The criminal psychologist finds difficulties where hidden impulses are
at work without seeming to have any relation to their results. In such
cases the starting-point for explanation is sought in the wrong
direction. I say starting-point, because “motive” must be conscious, and
“ground” might be misunderstood. We know of countless criminal cases
which we face powerless because we do indeed know the criminal but are
unable to explain the causal connection between him and the crime, or
because, again, we do not know the criminal, and judge from the facts
that we might have gotten a clew if we had understood the psychological
development of the crime. If we seek for “grounds,” we may possibly
think of so many of them as never to approach the right one; if we seek
motives, we may be far misled because we are able only to bring the
criminal into connection with his success, a matter which he must have
had in mind from the beginning. It is ever easy for us when motive and
crime are in open connection: greed, theft; revenge, arson; jealousy,
murder; etc. In these cases the whole business of examination is an
example in arithmetic, possibly difficult, but fundamental. When,
however, from the deed to its last traceable grounds, even to the
attitude of the criminal, a connected series may be discovered and yet
no explanation is forthcoming, then the business of interpretation has
reached its end; we begin to feel about in the dark. If we find nothing,
the situation is comparatively good, but it is exceedingly bad in the
numerous cases in which we believe ourselves to have sighted and pursued
the proper solution.
Such a hidden source or starting-point of very numerous crimes is sex.
That it often works invisibly is due to the sense of shame. Therefore it
is more frequent in women. The hidden sexual starting-point plays its
part in the little insignificant lie of an unimportant woman witness, as
well as in the poisoning of a husband for the sake of a paramour still
to be won. It sails everywhere under a false flag; nobody permits the
passion to show in itself; it must receive another name, even in the
mind of the woman whom it dominates.
The first of the forms which the sexual impulse takes is false piety,
religiosity. This is something ancient. Friedreich points to the
connection between religious activity and the sexual organization, and
cites many stories about saints, like that of the nun Blanbekin, of whom
it was said, “eam scire desiderasse cum lacrimis, et moerore maximo,
ubinam esset praeputium Christi.” The holy Veronica Juliani, in memory
of the lamb of God, took a lamb to bed with her and nursed it at her
breast. Similarly suggestive things are told of St. Catherine of Genoa,
of St. Armela, of St. Elizabeth, of the Child Jesus, etc. Reinhard says
correctly that sweet memories are frequently nothing more or less than
outbursts of hidden passion and attacks of sensual love. Seume is
mistaken in his assertion that mysticism lies mainly in weakness of the
nerves and colic--it lies a span deeper.
The use of this fact is simple. We must discover whether a woman is
morally pure or sensual, etc. This is important, not only in violations
of morality, but in every violation of law. The answers we receive to
questions on this matter are almost without exception worthless or
untrue, because the object of the question is not open to view, is
difficult to observe, and is kept hidden from even the nearest. Our
purpose is, therefore, best attained by directing the question to
religious activity, religiosity, and similar traits. These are not only
easy to perceive, but are openly exhibited because of their nature.
Whoever assumes piety, does so for the sake of other people, therefore
does not hide it. If religious extravagance can be reliably confirmed by
witnesses, it will rarely be a mistake to assume inclination to more or
less stifled sexual pleasure.
Examples of the relationship are known to every one of us, but I want to
cite two out of my own experience as types. In one of them the question
turned on the fact that a somewhat old, unmarried woman had appropriated
certain rather large trust sums and had presented them to her servant.
At first every suspicion of the influence of sex was set aside. Only the
discovery of the fact that in her ostentatious piety she had set up an
altar in her house, and compelled her servant to pray at it in her
company, called attention to the deep interest of this very moral maiden
in her servant.
The second case dealt with the poisoning of an old, impotent husband by
his young wife. The latter was not suspected by anybody, but at her
examination drew suspicion to herself by her unctuous, pious appearance.
She was permitted to express herself at length on religious themes and
showed so very great a love of saints and religious secrets that it was
impossible to doubt that a glowing sensuality must be concealed
underneath this religious ash. Adultery could not be proved, she must
have for one reason or another avoided it, and that her impotent husband
was unsatisfactory was now indubitable. The supposition that she wanted
to get rid of him in order to marry somebody else was now inevitable;
and as this somebody else was looked for and discovered, the adduction
of evidence of her guilt was no longer difficult.
How captious it is to prove direct passion and to attach reasonable
suspicion thereto, and how necessary it is, first of all, to establish
what the concealing material is, is shown in a remark of Kraus,[265] who
asserts that the wife never affects to be passionate with her husband;
her desire is to seduce him and she could not desire that if she were
not passionate. This assertion is only correct in general. It is not,
however, true that woman has no reason for affectation, for there are
enough cases in which some woman, rendered with child by a poor man,
desires to seduce a man of wealth in order to get a wealthy father for
her child. In such and similar cases, the woman could make use of every
trick of seduction without needing to be in the least passionately
disposed.
Another important form of submerged sexuality is ennui. Nobody can say
what ennui is, and everybody knows it most accurately. Nobody would say
that it is burdensome, and yet everybody knows, again, that a large
group of evil deeds spring from ennui. It is not the same as idleness; I
may be idle without being bored, and I may be bored although I am busy.
At best, boredom may be called an attitude which the mind is thrown into
because of an unsatisfied desire for different things. We speak of a
tedious region, a tedious lecture, and tedious company only by way of
metonymy--we always mean the emotional state they put us into. The
internal condition is determinative, for things that are boresome to one
may be very interesting to another. A collection, a library, a lecture,
are all tedious and boresome by transposition of the emotional state to
the objective content, and in this way the idea of boredom gets a wide
scope. We, however, shall speak of boredom as an emotional state. We
find it most frequently among girls, young women, and among undeveloped
or feminine men as a very significant phenomenon. So found, it is that
particular dreamful, happy, or unhappy attitude expressed in desire for
something absent, in quiet reproaches concerning the lack of the
satisfaction of that desire, with the continually recurring wish for
filling out an inner void. The basis of all this is mainly sex. It can
not be proved as such mathematically, but experience shows that the
emotional attitude occurs only in the presence of sexual energy, that it
is lacking when the desires are satisfied, but that otherwise, even the
richest and best substitution can offer no satisfaction. It is not
daring, therefore, to infer the erotic starting-point. Again we see how
the moralizing and training influence of rigidly-required work
suppresses all superfluous states which themselves make express demands
and might want complete satisfaction.
But everything has its limits, and frequently the gentle, still power of
sweet ennui is stronger than the pressure and compulsion of work. When
this power is present, it never results in good, rarely in anything
indifferent, and frequently forbidden fruit ripens slowly in its shadow.
Nobody will assert that ennui is the cause of illicit relations, of
seduction, of adultery and all the many sins that depend on it--from
petty misappropriations for the sake of the beloved, to the murder of
the unloved husband. But ennui is for the criminal psychologist a sign
that the woman was unsatisfied with what she had and wanted something
else. From wishing to willing, from willing to asking, is not such a
great distance. But if we ask the repentant sinner when she began to
think of her criminal action we always learn that she suffered from
incurable ennui, in which wicked thoughts came and still more wicked
plans were hatched. Any experienced criminal psychologist will tell you,
when you ask him, whether he has been much subject to mistakes in trying
to explain women’s crimes from the starting-point of their ennui. The
neighborhood knows of the periods of this ennui, and the sinner thinks
that they are almost discovered if she is asked about them. Cherchez la
femme, cherchez l’amour; cherchez l’ennui; and hundreds of times you
find the solution.
Conceit, too, may be caused by hidden sexuality. We need only to use the
word denotatively, for when we speak of the conceit of a scholar, an
official, or a soldier, we mean properly the desire for fame, the
activity of getting oneself praised and recognized. Conceit proper is
only womanish or a property of feminine men, and just as, according to
Darwin, the coloration of birds, insects, and even plants serves only
the purposes of sexual selection and has, therefore, sexual grounds, so
also the conceit of woman has only sexual purpose. She is conceited for
men alone even though through the medium of other women. As Lotze wrote
in his “Mikrokosmus,” “Everything that calls attention to her person
without doing her any harm is instinctively used by woman as a means in
sexual conflict.” There is much truth in the terms “means” and “sexual
conflict.” The man takes the battle up directly, and if we deal with
this subject without frills we may not deny that animals behave just as
men do. The males battle directly with each other for the sake of the
females, who are compelled to study how to arouse this struggle for
their person, and thus hit upon the use of conceit in sexual conflict.
That women are conceited does not much matter to us criminal
psychologists; we know it and do not need to be told. But the forms in
which their conceit expresses itself are important; its consequences and
its relation to other conditions are important.
To make use of feminine conceit in the court-room is not an art but an
unpermissible trick which might lead too far. Whoever wants to succeed
with women, as Madame de Rieux says, “must bring their self-love into
play.” And St. Prospère: “Women are to be sought not through their
senses--their weakness is in their heart and conceit.” These properties
are, however, so powerful that they may easily lead to deception. If the
judge does not understand how to follow this prescription it does no
good, but if he does understand it he has a weapon with which woman may
be driven too far, and then wounded pride, anger, and even suggestion
work in far too vigorous a manner. For example, a woman wants to defend
her lover before the judge. Now, if the latter succeeds by the
demonstration of natural true facts in wounding her conceit, in
convincing her that she is betrayed, harmed, or forgotten by her
protected lover, or if she is merely made to believe this, she goes, in
most cases, farther than she can excuse, and accuses and harms him as
much as possible; tries, if she is able, to destroy him--whether rightly
or wrongly she does not care. She has lost her lover and nobody else
shall have him. “Feminine conceit,” says Lombroso, “explains itself
especially in the fact that the most important thing in the life of
woman is the struggle for men.” This assertion is strengthened by a long
series of examples and historical considerations and can serve as a
guiding thread in many labyrinthine cases. First of all, it is important
to know in many trials whether a woman has already taken up this
struggle for men, i.e., whether she has a lover, or wishes to have a
lover. If it can be shown that she has suddenly become conceited, or her
conceit has been really intensified, the question has an unconditionally
affirmative answer. Frequently enough one may succeed even in
determining the particular man, by ascertaining with certainty the time
at which this conceit first began, and whether it had closer or more
distant reference to some man. If these conditions, once discovered, are
otherwise at all confirmed, and there are no mistakes in observation,
the inference is inevitably certain.
We learn much concerning feminine conceit when we ask how a man could
have altered the inclination of a woman whose equal he in no sense was.
It is not necessary in such cases to fuss about the insoluble riddle of
the female heart and about the ever-dark secrets of the feminine soul.
Vulpes vult fraudem, lupus agnum, femina laudem--this illuminates every
profundity. The man in question knew how to make use of laudem--he knew
how to excite feminine conceit, and so vanquished others who were worth
much more than he.
This goes so far that by knowing the degree of feminine conceit we know
also the vivacity of feminine sexuality, and the latter is
criminologically important. Heinroth[266] says, “The feminine
individual, so long as it has demands to make, or believes itself to
have them, has utmost self-confidence. Conceit is the sexual
characteristic.” And we may add, “and the standard of sexuality.” As
soon as the child has the first ribbon woven into its hair, sexuality
has been excited. It increases with the love of tinsel and glitter and
dies when the aging female begins to neglect herself and to go about
unwashed. Woman lies when she asserts that everything is dead in her
heart, and sits before you neatly and decoratively dressed; she lies
when she says that she still loves her husband, and at the same time
shows considerable carelessness about her body and clothes; she lies
when she assures you that she has always been the same and her conceit
has come or gone. These statements constitute unexceptionable rules. The
use of them involves no possible error.
We have now the opportunity to understand what feminine knowledge is
worth and in what degree it is reliable. This is no place to discuss the
capacity of the feminine brain, and to venture into the dangerous field
which Schopenhauer and his disciples and modern anthropologists have
entered merely to quarrel in. The judge’s business is the concrete case
in which he must test the expressions of a woman when they depend upon
real or apparent knowledge, either just as he must test the testimony of
any other witness, or by means of experts. We shall therefore indicate
only the symptomatic value of feminine knowledge with regard to feminine
conceit. According to Lotze, women go to theater and to church only to
show their clothes and to appear artistic and pious; while M.
d’Arconville says, that women learn only that it may be said of them,
“They are scholars,” but for knowledge they care not at all.
This is important because we are likely, with regard to knowledge in the
deepest sense of the word, to be frequently unjust to women. We are
accustomed to suppose that the accumulation of some form of knowledge
must have some definite, hence causally related, connection with
purpose. We ask why the scholar is interested in his subject, why he has
sought this knowledge? And in most cases we find the right reason when
we have found the logical connection and have sought it logically. This
might have explained difficult cases, but not where the knowledge of
women is concerned. Women are interested in art, literature, and
science, mainly out of conceit, but they care also for hundreds of other
little things in order, by the knowledge of them, to show off as
scholars. Conceit and curiosity are closely related. Women therefore
often attain information that might cause them to be listed as suspects
if it could not be harmlessly explained by conceit. Conceit, however,
has itself to be explained by the struggle for men, because woman knows
instinctively that she can use knowledge in this struggle. And this
struggle for the other sex frequently betrays woman’s own crime, or the
crime of others. Somebody said that Eve’s first thought after eating the
apple was: “How does my fig-leaf fit?” It is a tasteful notion, that
Eve, who needed only to please her Adam, thought only of this after all
the sorrow of the first sin! But it is true, and we may imagine Eve’s
state of mind to be as follows: “Shall I now please him more or less?”
It is characteristic that the question about dress is said to have been
the _first_ question. It shows the power of conceit, the swiftness with
which it presses to the front. Indeed, of all crimes against property
half would have remained undiscovered if the criminals had been
self-controlled enough to keep their unjustly acquired gains dark for a
while. That they have not, constitutes the hope of every judge for the
discovery of the criminal, and the hope is greater with the extent of
the theft. It may be assumed that the criminal exhibits the fruits of
his crime, but that it is difficult to discover when there is not much
of it. This general rule is much more efficacious among women than
among men, for which reason a criminalist who suspects some person
thinks rather of arresting this person’s wife or mistress than himself.
When the apprentice steals something from his master, his girl gets a
new shawl, and that is not kept in the chest but immediately decorates
the shoulders of the girl. Indeed, women of the profoundest culture can
not wait a moment to decorate themselves with their new gauds, and we
hear that gypsies, who have been caught in some fresh crime, are
betrayed mainly by the fact that the women who had watched the house to
be robbed had been trying on bits of clothing while the men were still
inside cleaning the place up. What was most important for the women was
to meet the men already decorated anew when the men would finally come
back.
The old maid is, from the sexual standpoint, legally important because
she is in herself rather different from other women, and hence must be
differently understood. The properties assigned to these very pitiful
creatures are well-known. Many of the almost exclusively unpleasant
peculiarities assigned to them they may be said really to possess. The
old maid has failed in her natural function and thus exhibits all that
is implied in this accident; bitterness, envy, unpleasantness, hard
judgment of others’ qualities and deeds, difficulty in forming new
relationships, exaggerated fear and prudery, the latter mainly as
simulation of innocence. It is a well-known fact that every experienced
judge may confirm that old maids (we mean here, always, childless,
unmarried women of considerable age--not maids in the anatomical sense)
as witnesses, always bring something new. If you have heard ten
mutually-corroborating statements and the eleventh is made by an old
maid, it will be different. The latter, according to her nature, has
observed differently, introduces a collection of doubts and suggestions,
introduces nasty implications into harmless things, and if possible,
connects her own self with the matter. This is as significant as
explicable. The poor creature has not gotten much good out of life, has
never had a male protector, was frequently enough defenseless against
scorn and teasing, the amenities of social life and friendship were
rarely her portion. It is, therefore, almost inevitable that she should
see evil everywhere. If she has observed some quarrel from her window
she will testify that the thing was provoked in order to disturb her; if
a coachman has run over a child, she suggests that he had been driving
at her in order to frighten her; the thief who broke into her neighbor’s
house really wanted to break into hers because she is without
protection and therefore open to all attacks, so that it is conceivable
that he should want to hurt her. As a rule there will be other
witnesses, or the old maid will be so energetic in her testimonies that
her “perceptions” will not do much damage, but it is always wise to be
cautious.
Of course, there are exceptions, and it is well-known that exceptions
occur by way of extreme contrast. If an old maid does not possess the
unpleasant characteristics of her breed, she is extraordinarily kind and
lovable, in such a way generally, that her all too mild and rather blind
conceptions of an event make her a dangerous witness. It is also true
that old maids frequently are better educated and more civilized than
other women, as De Quincey shows. They are so because, without the care
of husband and children, they have time for all kinds of excellences,
especially when they are inclined thereto. It is notable that the
founders of women’s charitable societies are generally old maids or
childless widows, who have not had the joys and tasks of motherhood. We
must take care, therefore, in judging the kindness of a woman, against
being blinded by her philanthropic activity. That may be kindness, but
as a rule it may have its source in the lack of occupation, and in
striving for some form of motherhood. In judging old maids we deceive
ourselves still more easily because, as Darwin keenly noted, they always
have some masculine quality in their external appearance as well as in
their activity and feeling. Now that kind of woman is generally strange
to us. We start wrong when we judge her by customary standards and miss
the point when, in the cases of such old maids, we presuppose only
feminine qualities and overlook the very virile additions. We may add to
these qualities the intrinsic productivity of old maids. Benneke, in his
“Pragmatische Psychologie,” compares the activity of a very busy
housewife with that of an unmarried virgin, and thinks the worth of the
former to be higher, while the latter accomplishes more by way of
“erotic fancies, intrigues, inheritances, winnings in the lottery, and
hypochondriac complaints.” This is very instructive from the
criminological point of view. For the criminalist can not be too
cautious when he has an old maid to examine. Therefore, when a case
occurs containing characteristic intrigues, fanciful inheritances, and
winnings in the lottery, it will be well to seek out the old maid behind
these things. She may considerably help the explanation.
Both professional and popular judgment agree that the largest majority
of women have great fear of becoming old maids. We are told how this
fear expresses itself in foreign countries. In Spain, e.g., it is said
that a Spanish woman who has passed her first bloom takes the first
available candidate for her hand in order to avoid old-maidenhood; and
in Russia every mature girl who is able to do so, goes abroad for a
couple of years in order to return as “widow.” Everybody knows the
event, nobody asks for particulars about it. Some such process is
universal, and many an unfortunate marriage and allied crime may be
explained by it. Girls who at seventeen or eighteen were very particular
and had a right to be, are modest at twenty, and at twenty-six marry at
any price, in order not to remain old maids. That this is not
love-marriage and is often contrary to intelligence, is clear, and when
neither heart nor head rule, the devil laughs, and it is out of such
marriages that adultery, the flight of the wife, cruelty, robbery from
the spouse, and worse things, arise. Therefore it will be worth while to
study the history of the marriage in question. Was it a marriage in the
name of God, i.e., the marriage of an old maid? Then double caution must
be used in the study of the case.
There is some advantage in knowing the popular conception of when a girl
becomes an old maid, for old-maidenhood is a matter of a point of view;
it depends on the opinion of other people. Belles-lettres deals
considerably with this question, for it can itself determine the popular
attitude to the unmarried state. So Brandes discovers that the heroines
of classical novelists, of Racine, Shakespeare, Moliere, Voltaire,
Ariosto, Byron, Lesage, Scott, are almost always sixteen years of age.
In modern times, women in novels have their great love-adventure in the
thirties. How this advance in years took place we need not bother to
find out, but that it has occurred, we must keep in mind.
Before concluding the chapter on sexual conditions, we must say a word
about hysteria, which so very frequently has deceived the judge.
Hysteria was named by the ancients, as is known, from ἡ ὑστἑρα, the
womb,--and properly--for most of the causes of evil are there hidden.
The hysterics are legally significant in various ways. Their fixed ideas
often cause elaborate unreasonable explanations; they want to attract
attention, they are always concerned with themselves, are always wildly
enthusiastic about somebody else; often they persecute others with
unwarranted hatred, and they are the source of the coarsest
denunciations, particularly with regard to sexual crimes. Incidentally,
most of them are smart and have a diseased acuity of the senses. Hearing
and smell in particular, are sometimes remarkably alert, although not
always reliable, for hysterics frequently discover more than is there.
On the other hand, they often are useful because of their delicate
senses, and it is never necessary to show the correctness of their
perception out of hand. Bianchi rightly calls attention to the fact,
that hysterics like to write anonymous letters. Writers of these are
generally women, and mainly hysterical women; if a man writes them, he
is indubitably feminine in nature.
Most difficulties with hysterics occur when they suffer some
damage,[267] for they not only add a number of dishonest phenomena, but
also actually feel them. I might recall by way of example Domrich’s
story, that hysterics regularly get cramps laughing, when their feet get
cold. If this is true it is easy to conceive what else may happen.
All this, clearly, is a matter for the court physician, who alone should
be the proper authority when a hysteric is before the court. We lawyers
have only to know what significant dangers hysterics threaten, and
further, that the physician is to be called whenever one of them is
before us. Unfortunately there are no specific symptoms of hysteria
which the layman can make use of. We must be satisfied with the little
that has just been mentioned. Hysteria, I had almost said _fortunately_,
is nowadays so widespread that everybody has some approximate knowledge
of how it affects its victims.
(4) _Particular Feminine Qualities._