sexual act may assist the
inquiry. I hope that no one will consider such a subject below the
dignity of a philosopher. The spirit in which the inquiry is made is the
chief matter. It is at least clear that the painters of Leda and Danäe
have pondered over the problem, and many great writers--I have in mind
Zola’s “Confession of Claude,” his “Hortense,” “Renée,” and “Nana,”
Tolstoi’s “Resurrection,” Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” and “Rita,” and above
all the “Sonja” of that great soul Dostoyevski--must have been thinking
of the general problem rather than merely wishing to describe particular
cases.
The maternal woman regards the sexual relations as means to an end; the
prostitute considers them as the end itself. That sexual congress may
have another purpose than mere reproduction is plain, as many animals
and plants are devoid of it. On the other hand, in the animal kingdom
sexual congress is always in connection with reproduction and is never
simply lust; and, moreover, takes place only at times suitable for
breeding. Desire is simply the means employed by nature to secure the
continuity of the species.
Although sexual congress is an end in itself for the prostitute, it must
not be assumed that it is meaningless in the mother-type. Women who are
sexually anæsthetic no doubt exist in both classes, but they are very
rare, and many apparent cases may really be phenomena of hysteria.
The final importance attached by the prostitute to the sexual act is
made plain by the fact that it is only that type in which coquetry
occurs. Coquetry has invariably a sexual significance. Its purpose is to
picture to the man the conquest of the woman before it has occurred, in
order to induce him to make the conquest an actual fact. The readiness
of the type to coquet with every man is an expression of her nature;
whether it proceeds further depends on merely accidental circumstances.
The maternal type regards the sexual act as the beginning of a series of
important events, and so attaches value to it equally with the
prostitute, although in a different fashion. The one is contented,
completed, satisfied; her life is made richer and of fuller meaning to
her by it. The other, for whom the act is everything, the compression
and end of all life, is never satisfied, never to be satisfied, were she
visited by all the men in the world.
The body of a woman, as I have already shown, is sexual throughout, and
the special sexual acts are only intensifications of a distributed
sensation. Here, also, the difference between the two types displays
itself. The prostitute type in coquetting is merely using the general
sexuality of her body as an end in itself; for her there is a difference
only in degree between flirtation and sexual congress. The maternal type
is equally sexual, but with a different purpose; all her life, through
all her body, she is being impregnated. In this fact lies the
explanation of the “impression” which I referred to as being
indubitable, although it is denied by men of science and physicians.
Paternity is a diffused relation. Many instances, disputed by men of
science, point to an influence not brought about directly by the
reproductive cells. White women who have borne a child to a black man,
are said if they bear children afterwards to white men, to have retained
enough impression from the first mate to show an effect on the
subsequent children. All such facts, grouped under the names of
“telegony,” “germinal infection,” and so on, although disputed by
scientists, speak for my view. And so also the motherly woman,
throughout her whole life, is impressed by lovers, by voices, by words,
by inanimate things. All the influences that come to her she turns to
the purpose of her being, to the shaping of her child, and the “actual”
father has to share his paternity with perhaps other men and many other
things.
The woman is impregnated not only through the genital tract but through
every fibre of her being. All life makes an impression on her and throws
its image on her child. This universality, in the purely physical
sphere, is analogous to genius.
It is quite different with the prostitute. Whilst the maternal woman
turns the whole world, the love of her lover, and all the impressions
that she receives to the purposes of the child, the prostitute absorbs
everything for herself. But just as she has this absorbing need of the
man, so the man can get something from her which he fails to find in the
badly dressed, tasteless, pre-occupied maternal type. Something within
him requires pleasure, and this he gets from the daughters of joy.
Unlike the mother, these think of the pleasures of the world, of
dancing, of dressing, of theatres and concerts, of pleasure-resorts.
They know the use of gold, turning it to luxury instead of to comfort,
they flame through the world, making all its ways a triumphant march for
their beautiful bodies.
The prostitute is the great seductress of the world, the female Don
Juan, the being in the woman that knows the art of love, that cultivates
it, teaches it, and enjoys it.
Very deep-seated differences are linked with what I have been
describing. The mother-woman craves for respectability in the man, not
because she grasps its value as an idea, but because it is the supporter
of the life of the world. She herself works, and is not idle like the
prostitute; she is filled with care for the future, and so requires from
the man a corresponding practical responsibility, and will not seduce
him to pleasure. The prostitute, on the other hand, is most attracted by
a careless, idle, dissipated man. A man that has lost self-restraint
repels the mother-woman, is attractive to the prostitute. There are
women who are dissatisfied with a son that is idle at school; there are
others who encourage him. The diligent boy pleases the mother-woman, the
idle and careless boy wins approval from the prostitute type. This
distinction reaches high up amongst the respectable classes of society,
but a salient example of it is seen in the fact that the “bullies” loved
by women of the streets are usually criminals. The souteneur is always a
criminal, a thief, a fraudulent person, or sometimes even a murderer.
I am almost on the point of saying that, however little woman is to be
regarded as immoral (she is only non-moral), prostitution stands in some
deep relation with crime, whilst motherhood is equally bound with the
opposite tendency. We must avoid regarding the prostitute as the female
analogue of the criminal; women, as I have already pointed out, are not
criminals; they are too low in the moral scale for that designation.
None the less, there is a constant connection between the prostitute
type and crime. The great courtesan is comparable with that great
criminal, the conqueror, and readily enters into actual relations with
him; the petty courtesan entertains the thief and the pickpocket. The
mother type is in fact the guardian of the life of the world, the
prostitute type is its enemy. But just as the mother is in harmony, not
with the soul but with the body, so the prostitute is no diabolic
destroyer of the idea, but only a corrupter of empirical phenomena.
Physical life and physical death, both of which are in intimate
connection with the sexual act, are displayed by the woman in her two
capacities of mother and prostitute.
It is still impossible to give a clearer solution than that which I have
attempted, of the real significance of motherhood and prostitution. I am
on an unfamiliar path, almost untrodden by any earlier wayfarer.
Religious myths and philosophy alike have been unable to propound
solutions. I have found some clues however. The anti-moral significance
of prostitution is in harmony with the fact that it appears only amongst
mankind. In all the animal kingdom the females are used only for
reproduction; there are no true females that are sterile. There are
analogies to prostitution, however, amongst male animals; one has only
to think of the display and decoration of the peacock, of the shining
glow-worm, of singing birds, of the love dances of many male birds.
These secondary sexual manifestations, however, are mere advertisements
of sexuality.
Prostitution is a human phenomenon; animals and plants are non-moral;
they are never disposed to immorality and possess only motherhood. Here
is a deep secret, hidden in the nature and origin of mankind. I ought to
correct my earlier exposition by insisting that I have come to regard
the prostitute element as a possibility in all women just as much as the
merely animal capacity for motherhood. It is something which penetrates
the nature of the human female, something with which the most
animal-like mother is tinged, something which corresponds in the human
female, to the characters that separate the human male from the animal
male. Just as the immoral possibility of man is something that
distinguishes him from the male animal, so the quality of the prostitute
distinguishes the human female from the animal female. I shall have
something to say as to the general relation of man to this element in
woman, towards the end of my investigation, but possibly the ultimate
origin of prostitution is a deep mystery into which none can penetrate.