The dead fingers of spent passions, spent dreams, spent youth clutch at
the throat of the rising generation and preserve the integrity of the
American family. Not that there is a typical American family. There is
only the typical struggle between the dead and the living, between the
inert and hideous virtue of decayed souls and the rebellious desires of
their doomed progeny.
The ambitious and educated American mother is a forceful creature, a
strong, powerful woman. As an individual she is dead. Once she knew and
had the desire for beauty. Dead fingers reached into her heart and
killed it. The force of which she was doomed to become a part crushed
her. The conventions of the world are stronger than its natural
destinies. Those conventions—the conventions of the family—are not of
the man’s making. Woman attends to her own subjugation. She preserves
the spirit of the family, struggles and labors to keep it a unit, to
keep its members alike. Moaning with the tyrannical lust for possession
she enfolds her daughter in her arms. There are certain things in her
daughter which must be killed. There is a dawning of love for
“impossible” things in her daughter’s heart. There is an awakened mental
curiosity, a perceptible inclination to break from the oppressiveness of
the surrounding dead. In the night the daughter wonders and doubts. She
would like “to get away”—to go forth free of certain fiercely applied
restrictions and meet a different kind of folk, a different kind of
thought. She would like to be—to feel the things she is capable of. It
is all vague. Always revolt is vague and intangible for the daughters of
women. Revolt is for souls still living, and the living are weaker than
the dead. The living soul is a lone, individual force, its yearnings are
ephemeral and undefined. The mother knows what they are. The dead always
know what it is they have lost. And in this knowledge the mother is
strong. But the living cannot say to itself what it wishes to gain, what
it reaches to attain. Only in the stray geniuses of time has the
individual soul fought desperately and triumphantly for its
preservation. And there is no genius in the daughter. There is merely
the divine and natural instinct for self-realization. Once the mother
felt it and it was killed. Now the daughter has caught the dread
disease—the contamination which starts a cold sweat under the corset
stays of society; the thing which brings down upon it for its
destruction the phalanxes of fierce fatuities—the moribund mercenaries
employed by the home for its defense and preservation.
Something happens to crystallize the revolt. It is a man outside the
pale, a good man, a bad man. It is a book. It is a friend. Often the
struggle is fought through little things too numerous to mention and the
struggle itself too casual to classify. Sometimes it wages without a
word; at other times there are blows. And at such times the enshrouding
veils are torn aside. One can see the dead rise up, their pasty limbs
dragging with the mould and slime of their couch. One can see them
reaching their dead arms out, with the bloodless flesh hanging from them
in shreds. One can watch them crawl on their bony feet and as they come
close—these dead—the foul odor that issues from their sightless,
twisted, rotted faces hangs like a grey smeared canopy above them.
They come. They take their stand at the mother’s back. And the pitiful
struggle is on.
It is the mother who strikes the blows. Her first weapon (she uses it
like a poison) is her love. She calls it that. “You are my only
happiness,” she cries. “I have given you everything, a part of me, all
you have needed. I have sacrificed everything for you. All my dreams
have been for you. O, how can you permit anything to come between us?”
The daughter listens. There is a selfish ring to it. But love must be
forgiven for selfishness. In the schools and the churches the
preliminaries of the struggle have been insidiously fought. Children owe
duties to their parents and not to themselves. It was what the daughter
learned at school. It is what she read between the lines of her books
and heard from the lips of all around her. And now it is the murmur that
rolls into her ears. It is the odor of the dead.
Day after day the mother strikes with this weapon. Her red, furious eyes
dripping tears, she moans it out. Her voice is like the yelp of a
frantic animal. Her voice is like the whine of a woebegone fice. Her
voice is cold and hard and hollow like the echo in a tomb.
The beauty that has come to her daughter is a fragile thing. The
lovliness she visioned is the most delicately mortal of life’s
treasures. Fiercely the mother hurls herself against it, hurls the
reproaches of her dead soul, the recriminations of her entombed
spirit—the odors of the dead.... And her weapons are tangible things.
They are sentences. They are the moral perversions with which the family
unit always has fought for its preservation. They are tried things,
prophetic precedents. And the beauty in the normal being is an
indefinite force—a vagueness. It has no weapons with which to strike.
Triumphant revolt is only for martyrs and artists. It is the losing
force in normal existence.
Gradually it becomes clouded in the daughter’s soul. She feels unclean.
She imagines it is the beauty which is unclean. She does not know that
it is the uncleanliness of the dead—the uncleanliness of her mother
revealed to her in her heart by the divine light that is dying within
herself. An agony comes into her. The struggle narrows to pain. Cold
things reach at her heart. It leaps and flutters. She stands, her face
white and a look of uncanny suffering about her eyes. The dead fingers
grip fast.
The mother, moaning, shuddering, her eyes gleaming, enfolds her daughter
in her arms. “I dare you to take her from me,” she cries out to the man,
to the friend, to the book, to the world of beauty, whatever it is
toward which her daughter inclined for the divine instant of awakened
soul. “I dare you. I dare you.”
“Nothing can ever take me from you,” the daughter weeps. Death.
Tears, a form of decomposition now, roll from her cheeks. The struggle
is over. The unit has been preserved and now one may look at the unit
and see what it is. The rotted figures of the dead have dragged their
shredded flesh back to the graves.
There are different kinds of families. Only in the struggle between the
dead and the living do they become the same even when the contestants
differ. I will describe only one type. Perhaps it is _the_ American
family; perhaps it is not.
It is the family which considers culture a matter of polished
fingernails and emotional suppression and dinner table aphorisms, puns
and the classics in half morocco. It has bound volumes of _The
Philistine_ or some other mawkish philosophical twaddle on view in the
bookcase. It—the spirit of this family—knows the titles of books
memorized from literary reviews in current magazines and will discourse
bitingly on the malicious trend of these radical volumes from the
sweeping knowledge she has of their titles. In the matter of music the
spirit of this family “plays safe.” It will characterize as “tinkly” or
“syrupy” anything melodious which secretly pleases it. The rather
humorous falseness of its culture is inexhaustible.
Introspection is an indecent as well as impossible thing to the spirit
of this family. To look into her soul and see the diseased and dead
things that fill it is naturally impossible and naturally indecent.
Dostoevsky calls man an animal who can get used to anything. And a man’s
adjustment to hideous things is not so final as a woman’s.
For the spirit of this family to reveal an honest reaction when it is
contrary to the approved artificial demands of a situation is as heinous
an exhibition of bad taste as to uncover a thigh. But luckily, this
concealing of honest feeling is not often required. The spirit of this
family is incapable in the main of honest feeling. That is a part of the
beauty killed long ago in her, a part of the beauty she killed in the
daughter, a part of the beauty the daughter will strangle in her own
children. And one of the compensations for dead souls is that they
naturally feel dishonest feeling and do not have to suffer with a
realization of hypocrisy.
This family thinks of virtue in terms of legs. This family regards art
and truth with a modulated leer. It is crudely cynical of everything
outside its range. It sneers and pooh-hoos, it ostracizes and condemns.
It is vulgarly contemptuous of the factors in life superior to it. The
spirit of this family would have shrieked in outrage at the presence of
Verlaine in its home—unless he could have reflected social distinction
on it. It would have closed the doors to Ibsen,—except for the social
distinction,—to every triumphant soul that had escaped the dead fingers
and realized itself. And by some inexplicable trick of self-adjustment
the spirit of this family looks upon thought as an undesirable
affectation.
Social success means to this family a speaking acquaintance with any
wealthier unit which originally considered itself “above” this family.
Moral success means to this family an exemption from the prosecution of
the forces it has reared for its own protection—keeping out of jail, out
of scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner
gossip of its friends.
Of an evening you will find this family in the living room. The husband
and father reads a newspaper. He has worked in his office all day and is
tired. Life long ago ceased to mean anything to him. He is an animal
husk in fine linen. He has his little prejudices and his little
conventions. Indeed, he is a part of the system of the unit but not much
interested in it. He never was possessed of the capacity for beauty
which his women folk once had and which they found it necessary to kill
in each other. Man is a more natural part of the world’s ugliness. He is
coarser stuff in general. For him it is not necessary to wage any
struggle. He accepted matrimony because of a concentrated physical
curiosity in one woman, and because it was the thing to do at his age.
Love suffered epileptic dissolution in the nuptial couch. Honor toward
his woman expired when the mysteries of her flesh paled. Obedience is
his natural state—that is, long ago he established a line of least
resistance and inoculated his women folk with the fable that adherence
to _this_ line was the obedience and respect he owed them. If a latent
instinct awakens suddenly in him he indulges himself. He finds it rather
difficult to be immoral, but as he hesitates a latent strength overcomes
his fear and thus he is able to be immoral and unfaithful to his own
convenient restrictions in a natural manner and with no great loss of
sleep.
One man in ten thousand inherits the beauty of the woman who bore him
and he becomes an artist. It is not necessary for him to revolt. His
fathers have taken care of that. There is an assured place in the world
for him—not in the living room here in front of the fireplace but
elsewhere, in places of which poets sing.
The family man keeps posted. He knows what is going on in the world but
does not understand it. He is not capable of understanding. But
sometimes understanding and reason coincide with his prejudices and he
is then as liable to hold minority views as not. He is dry, sometimes
clever. But always he jogs, jogs, jogs along. He can even sleep night
after night in the same bed with his wife without feeling annoyance. His
bluntedness is complete. Dostoevsky is right.
His wife and the mother of his children is a part of the furniture of
existence for him. In his own way he is quite dead, but it was not
necessary to kill him. If his son revolts the instinct of his mother is
communicated to him and he fights. He borrows the mother’s weapons and
he blasphemes in a half-hearted way about the duty to parents. But the
beauty which the mother found easy to kill in the daughter usually
discovers a hardier citadel in the son and usually he carries it safely
into the world.
The room—this living room—is dimly and “artistically” lighted. The fire
in the grate glows. The daughter sits in a corner speaking to a friend.
At the other side sits the father—reading blankly. The wife enters. She
surveys the scene from the doorway with a feeling of warm satisfaction.
She comes in and sits down. They talk about nothing, they think about
nothing. The daughter and the young man, beneath the smooth surface of
the artificial moments, are playing at the eternal indecency. The mother
leads the conversation. Neighbors are discussed. Friends are derided.
Social inferiors are laughed to scorn. Social superiors are spoken of
with adulation and veneration. At last the father climbs to his bed like
an ox. He is tired, poor fellow. The mother follows him into the
bedroom. A victor, utterly triumphant, she hugs her dead soul to herself
and smiles. The daughter retires after being desperately kissed by the
physically curious young man, and she lies awake a while wishing in
moments of provoked sex that she too was married and meditating in
calmer spaces upon the advantages of the family unit, the fireplace, the
party calls. O, this daughter! She is the one who had the vision of
beauty. She is the one whose soul sang for a day with the capacity for
all the world’s lovliness. Honesty, purity, fineness burned in her with
their divine radiance. The lights are turned out. Death reigns supreme.