Women's rôle in the work of civilization is so great that it would
scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the edifice is reared on the
shoulders of these frail caryatides. Women know things that have never
been written or taught, and without which almost the whole equipment
of our daily life would be rendered useless. In 1814, some Cossacks,
who had discovered a supply of stockings, drew them on directly over
their boots--a general example of our commonest acts, had not women,
for centuries of centuries, been the patient teachers of childhood.
This rôle is so natural that it seems humble. We are struck only
by what is extraordinary. The powerful machinery of a woolen-mill
overwhelms us. Who has ever felt moved at the sight of the simple
play of a pair of knitting-needles? Yet, compared with these little
sticks, the greatest power-loom becomes insignificant. It represents a
particular civilization. The wooden or steel needles represent absolute
civilization. In every field the essential should be distinguished from
the accessory. In civilization women's part represents the essential.
It is easier to feel this than to prove it, for it is a question
precisely of those acts which pass unperceived along life's path--of
all sorts of things which are never mentioned, because they are not
observed or because their importance is not understood. Thus physiology
was long unknown, while curiosity was occupied with monsters. The
continuous phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a
city-dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly restored to
sight, who first noted natural beauty. There is an external physiology
which disappears in habit. Analyzed, it reveals the most important
voluntary act of our lives--voluntary, in the sense that they are
contingent compared with the primordial movements of the life of a
species; voluntary, if the will be regarded as the consciousness of an
unconscious effort.
* * * * *
Whether sense or faculty, speech cannot logically be separated from
hearing, but the education of the ear is much less perceptible than
that of the vocal apparatus. They can thus be considered separately, or
at least without observing a precise order in acquisitions which are
entangled like all the activities of life. Moving, hearing, seeing,
speaking--all these are connected. Imitation imposes itself upon all
the functions at the same time, though an appreciable order of birth
can be established for each of them. This order is of little moment in
a study where it is question, not of the intelligence which receives,
but of the intelligence which gives--of the exterior and not of the
interior psychological life.
Speech is feminine. Poets and orators are feminine types. To speak is
to do woman's work. Because woman speaks as a bird sings, she alone is
capable of teaching the language. When the child attempts to imitate
the sounds it has heard, the woman is there to watch him, to smile at
him, and to encourage him. There is established a mute working contract
between these two beings, and what patience the one who knows displays
in guiding the one who tries! The first words pronounced by a child
correspond in its mind to no object, to no sensation. The child, at
this moment of its life, is a parrot, and nothing more. It imitates.
It speaks because it hears others speaking. If the world were silent
around it, speech would remain congealed in its brain. Thence the
importance of a woman's prattle--an importance far greater than that
of the most beautiful poems and of the profoundest philosophies. The
function which makes man a man is the special work of the woman. A
child reared by a very feminine and very talkative woman is formed
rather for speech and, consequently, for psychologic consciousness.
Left to the care of a taciturn man, the same child would develop very
slowly--so slowly, perhaps, that it would never attain the full limits
of its practical intelligence.
Were it possible to assign an origin to language, one would say that
woman had created it; but the secret of all origins will forever escape
us. Birds sing, the dog barks, man speaks. It is not easier to imagine
a dumb man than a dumb dog or a dumb finch; and if these species
formerly existed without a voice, it is not easy to see why they should
have acquired an organ which many other animals, including the birds
of the South Polar regions, get along very well without. If language
were learned or acquired--if, in order to recover its first traces, the
celebrated roots, it were enough to find the common mother of Latin and
Sanskrit, of Greek and of Anglo-Saxon--it is not easy to see why the
dog does not converse with his master otherwise than with his tail, his
eyes and his yelping. But the dog will never speak, because the genius
of an animal species is as rigorously determined as the forms of the
crystalline species.
The view that the oldest language was composed of five or six hundred
monosyllables, is now without value, though it had a certain force.
It gave weight to several hypotheses whose absurdity was not at first
evident. Yet nothing had ever been observed in any real language
resembling an even unconscious reservoir of roots. Words are born of
each other by derivation, coming into the world sometimes longer,
sometimes shorter, than the original word. This derivation is always
dominated by a real, living concrete sense. No man whose mind has not
been spoiled by special studies, has the sense of roots. The ba, be,
bi, bo, bu of the alphabets, are, according to the theory, so many
roots; but a series of kindred meanings has not been attributed to
each of these sounds. They are capable, even in the same language, of
expressing them all, either by chance, or according to a logic whose
laws are undeterminable.
The primitive element in speech is not the word but the phrase. Man's
spoken phrase is instinctive, like the sung phrase of the bird, like
the yelped phrase of the dog. The word is a product of analysis.
In order to give the word priority over the phrase, the older school
started from this idea, namely, that the word is created after the
thing has been perceived, man acting as a nomenclator, as a professor
of botany who gives names to sprigs of moss. The reality is different.
The child stammers words before knowing the objects of which these
words are the signs. It is possible that man spoke--chattered--a long
time before a fixed relation became established between things and the
familiar sounds issuing from his mouth.
Thousands of languages can thus have been chattered successively on
thousands of territories--languages lacking precision, essentially
musical, a succession of phrases in which certain sounds only
corresponded to realities; but these sounds, in spite of their
importance, in spite of their utilitarian and representative value,
may be supposed to have been at first almost as fugitive as the rest
of the speech. An unwritten language never survives the generation
which created it. Among savages each generation remakes its language
so completely that the grandfather is a stranger among his own
grandchildren.
If this primitive chattering be admitted, it will readily be admitted
also that woman must have had a large share in it, while arousing the
mind of the males by her laughter and her attention. Woman has little
capacity for verbal innovation. Among so many excellent women writers,
none has ever created a language in the sense of which this is said
of Ronsard, of Montaigne, of Chateaubriand, or of Victor Hugo; but
she repeats well--often better than a man--what was said before her.
Born to conserve, she performs her rôle to perfection. Eternally,
unwearyingly she rekindles from the failing torch a new torch identical
with the old. It is in the hands of women--dancers in life's ballet,
or melancholy vestals in deep caverns--that the _lampada vitai_ shine.
What woman has been historically, she will always be and she has always
been, from before history even.
Certain words became fixed in the primitive chattering. This was the
work of woman. Destined to attention by the monotony of her domestic
labour,[1] she rebelled against the useless renewal of terms. Her life
became complicated in those lands where the game was abundant, where
nature was fertile. Men's needs increased with their wealth, and with
them, woman's occupations. Having to work more, she had less time to
listen to songs and speeches. Novelties succeeding each other too
rapidly, upset her. She corrected the language of men who, in their
turn, became disconcerted. Thus were born the words in common use, and
thus the fixed sounds corresponding to realities in man's spoken song
gradually grew in number.
Woman, whose memory is excellent, had also, from the earliest times,
no doubt, retained the most musical, the most rhythmical parts of
speech--some combination of phrases resembling those melopeias repeated
insatiably by Negroes. Man created. Woman learned by heart. If a
civilized country were one day to reach that state of mind in which
every novelty is at once welcomed and substituted for traditional ideas
and methods--if the past were to yield constantly to the future--then,
after a period of frenzied curiosity, men would be observed falling
into the apathy of the tourist who never glances twice at the same
object. In order to recover their grip, they would be obliged to seek
refuge in a purely animal existence, and civilization would perish.
Such a fate seems to have overtaken ancient peoples, so eager to renew
their pleasures that their passing has left but hypothetical traces.
Excess of activity, far more than torpor, has caused the decay of many
Asiatic civilizations. Wherever woman has been unable to intervene and
to oppose the influence of her passivity to the arrogance of the young
males, the race has exhausted itself in fugitive essays. We can, then,
be sure that, wherever a durable civilization has been organized, woman
was its cornerstone.
Arising, as a reciter, before the creator, woman formed a repertory,
a library, archives. The first song-book was woman's memory, and it
is the same with the first collection of tales, the first bundle of
documents.
However, the invention of writing came, like all progress,
successively, to diminish woman's importance as archivist. Since
everything that seemed worth remembering was fixed by signs on
durable matter, it became woman's duty and pleasure to perpetuate
what men condemned to oblivion. She has performed faithfully a task
that matter has almost always betrayed; and so it is that tales which
were never written, and which assuredly go back to the earliest ages,
have come down to us. Women who had been entertained by them as
children, entertained their own children with them in turn. In spite
of the efforts of rational pedagogy, which would like to substitute
the history of the French Revolution, or that of the founding of the
German Empire, for _Tom Thumb_, mothers still put their good children
to sleep with blue story or red, of love or of blood. But this oral
literature, whose themes are so much more numerous than those of
written literature, has been found to possess the greatest beauty,
and consequently a supreme importance. We owe the salvaging of this
treasure to woman's conservative genius.
She conserved also the songs, the tunes (and the dances accompanying
them) which man sheds at the very moment when he leaves his youth. For
him they are futilities, and he never gives them another thought. For
woman, they are means of pleasing and she remembers them always. When
hope has departed, she falls back upon them to live again the happy
days of her youth. Thus do old women keep their hearts young.
Women do not seem to have had a great share in the invention of tales
and of songs. They have preserved, which is a way of creating. Yet one
finds, nevertheless, the mark of their mind in certain variants. Their
tendency was to tone down the end of a tale, to quiet the effervescence
of a song too rollicking. This invention saved the life of many of
these small things, by making them available to children, whose memory
is an exceedingly sure casket.
Along with literature women saved a whole collection of notions
difficult to determine. It is not a question of the long string of
superstitions, but of the element of practical science contained in
these superstitions, these beliefs, these traditions. To estimate the
importance of this chapter of human knowledge, one should make a sort
of examination of his own consciousness. Then, after long reflection,
he will be able to distinguish between things learned from books,
and those which, while never written, everyone knows. What is truly
indispensable for the conduct of life has been taught us by women--the
petty rules of politeness, those acts which win us the cordiality or
deference of others; those words which assure us a welcome; those
attitudes which must be varied according to the character and the
situation; all social strategy. It is listening to women that teaches
us to speak to men, to worm our way into their will. For those alone
who know how to please, can teach the art of pleasing.
Even before he speaks, a child knows the value of a smile. It is his
first language, and nothing proves that it is absolutely instinctive.
The animal has only those attitudes which are the sign of a need. Some
are beautiful, some are pretty, but none are voluntary.
The smallest child's smile often veils an intention. Woman has taught
it the mystery of exchanges, and the fact that a friendly gesture can
win food and other things essential to life. The little girl, better
disposed than the boy to appreciate this teaching, knows the value of
curving lips and of the wave of her rosy hand, long before knowledge
of the vocal signs has permitted her tender brain the most elementary
reasoning. It is, then, in her case, pure imitation; but the act is
favoured by recollection of the end already obtained by the first
attempt, and we have here a very curious and obscure example of an
effect determining its cause in physiological unconsciousness.
Since women have little in their lives but passional relations, this
very primitive play remains the basis of their social tactics. Men feel
progressively the need of complicating this elementary science, but it
always remains for them a supreme resource. To touch his conqueror, to
please him--such is the last argument of the conquered.
All mimetic art is the work of women. Even when she is silent, a woman
continues to speak--often with a sincerity which her words lack. Even
when she is motionless she continues to speak, and she is often more
eloquent then than with words or with gestures. The form of her body
makes her breathing a language. The rhythm of her bosom betrays the
state of her soul and the degree of her emotion. No speech finds a
man more sensitive. But their eyes have at their disposal a keyboard
still more extended, though less effective. With her eyes, with the
varied curves of her mute mouth, woman can express her inmost thought.
The eye pales or kindles, lifts or lowers its look, and it spells
desire or disdain, anger or promise--so many pages understood by man
the moment he has an interest in reading them. To these gleams and
these movements, the play of the eyelids adds its value. This play is
affirmative, negative, interrogative. It utters a short and decisive
yes, or a yes of languor and abandon. It questions in the tone of anger
or of complaining. It refuses with a half-abrupt closing of the pupil,
which veils the eyes without closing them. But how many other shades
there are, and how rich in speech the smile is, also! The whole woman
speaks. She is language incarnate.
Her children will first be actors. Like their mother, they will learn
how to speak at the start with everything that is silent--precious
acquisition. Darwin found the first sketch of emotional expression
in animals. There is an important element of instinct in the human
mimetic. Woman has cultivated these primitive movements, has refined
and multiplied them. To the signs of the true emotions have come to be
added the signs of the false emotions, and then only has a language
been created. Animal expression of the emotions is not a language, for
it would be incapable of making believe. True language begins with
the lie. There is a real meaning in the famous saying that language
was given to man to disguise his thought. The lie, which is the sole
external proof of psychological consciousness, is also the sole proof
that signs are language, and not unconscious mimetic. The lie is
the very basis of language and its absolute condition. Analysis of
linguistic facts proves this clearly enough, since every word contains
a metaphor, and since every metaphor is a transposition of reality,
when it is not a wilful, premeditated falsehood. But, taking language
such as it appears to us, and supposing each word to correspond to
an object, it may be said that, if there existed a man who had never
lied, that man never spoke. It is not, in fact, speaking, to say "I
am afraid," or "I am cold," when you are afraid, or are cold. It is
expressing an emotion or a sensation by means of verbal signs analogous
to the trembling of the animal famished or frozen. But if, on the
contrary, denying his emotion or his sensation, the man who is cold
says "I am warm," and the man who is hungry says "I am not hungry,"
he speaks. Whether he employ words, gestures or written signs, it is
by this, by the lie--that is to say, by consciousness--that the man
is recognized. Lie, let it be understood, here signifies expression
of an imaginary sensation. It is a matter of psychology, not of
morality--separate domains.
If woman is language, she should be lie, and also consciousness.
All three are connected and form but one. The first of these points
has never been studied, but popular opinion favours it. Not only
do women speak more readily than men, they employ a better syntax,
a less haphazard vocabulary, their pronunciation is excellent. One
feels that language is their element. The second point, the lie, is
not disputed; but women are reproached with it, whereas it is the
consequence of another gift and, moreover, an assertion of their
spiritual nature. Women lie more than men. Then it is because they have
a greater sentiment of independence, a livelier consciousness; and here
we have reached the third point, without, it seems to me, a minute
demonstration being necessary.
The hysterical lie has been spoken of. It is probable that there is an
error here, not in the terms, but in the intention which has brought
them together. If unconscious life is meant, it is an absurdity. The
lie is, on the contrary, the very sign of consciousness, and there
can be no lie save where there is full and active consciousness. A
distempered sensation, expressed as felt, should not be confused with
the intentional travestying of the exposition of a true sensation--the
first term of the series with the last. The animal never lies. How
could it? It is forced to express its sensation just as he feels
it. If it wishes to bite, the dog curves his lips, shows his teeth.
If you see it hold back, play the hypocrite, lie, it is because,
through its contact with man, it has perhaps acquired a rudiment of
consciousness--because its acquired education comes, at such a moment,
into conflict with its instinct. Moreover, ruse--especially when
applied to defence, or to the search for food--is something quite
different from the lie. It is the acute form of prudence. The true lie
is purposeless, without other utility than the assertion of a superior
detachment. It presents itself as a negation of the ties that attach
man to reality, in which respect it approaches poetry and art, of which
it is one of the elements. Art is born, like the lie, of a lively
consciousness of the sensations and emotions. It declares a state of
extreme sensibility, together with a tendency to repel that reality
whereby a man's senses were wounded. Art, whatever its form, implies
a profound knowledge of the signs, and the will to transpose them,
without reference to their customary concordances. The artist is he
who lies superiorly--better than other men. If he lies with speech, he
is the poet; with inarticulate sounds, the musician; with forms whose
attitudes he fixes, the sculptor, and his art is merely the extreme
development of the language of motion (of which the dancer represents
a very fugitive stage); with lines and colours, the painter, and what
does this last do if not restore to primitive hieroglyphics their true
aspect and all their natural scope? Art is a language, and it is only
that.
But if woman is language, how do women happen to have played so
inconspicuous a part in the supreme activity of language? Critics,
to flatter them, have alleged some sort of lateral heredity whereby
it is demonstrated that, as the daughters of mothers less and less
cultivated, going back through the centuries, it is not surprising
that their aptitudes are inferior to those of the males. This is not
to be taken seriously. For, if it be true that genius and talent are
often directly related with anterior cultures, there are also sudden
aptitudes developed by the environment. Why should not a girl find
this aptitude in her flesh, like her brother? Moreover, for thousands
of years now, women have been taught music. Yet it is perhaps the art
in which they have least created. The cause lies deeper. Woman is
language, but language is useful. Her rôle is not to create, but to
conserve. She accomplishes this task marvellously. She creates neither
poems nor statues, but she creates the creators of the poems and of the
statues. She teaches them language, which is the condition of their
science, the lie which is the condition of their art, the consciousness
which gives them their genius. When the child, about the age of six or
seven, leaves the woman's hands, the man is already man. He speaks, and
that is man in his entirety.
Woman's great intellectual task is teaching the language. The
grammarians and their substitutes, school-teachers and professors,
fancy that they are the masters of language, and that, without
their intervention, men's language would perish in confusion and
incoherence. They have been maintained for ages in this illusion, yet
there is none more ridiculous. Women are the elementary, and poets the
superior artisans of language, both unconscious of their function.
The intervention of grammarians is almost always bad, unless it limit
itself to a statement of the facts--unless it dare restore to the hands
of women and of poets an influence which science could exert only with
injustice. Here are some children who speak. They are going to school
to have a lesson in grammar. They speak, and employ all the forms of
the verb, all the shades of syntax, easily and correctly. They speak,
but here now is the school, and the master succeeds in teaching them
the nature of the imperfect subjunctive. For a function, the pedagogue
has substituted a notion. He has replaced the act by consciousness of
the act, the word by its definition. He teaches grammar. He does not
teach language.
Language is a function. Grammar is the analysis of this function. It is
as useless to know grammar in order to speak one's native tongue, as to
know physiology in order to breathe with one's lungs, or to walk with
one's legs. Compared with the rôle of the ignorant mother who plucks,
like a flower, the first word blossoming on her child's lips, the
teacher's rôle amounts to almost nothing. It is the mother herself who
sowed this word which has just bloomed. For, if language be a function,
it must be given the material on which to work. A woman's idle chatter,
differing so slightly from that of the little girl talking to her doll,
is the child's first lesson, and the one whose importance surpasses
every other. Words are so many seeds which will sprout, grow and come
to fruition in the young brain. Without this ceaseless random sowing,
the child's linguistic function would remain inert, and only vague and
perhaps inarticulate sounds would issue from its lips. It has sometimes
been wondered what language children, brought up together beyond reach
of the human voice, would speak. Perhaps they would speak none at all.
It is a question that no one can solve. At all events, they would speak
merely a rudimentary language--that is to say, one too rich, variable
and entirely unknown. For innate roots exist no more than innate ideas.
The child does not create his language. Still less does he secrete
his language. He learns it. He speaks the way people speak about him
in his cradle. He is a phonograph and at first functions no less
mechanically. Before he is able to situate verbal signs with reference
to the objects represented, he possesses them in great quantity, but in
confusion, pell-mell. Later he will learn to utilize this wealth. Since
he knows, on the one hand, the words and, on the other, the objects,
the operation of combining them in his memory will be of the simplest,
most natural order. The woman directs this combination joyfully, and
she admires herself in her admiration of the child's progress. She
believes that the double acquisition of the word and of the object is
made exclusively at her command, and that fills her with pride. Thus,
ignorance of the child's psychological mechanism assures the teacher's
success.
Later, as poet, story-teller, philosopher, theologian or moralist--as
creator of values, in Nietzsche's very forceful expression--the child
will usually employ in her honour this language that he receives almost
entirely from woman. The larger part of literature is the indirect
work of woman, made for her, to please or to pique her, to exalt or
to decry her, to touch her heart, to idealize or to curse her beauty
and her love. The two sexes had to be thus profoundly dissimilar,
foreign, opposite, for one to become the other's adorer. With equality
of tastes, of needs, of desires, bodily differences would not have
sufficed, nor the injunction of the species. Humanity could perpetuate
itself without love;[2] but love would have been impossible without the
radical divergences which render man and woman two mutually mysterious
worlds. Only the unknown can be adored. There is no longer a religion
where there is no longer mystery. In all societies, so long as she
is young and beautiful, woman, even when a slave, is the mistress of
civilization. The poets, inspired by her grace, heighten this supremacy
by making her the theme of their songs; and poetry, which had, at
first, no other aim than to tell the joys of possession or the pangs of
desire, completed its evolution by creating love. For love, with all
the sentiment, the passion, the dream, the happiness, the tears which
this word implies, is at bottom a verbal creation and the imaginative
achievement of the artists of language.
It is through poems, tales, traditional narratives, that ordinary man,
inclined to enjoyment only, has learned to love, to enhance infinitely
his commonplace joys and futile sorrows. Let us repeat here Nietzsche's
saying--the poet has been the creator of sentimental values. But almost
as soon as created, they have escaped him. Possessing herself of these
new values, woman has turned them into instruments to assure her
sovereignty. She has, in all simplicity, culled the fruits of language,
her work.
How love has evolved under this domination, with all the benefits
which have accrued from it, would be a long chapter in the history of
civilization.
1901.
[1] The idea of thus introducing attention into the world through woman
is M. Ribot's, in his _Psychologie de l'attention_.
[2] Copulation would have sufficed for that. Life in common, after
fertilization, is extremely rare, except among primates and birds.
Among carnivorous insects, the union is often mortal for the male whom
the stronger female devours.
Note.--Philosophic deductions are of value only if they agree exactly
with science; but then they have a value. I have therefore availed
myself of the opportunity to complete the note on a previous page,
concerning the lie considered as a vital reaction. Here is the
scientific statement of the question:
"M. R. Quinton has been led, in the course of his investigations,
to recognize that all living beings are divided into two great
physiological groups, which correspond exactly to the two anatomical
groups: _Invertebrates_ and _Vertebrates_--The first, and lower group
(Invertebrates), always in equilibrium with the environment, supporting
all the exterior conditions, however unfavourable; the second, and
higher (Vertebrates), not accepting these conditions, reacting against
them, always in disequilibrium with the environment, maintaining
internally the saline concentration of their origins, in opposition
to the sea, which becomes more concentrated, or to fresh water which
loses its salt; maintaining, moreover, its original temperature
in opposition to a terrestrial environment which grows colder,
_lying to the environment_, in short, in order to maintain its most
favourable conditions of life. The lie, of which we speak, is only the
psychological form of this reaction, on the part of the _Vertebrates_,
against the hostility of the environment."
The obscure terms in this note (saline concentration, temperature of
the origins) are explained in M. Quinton's book: _L'Eau de mer, milieu
organique_.