dramatic and literary, further elucidating this subject. Robert
Herrick, in TOGETHER; Pinero, in MID-CHANNEL; Eugene Walter, in PAID
IN FULL, and scores of other writers are discussing the barrenness,
the monotony, the sordidness, the inadequacy of marriage as a factor
for harmony and understanding.
The thoughtful social student will not content himself with the
popular superficial excuse for this phenomenon. He will have to dig
deeper into the very life of the sexes to know why marriage proves so
disastrous.
Edward Carpenter says that behind every marriage stands the life-long
environment of the two sexes; an environment so different from each
other that man and woman must remain strangers. Separated by an
insurmountable wall of superstition, custom, and habit, marriage has
not the potentiality of developing knowledge of, and respect for,
each other, without which every union is doomed to failure.
Henrik Ibsen, the hater of all social shams, was probably the first
to realize this great truth. Nora leaves her husband, not--as the
stupid critic would have it--because she is tired of her
responsibilities or feels the need of woman's rights, but because she
has come to know that for eight years she had lived with a stranger
and borne him children. Can there be anything more humiliating, more
degrading than a life-long proximity between two strangers? No need
for the woman to know anything of the man, save his income. As to
the knowledge of the woman--what is there to know except that she has
a pleasing appearance? We have not yet outgrown the theologic myth
that woman has no soul, that she is a mere appendix to man, made out
of his rib just for the convenience of the gentleman who was so
strong that he was afraid of his own shadow.
Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is
responsible for her inferiority. At any rate, woman has no
soul--what is there to know about her? Besides, the less soul a
woman has the greater her asset as a wife, the more readily will she
absorb herself in her husband. It is this slavish acquiescence to
man's superiority that has kept the marriage institution seemingly
intact for so long a period. Now that woman is coming into her own,
now that she is actually growing aware of herself as being outside
of the master's grace, the sacred institution of marriage is
gradually being undermined, and no amount of sentimental lamentation
can stay it.
From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her
ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed
towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is
prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much
less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan
of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to
know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of
respectability, that needs the marriage vow to turn something which
is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare
question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the
average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is
kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive
field--sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only
to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the
most natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a
large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical
suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex
matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all
an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up
because of this deplorable fact.
If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex
without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as
utterly unfit to become the wife of a "good" man, his goodness
consisting of an empty brain and plenty of money. Can there be
anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman,
full of life and passion, must deny nature's demand, must subdue her
most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must
stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience
until a "good" man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife?
That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement
end except in failure? This is one, though not the least important,
factor of marriage, which differentiates it from love.
Ours is a practical age. The time when Romeo and Juliet risked the
wrath of their fathers for love, when Gretchen exposed herself to the
gossip of her neighbors for love, is no more. If, on rare occasions,
young people allow themselves the luxury of romance, they are taken
in care by the elders, drilled and pounded until they become
"sensible."
The moral lesson instilled in the girl is not whether the man has
aroused her love, but rather is it, "How much?" The important and
only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? can
he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage.
Gradually this saturates every thought of the girl; her dreams are
not of moonlight and kisses, of laughter and tears; she dreams of
shopping tours and bargain counters. This soul poverty and
sordidness are the elements inherent in the marriage institution.
The State and Church approve of no other ideal, simply because it is
the one that necessitates the State and Church control of men and
women.
Doubtless there are people who continue to consider love above
dollars and cents. Particularly this is true of that class whom
economic necessity has forced to become self-supporting. The
tremendous change in woman's position, wrought by that mighty factor,
is indeed phenomenal when we reflect that it is but a short time
since she has entered the industrial arena. Six million women wage
workers; six million women, who have equal right with men to be
exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to starve even.
Anything more, my lord? Yes, six million wage workers in every walk
of life, from the highest brain work to the mines and railroad
tracks; yes, even detectives and policemen. Surely the emancipation
is complete.
Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women
wage workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light
as does man. No matter how decrepit the latter, he has been taught
to be independent, self-supporting. Oh, I know that no one is really
independent in our economic treadmill; still, the poorest specimen of
a man hates to be a parasite; to be known as such, at any rate.
The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown
aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to
organize women than men. "Why should I join a union? I am going to
get married, to have a home." Has she not been taught from infancy
to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough
that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more
solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can
escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no
longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.
According to the latest statistics submitted before a Committee "on
labor and wages, and congestion of population," ten per cent. of the
wage workers in New York City alone are married, yet they must
continue to work at the most poorly paid labor in the world. Add to
this horrible aspect the drudgery of housework, and what remains of
the protection and glory of the home? As a matter of fact, even the
middle-class girl in marriage can not speak of her home, since it is
the man who creates her sphere. It is not important whether the
husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that
marriage guarantees woman a home only by the grace of her husband.
There she moves about in HIS home, year after year, until her aspect
of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow, and drab as her
surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome,
gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could
not go, if she wanted to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short
period of married life, of complete surrender of all faculties,
absolutely incapacitates the average woman for the outside world.
She becomes reckless in appearance, clumsy in her movements,
dependent in her decisions, cowardly in her judgment, a weight and a
bore, which most men grow to hate and despise. Wonderfully inspiring
atmosphere for the bearing of life, is it not?
But the child, how is it to be protected, if not for marriage? After
all, is not that the most important consideration? The sham, the
hypocrisy of it! Marriage protecting the child, yet thousands of
children destitute and homeless. Marriage protecting the child, yet
orphan asylums and reformatories overcrowded, the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeping busy in rescuing the little
victims from "loving" parents, to place them under more loving care,
the Gerry Society. Oh, the mockery of it!
Marriage may have the power to bring the horse to water, but has it
ever made him drink? The law will place the father under arrest, and
put him in convict's clothes; but has that ever stilled the hunger of
the child? If the parent has no work, or if he hides his identity,
what does marriage do then? It invokes the law to bring the man to
"justice," to put him safely behind closed doors; his labor, however,
goes not to the child, but to the State. The child receives but a
blighted memory of his father's stripes.
As to the protection of the woman,--therein lies the curse of
marriage. Not that it really protects her, but the very idea is so
revolting, such an outrage and insult on life, so degrading to human
dignity, as to forever condemn this parasitic institution.
It is like that other paternal arrangement--capitalism. It robs man
of his birthright, stunts his growth, poisons his body, keeps him in
ignorance, in poverty, and dependence, and then institutes charities
that thrive on the last vestige of man's self-respect.
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute
dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her
social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its
gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human
character.
If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman's nature, what
other protection does it need, save love and freedom? Marriage but
defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment. Does it not say to
woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life? Does it
not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if
she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself? Does
not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in
hatred, in compulsion? Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of
love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of
thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the
hideous epithet, Bastard? Were marriage to contain all the virtues
claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it
forever from the realm of love.
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of
hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all
conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human
destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that
poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains,
but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has
subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue
love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not
conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has
been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the
splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate,
if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant
with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to
make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other
atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly,
completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the
universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.
If, however, the soil is sterile, how can marriage make it bear
fruit? It is like the last desperate struggle of fleeting life
against death.
Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love
begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want
of affection. I know this to be true. I know women who became
mothers in freedom by the men they loved. Few children in wedlock
enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is
capable of bestowing.
The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood,
lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who
would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if
woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The
race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the
priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a
mere machine,--and the marriage institution is our only safety valve
against the pernicious sex awakening of woman. But in vain these
frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage. In vain, too, the
edicts of the Church, the mad attacks of rulers, in vain even the arm
of the law. Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of
a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have
neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of
poverty and slavery. Instead she desires fewer and better children,
begotten and reared in love and through free choice; not by
compulsion, as marriage imposes. Our pseudo-moralists have yet to
learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in
freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego
forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an
atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death. And if she does
become a mother, it is to give to the child the deepest and best her
being can yield. To grow with the child is her motto; she knows that
in that manner alone can she help build true manhood and womanhood.
Ibsen must have had a vision of a free mother, when, with a master
stroke, he portrayed Mrs. Alving. She was the ideal mother because
she had outgrown marriage and all its horrors, because she had broken
her chains, and set her spirit free to soar until it returned a
personality, regenerated and strong. Alas, it was too late to rescue
her life's joy, her Oswald; but not too late to realize that love in
freedom is the only condition of a beautiful life. Those who, like
Mrs. Alving, have paid with blood and tears for their spiritual
awakening, repudiate marriage as an imposition, a shallow, empty
mockery. They know, whether love last but one brief span of time or
for eternity, it is the only creative, inspiring, elevating basis for
a new race, a new world.
In our present pygmy state love is indeed a stranger to most people.
Misunderstood and shunned, it rarely takes root; or if it does, it
soon withers and dies. Its delicate fiber can not endure the stress
and strain of the daily grind. Its soul is too complex to adjust
itself to the slimy woof of our social fabric. It weeps and moans
and suffers with those who have need of it, yet lack the capacity to
rise to love's summit.
Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the
mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to
receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What
fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even
approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men
and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship
and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.
THE MODERN DRAMA: A POWERFUL DISSEMINATOR OF RADICAL THOUGHT
So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt
within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often
succeed in suppressing such manifestations. But when the dumb unrest
grows into conscious expression and becomes almost universal, it
necessarily affects all phases of human thought and action, and seeks
its individual and social expression in the gradual transvaluation of
existing values.
An adequate appreciation of the tremendous spread of the modern,
conscious social unrest cannot be gained from merely propagandistic
literature. Rather must we become conversant with the larger phases
of human expression manifest in art, literature, and, above all, the
modern drama--the strongest and most far-reaching interpreter of our
deep-felt dissatisfaction.
What a tremendous factor for the awakening of conscious discontent
are the simple canvasses of a Millet! The figures of his
peasants--what terrific indictment against our social wrongs; wrongs
that condemn the Man With the Hoe to hopeless drudgery, himself
excluded from Nature's bounty.
The vision of a Meunier conceives the growing solidarity and defiance
of labor in the group of miners carrying their maimed brother to
safety. His genius thus powerfully portrays the interrelation of the
seething unrest among those slaving in the bowels of the earth, and
the spiritual revolt that seeks artistic expression.
No less important is the factor for rebellious awakening in modern
literature--Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Andreiev, Gorki,
Whitman, Emerson, and scores of others embodying the spirit of
universal ferment and the longing for social change.
Still more far-reaching is the modern drama, as the leaven of radical
thought and the disseminator of new values.
It might seem an exaggeration to ascribe to the modern drama such an
important role. But a study of the development of modern ideas in
most countries will prove that the drama has succeeded in driving
home great social truths, truths generally ignored when presented in
other forms. No doubt there are exceptions, as Russia and France.
Russia, with its terrible political pressure, has made people think
and has awakened their social sympathies, because of the tremendous
contrast which exists between the intellectual life of the people and
the despotic regime that is trying to crush that life. Yet while the
great dramatic works of Tolstoy, Tchechov, Gorki, and Andreiev
closely mirror the life and the struggle, the hopes and aspirations
of the Russian people, they did not influence radical thought to the
extent the drama has done in other countries.
Who can deny, however, the tremendous influence exerted by THE POWER
OF DARKNESS or NIGHT LODGING. Tolstoy, the real, true Christian, is
yet the greatest enemy of organized Christianity. With a master hand
he portrays the destructive effects upon the human mind of the power
of darkness, the superstitions of the Christian Church.
What other medium could express, with such dramatic force, the
responsibility of the Church for crimes committed by its deluded
victims; what other medium could, in consequence, rouse the
indignation of man's conscience?
Similarly direct and powerful is the indictment contained in Gorki's
NIGHT LODGING. The social pariahs, forced into poverty and crime,
yet desperately clutch at the last vestiges of hope and aspiration.
Lost existences these, blighted and crushed by cruel, unsocial
environment.
France, on the other hand, with her continuous struggle for liberty,
is indeed the cradle of radical thought; as such she, too, did not
need the drama as a means of awakening. And yet the works of
Brieux--as ROBE ROUGE, portraying the terrible corruption of the
judiciary--and Mirbeau's LES AFFAIRES SONT LES AFFAIRES--picturing
the destructive influence of wealth on the human soul--have
undoubtedly reached wider circles than most of the articles and books
which have been written in France on the social question.
In countries like Germany, Scandinavia, England, and even in
America--though in a lesser degree--the drama is the vehicle which is
really making history, disseminating radical thought in ranks not
otherwise to be reached.
Let us take Germany, for instance. For nearly a quarter of a century
men of brains, of ideas, and of the greatest integrity, made it their
life-work to spread the truth of human brotherhood, of justice, among
the oppressed and downtrodden. Socialism, that tremendous
revolutionary wave, was to the victims of a merciless and inhumane
system like water to the parched lips of the desert traveler. Alas!
The cultured people remained absolutely indifferent; to them that
revolutionary tide was but the murmur of dissatisfied, discontented
men, dangerous, illiterate troublemakers, whose proper place was
behind prison bars.
Self-satisfied as the "cultured" usually are, they could not
understand why one should fuss about the fact that thousands of
people were starving, though they contributed towards the wealth of
the world. Surrounded by beauty and luxury, they could not believe
that side by side with them lived human beings degraded to a position
lower than a beast's, shelterless and ragged, without hope or
ambition.
This condition of affairs was particularly pronounced in Germany
after the Franco-German war. Full to the bursting point with its
victory, Germany thrived on a sentimental, patriotic literature,
thereby poisoning the minds of the country's youth by the glory of
conquest and bloodshed.
Intellectual Germany had to take refuge in the literature of other
countries, in the works of Ibsen, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and
especially in the great works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgeniev.
But as no country can long maintain a standard of culture without a
literature and drama related to its own soil, so Germany gradually
began to develop a drama reflecting the life and the struggles of its
own people.
Arno Holz, one of the youngest dramatists of that period, startled
the Philistines out of their ease and comfort with his FAMILIE
SELICKE. The play deals with society's refuse, men and women of the
alleys, whose only subsistence consists of what they can pick out of
the garbage barrels. A gruesome subject, is it not? And yet what
other method is there to break through the hard shell of the minds
and souls of people who have never known want, and who therefore
assume that all is well in the world?
Needless to say, the play aroused tremendous indignation. The truth
is bitter, and the people living on the Fifth Avenue of Berlin hated
to be confronted with the truth.
Not that FAMILIE SELICKE represented anything that had not been
written about for years without any seeming result. But the dramatic
genius of Holz, together with the powerful interpretation of the
play, necessarily made inroads into the widest circles, and forced
people to think about the terrible inequalities around them.
Sudermann's EHRE[1] and HEIMAT[2] deal with vital subjects. I have
already referred to the sentimental patriotism so completely turning
the head of the average German as to create a perverted conception of
honor. Duelling became an every-day affair, costing innumerable
lives. A great cry was raised against the fad by a number of leading
writers. But nothing acted as such a clarifier and exposer of that
national disease as the EHRE.
Not that the play merely deals with duelling; it analyzes the real
meaning of honor, proving that it is not a fixed, inborn feeling, but
that it varies with every people and every epoch, depending
particularly on one's economic and social station in life. We
realize from this play that the man in the brownstone mansion will
necessarily define honor differently from his victims.