brought up in almost any tribe of savages, they would a few years
previously have gone through regular offices of initiation into manhood
and womanhood, during which time ceremonies (possibly indecent in our
eyes) would at any rate have made many misapprehensions impossible. As
it is, the civilized girl is led to the “altar” often in uttermost
ignorance and misunderstanding as to the nature of the sacrificial rites
about to be consummated. The youth too is ignorant in his way. Perhaps
he is unaware that love in the female is, in a sense, more diffused than
in the male, less specially sexual: that it dwells longer in caresses
and embraces, and determines itself more slowly towards the reproductive
system. Impatient, he injures and horrifies his partner, and
unconsciously perhaps aggravates the very hysterical tendency which
marriage might and should have allayed.[13]
Among the middle and well-to-do classes especially, the conditions of
high civilization, by inducing an overfed masculinity in the males and a
nervous and hysterical tendency in the females,[14] increase the
difficulties mentioned; and it is among the “classes” too that the
special evils exist of sex-starvation and sex-ignorance on the one hand,
and of mere licentiousness on the other.
Among the comparatively uncivilized mass of the people, where a good
deal of familiarity between the sexes takes place before marriage, and
where probably there is less ignorance on the one side and less
licentiousness on the other, these ills are not so prominent. But here
too the need for some sensible teaching is clear; and sheer neglect of
the law of Transmutation, or sheer want of self-control, are liable to
make the proletarian union brutish enough.
So far with regard to difficulties arising from personal ignorance and
inexperience. But stretching beyond and around all these are those
others that arise from the special property relation between the two
sexes, and from deep-lying historic and economic causes generally. The
long historic serfdom of woman, creeping down into the moral and
intellectual natures of the two sexes, has exaggerated the naturally
complementary relation of the male and the female into an absurd
caricature of strength on the one hand and dependence on the other. This
is well seen in the ordinary marriage-relation of the common-prayer book
type. The frail and delicate female is supposed to cling round the
sturdy husband’s form, or to depend from his arm in graceful incapacity;
and the spectator is called upon to admire the charming effect of the
union—as of the ivy with the oak—forgetful of the terrible moral,
namely, that (in the case of the trees at any rate) it is really a
death-struggle which is going on, in which either the oak must perish
suffocated in the embraces of its partner, or in order to free the
former into anything like healthy development the ivy must be
sacrificed.
Too often of course of such marriages the egoism, lordship and physical
satisfaction of the man are the chief motive causes. The woman is
practically sacrificed to the part of the maintenance of these male
virtues. It is for her to spend her days in little forgotten details of
labor and anxiety for the sake of the man’s superior comfort and
importance, to give up her needs to his whims, to “humor” him in all
ways she can; it is for her to wipe her mind clear of all opinions in
order that she may hold it up as a kind of mirror in which he may behold
reflected his lordly self; and it is for her to sacrifice even her
physical health and natural instincts in deference to what is called her
“duty” to her husband.
How bitterly alone many such a woman feels! She has dreamed of being
folded in the arms of a strong man, and surrendering herself, her life,
her mind, her all, to his service. Of course it is an unhealthy dream,
an illusion, a mere luxury of love; and it is destined to be dashed. She
has to learn that self-surrender may be just as great a crime as
self-assertion. She finds that her very willingness to be sacrificed
only fosters in the man, perhaps for his own self-defense, the egotism
and coldness that so cruelly wound her.
For how often does he with keen prevision see that if he gives way from
his coldness the clinging dependent creature will infallibly overgrow
and smother him!—that she will cut her woman-friends, will throw aside
all her own interests and pursuits in order to “devote” herself to him,
and, affording no sturdy character of her own in which he can take any
interest, will hang the festoons of her affection on every ramification
of his wretched life—nor leave him a corner free—till he perishes from
all manhood and social or heroic uses into a mere matrimonial
clothes-peg, a warning and a wonderment to passers by!
However, as an alternative, it sometimes happens that the Woman, too
wise to sacrifice her own life indiscriminately to the egoism of her
husband, and not caring for the “festoon” method, adopts the middle
course of appearing to minister to him while really pursuing her own
purposes. She cultivates the gentle science of indirectness. While
holding up a mirror for the Man to admire himself in, behind that mirror
she goes her own way and carries out her own designs, separate from him;
and while sacrificing her body to his wants, she does so quite
deliberately and for a definite reason, namely, because she has found
out that she can so get a shelter for herself and her children, and can
solve the problem of that maintenance which society has hitherto denied
to her in her own right. For indeed by a cruel fate women have been
placed in exactly that position where the sacrifice of their
self-respect for base motives has easily passed beyond a temptation into
being a necessity. They have had to live, and have too often only been
able to do so by selling themselves into bondage to the man. Willing or
unwilling, overworked or dying, they have had to bear children to the
caprice of their lords; and in this serf-life their very natures have
been blunted; they have lost—what indeed should be the very glory and
crown of woman’s being—the perfect freedom and the purity of their
love.[15]
At this whole spectacle of woman’s degradation the human male has looked
on with stupid and open-mouthed indifference—as an ox might look on at a
drowning ox-herd—not even dimly divining that his own fate was somehow
involved. He has calmly and obliviously watched the woman drift farther
and farther away from him, till at last, with the loss of an intelligent
and mutual understanding between the sexes, Love with unequal wings has
fallen lamed to the ground. Yet it would be idle to deny that even in
such a state of affairs as that depicted, men and women have in the past
and do often even now find some degree of satisfaction—simply indeed
because their types of character are such as belong to, and have been
evolved in accordance with, this relation.
To-day, however, there are thousands of women—and everyday more
thousands—to whom such a lopsided alliance is detestable; who are
determined that they will no longer endure the arrogant lordship and
egoism of men, nor countenance in themselves or other women the craft
and servility which are the necessary complements of the relation; who
see too clearly in the oak-and-ivy marriage its parasitism on the one
hand and strangulation on the other to be sensible of any
picturesqueness; who feel too that they have capacities and powers of
their own which need space and liberty, and some degree of sympathy and
help, for their unfolding; and who believe that they have work to do in
the world, as important in its own way as any that men do in theirs.
Such women have broken into open warfare—not against marriage, but
against a marriage which makes true and equal love an impossibility.
They feel that as long as women are economically dependent they cannot
stand up for themselves and insist on those rights which men from
stupidity and selfishness will not voluntarily grant them.
On the other hand there are thousands—and one would hope every day more
thousands—of men who (whatever their forerunners may have thought) do
not desire or think it delightful to have a glass continually held up
for them to admire themselves in; who look for a partner in whose life
and pursuits they can find some interest, rather than for one who has no
interest but in them; who think perhaps that they would rather minister
than be (like a monkey fed with nuts in a cage) the melancholy object of
another person’s ministrations; and who at any rate feel that love, in
order to be love at all, must be absolutely open and sincere, and free
from any sentiment of dependence or inequality. They see that the
present cramped condition of women is not only the cause of the false
relation between the sexes, but that it is the fruitful source—through,
its debarment of any common interests—of that fatal boredom of which we
have spoken, and which is the bugbear of marriage; and they would gladly
surrender all of that masterhood and authority which is supposed to be
their due, if they could only get in return something like a frank and
level comradeship.
Thus while we see in the present inequality of the sexes an undoubted
source of marriage troubles and unsatisfactory alliances, we see also
forces at work which are tending to reaction, and to bringing the two
nearer again to each other—so that while differentiated they will not
perhaps in the future be quite so much differentiated as now, but only
to a degree which will enhance and adorn, instead of destroy, their
sense of mutual sympathy.
There is another point which ought to be considered as contributing to
the ill-success of many marriages, and which no doubt is closely
connected with that just discussed—but which deserves separate
treatment. I mean the harshness of the line, the kind of “ring-fence,”
which social opinion (at any rate in this country) draws round the
married pair with respect to their relations to outsiders. On the one
hand, and within the fence, society allows practically the utmost
passional excess or indulgence, and condones it; on the other hand (I am
speaking of the middling bulk of the people, not of the extreme
aristocratic and slum classes) beyond that limit, the slightest
familiarity, or any expression of affection which might by any
possibility be interpreted as deriving from sexual feeling, is sternly
anathematized. Marriage, by a kind of absurd fiction, is represented as
an oasis situated in the midst of an arid desert—in which latter, is
pretended, neither of the two parties is so fortunate as to find any
objects of real affectional interest. If they do they have carefully to
conceal the same from the other party.
The result of this convention is obvious enough. The married pair, thus
driven as well as drawn into closest continual contact with each other,
are put through an ordeal which might well cause the stoutest affection
to quail. To have to spend all your life with another person is severe;
but to have all outside personal interests, except of the most abstract
kind, debarred, and if there happens to be any natural jealousy in the
case, to have it tenfold increased by public interference, is terrible;
and yet unless the contracting parties are fortunate enough to be, both
of them, of such a temperament that they are capable of strong
attachments to persons of their own sex—and this does not always exclude
jealousy—such must be their fate.
It is hardly necessary to say, not only how dull a place this makes the
home, but also how narrowing it acts on the lives of the married pair.
However appropriate the union may be in itself it cannot be good that it
should degenerate—as it tends to degenerate so often, and where man and
wife are most faithful to each other—into a mere egoisme a deux. And
right enough no doubt as a great number of such unions actually are, it
must be confessed that the bourgeois marriage as a rule, and just in its
most successful and pious and respectable form, carries with it an
odious sense of Stuffiness and narrowness, moral and intellectual; and
that the type of Family which it provides is too often like that which
is disclosed when on turning over a large stone we disturb an insect
Home that seldom sees the light.
But in cases where the marriage does not happen to be particularly
successful or unsuccessful, when perhaps a true but not overpoweringly
intense affection is satiated at a needlessly early stage by the
continual and unrelieved impingement of the two personalities on each
other, then the boredom resulting is something frightful to
contemplate—and all the more so because of the genuine affection behind
it, which contemplates with horror its own suicide. The weary couples
that may be seen at seaside places and pleasure resorts—the respectable
working-man with his wife trailing along by his side, or the highly
respectable stock-jobber arm-in-arm with his better and larger
half—their blank faces, utter want of any common topic of conversation
which has not been exhausted a thousand times already, and their obvious
relief when the hour comes which will take them back to their several
and divided occupations—these illustrate sufficiently what I mean. The
curious thing is that jealousy (accentuated as it is by social opinion)
sometimes increases in exact proportion to mutual boredom; and there are
thousands of cases of married couples leading a cat-and-dog life, and
knowing that they weary each other to distraction, who for that very
reason dread all the more to lose sight of each other, and thus never
get a chance of that holiday from their own society, and renewal of
outside interests, which would make a real good time for them possible.
Thus the sharpness of the line which society draws around the pair, and
the kind of fatal snap-of-the-lock with which marriage suddenly cuts
them off from the world, not only precluding the two, as might fairly be
thought advisable, from sexual, but also barring any openly affectional
relations with outsiders, and corroborating the selfish sense of
monopoly which each has in the other,—these things lead inevitably to
the narrowing down of lives and the blunting of general human interests,
to intense mutual ennui, and when (as an escape from these evils)
outside relations are covertly indulged in, to prolonged and systematic
deceit.
From all which the only conclusion seems to be that marriage must be
either alive or dead. As a dead thing it can of course be petrified into
a hard and fast formula, but if it is to be a living bond, that living
bond must be trusted to, to hold the lovers together; nor be too
forcibly stiffened and contracted by private jealousy and public
censorship, lest the thing that it would preserve for us perish so, and
cease altogether to be beautiful. It is the same with this as with
everything else. If we would have a living thing we must give that thing
some degree of liberty—even though liberty bring with it risk. If we
would debar all liberty and all risk, then we can have only the mummy
and dead husk of the thing.
Thus far I have had the somewhat invidious task, but perhaps necessary
as a preliminary one, of dwelling on the defects and drawbacks of the
present marriage system. I am sensible that, with due discretion, some
things might have been said, which have not been said in its praise; its
successful, instead of its unsuccessful, instances might have been
cited; and taking for granted the dependence of women, and other points
which have already been sufficiently discussed, it might have been
possible to show that the bourgeois arrangement was on the whole as
satisfactory as could be expected. But such a course would neither have
been sincere nor have served any practical purpose. In view of the
actually changing relations between the sexes, it is obvious that
changes in the form of the marriage institution are impending, and the
questions which are really pressing on folks’ mind are: What are those
changes going to be? and, Of what kind do we wish them to be?
MARRIAGE
A FORECAST
In answer to the last question it is not improbable that the casual
reader might suppose the writer of these pages to be in favor of a
general and indiscriminate loosening of all ties—for indeed it is always
easy to draw a large inference even from the simplest expression.
But such a conclusion would be rash. There is little doubt, I think,
that the compulsion of the marriage-tie (whether moral, social, or
merely legal) acts beneficially in a considerable number of cases—though
it is obvious that the more the compelling force takes a moral or social
form and the less purely legal it is, the better; and that any changes
which led to a cheap and continual transfer of affections from one
object to another would be disastrous both to the character and
happiness of a population. While we cannot help seeing that the
marriage-relation—in order to become the indwelling-place of Love—must
be made far more free than it is at present, we may also recognize that
a certain amount of external pressure is not (as things are at least)
without its uses: that, for instance, it tends on the whole to
concentrate affectional experience and romance on one object, and that
though this may mean a loss at times in breadth it means a gain in depth
and intensity; that, in many cases, if it were not for some kind of
bond, the two parties, after their first passion for each other was
past, and when the unavoidable period of friction had set in, might in a
moment of irritation easily fly apart, whereas being forced for a while
to tolerate each other’s defects they learn thereby one of the best
lessons of life—a tender forbearance and gentleness, which as time goes
on does not unfrequently deepen again into a more pure and perfect love
even than at first—a love founded indeed on the first physical intimacy,
but concentrated and intensified by years of linked experience, of
twined associations, of shared labors, and of mutual forgiveness; and in
the third place that the existence of a distinct tie or pledge
discredits the easily-current idea that mere pleasure-seeking is to be
the object of the association of the sexes—a phantasmal and delusive
notion, which if it once got its head, and the bit between its teeth,
might soon dash the car of human advance in ruin to the ground.
But having said thus much, it is obvious that external public opinion
and pressure are looked upon only as having an educational value; and
the question arises whether there is beneath this any reality of
marriage which will ultimately emerge and make itself felt, enabling men
and women to order their relations to each other, and to walk freely,
unhampered by props or pressures from without.
And it would hardly be worth while writing on this subject, if one did
not believe in some such reality. Practically I do not doubt that the
more people think about these matters, and the more experience they
have, the more they must ever come to feel that there is such a thing as
a permanent and life-long union—perhaps a many-life-long union—founded
on some deep elements of attachment and congruity in character; and the
more they must come to prize the constancy and loyalty which rivets such
unions, in comparison with the fickle passion which tends to dissipate
them.
In all men who have reached a certain grade of evolution, and certainly
in almost all women, the deep rousing of the sexual nature carries with
it a romance and tender emotional yearning towards the object of
affection, which lasts on and is not forgotten, even when the sexual
attraction has ceased to be strongly felt. This, in favorable cases,
forms the basis of what may almost be called an amalgamated personality.
That there should exist one other person in the world towards whom all
openness of interchange should establish itself, from whom there should
be no concealment; whose body should be as dear to one, in every part,
as one’s own; with whom there should be no sense of Mine or Thine, in
property or possession; into whose mind one’s thoughts should naturally
flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a new illumination;
and between whom and oneself there should be a spontaneous rebound of
sympathy in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; such is
perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul. It is obvious however
that this state of affairs cannot be reached at a single leap, but must
be the gradual result of years of intertwined memory and affection. For
such a union Love must lay the foundation, but patience and gentle
consideration and self-control must work unremittingly to perfect the
structure. At length each lover comes to know the complexion of the
other’s mind, the wants, bodily and mental, the needs, the regrets, the
satisfactions of the other, almost as his or her own—and without
prejudice in favor of self rather than in favor of the other; above all,
both parties come to know in course of time, and after perhaps some
doubts and trials, that the great want, the great need, which holds them
together, is not going to fade away into thin air; but is going to
become stronger and more indefeasible as the years go on. There falls a
sweet, an irresistible, trust over their relation to each other, which
consecrates as it were the double life, making both feel that nothing
can now divide; and robbing each of all desire to remain, when death has
indeed (or at least in outer semblance) removed the other.[16]
So perfect and gracious a union—even if not always realized—is still, I
say, the bona fide desire of most of those who have ever thought about
such matters. It obviously yields far more and more enduring joy and
satisfaction in life than any number of frivolous relationships. It
commends itself to the common sense, so to speak, of the modern mind—and
does not require, for its proof, the artificial authority of Church and
State. At the same time it is equally evident—and a child could
understand this—that it requires some rational forbearance and
self-control for its realization, and it is quite intelligible too, as
already said, that there may be cases in which a little outside
pressure, of social opinion, or even actual law, may be helpful for the
supplementing or reinforcement of the weak personal self-control of
those concerned.
The modern Monogamic Marriage, however, certified and sanctioned by
Church and State, though apparently directed to this ideal, has for the
most part fallen short of it. For in constituting—as in a vast number of
cases—a union resting on nothing but the outside pressure of Church and
State, it constituted a thing obviously and by its nature bad and
degrading; while in its more successful instances by a too great
exclusiveness it has condemned itself to a fatal narrowness and
stuffiness.