OLIVE SCHREINER AND ISADORA DUNCAN
I hope that no one will see in the conjuncture of these names a mere
wanton fantasy, or a mere sensational contrast. To me there is something
extraordinarily appropriate in that conjuncture, inasmuch as the work of
Olive Schreiner and the work of Isadora Duncan supplement each other.
It is the drawback of the woman's movement that in any one of its
aspects (heightened and colored as such an aspect often is by the
violence of propaganda) it may appear too fiercely narrow. That women
should make so much fuss about getting the vote, or that they should so
excite themselves over the prospect of working for wages, will appear
incomprehensible to many people who have a proper regard for art, for
literature, and for the graces of social intercourse. It is only when
the woman's movement is seen broadly, in a variety of its aspects, that
there comes the realization that here is a cause in which every fine
aspiration has a place, a cause from which sincere lovers of truth and
beauty have nothing really to fear.
Mrs. Olive Schreiner stands, by virtue of her latest book, "Women and
Labor," as an exponent of the doctrine that would send women into every
field of economic activity; or, rather, the doctrine that finds in the
forces which are driving them there a savior of her sex from the
degradation of parasitism. In behalf of this doctrine she has expended
all that eloquence and passion which have made her one of the figures in
modern literature and a spokesman for all women who have not learned to
speak that hieratic language which is heard, as the inexpressive speech
of daily life is not heard, across space and time.
Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative of the renaissance in
dancing. She has brought back to us the antique beauty of an art of
which we have had only relics and memento in classic sculpture and
decoration. She has made us despise the frigid artifice of the ballet,
and taught us that in the natural movements of the body are contained
the highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty. It has been to many of
us one of the finest experiences of our lives to see, for the first
time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn come to life in her, and all
the leaf-fringed legends of Arcady drift before our enamored eyes. She
has touched our lives with the magic of immemorial loveliness.
But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a
dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an
injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They
have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul.
The woman's movement is a product of the evolutionary science of the
nineteenth century. Women's rebellions there have been before, utopian
visions there have been, which have contributed no little to the modern
movement by the force of their tradition and ever-living spirit. No Joan
of Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva has sacrificed her
modesty--nay, even, no courtesan has taught a feeble king how to rule
his country--without feeding the flame of feminine aspiration. But it is
modern science which, by giving us a new view of the body, its
functions, its needs, its claim upon the world, has laid the basis for a
successful feminist movement. When the true history of this movement is
written it will contain more about Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman,
perhaps, than about Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In any
case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.
The eye--that is to say--is guarantor for the safety of art in a future
regime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have
their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not
deny them.
It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She
knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of
the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the
earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the
directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human
brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little
lives gain their peculiar grandeur.
And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the
smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and
grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there
is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's
domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is
taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of
modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on
behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that
strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman,
where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and
relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of
honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of
the Children of Woman."
And what of Miss Duncan--what is her part in the woman's movement? In
her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I
dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion
of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,'
and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of
the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.'
'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At
this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered
teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel--' 'But,' said the
lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel--' At this point I could
think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am
of little value and ought not to speak."
But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of
the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is
the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work,
so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which
we call play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate the one as Olive Schreiner
would emancipate the other--to new activities and new delights.
And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new
world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a
question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of
the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to
the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. It is a
question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy
and beautiful children." Here we have an inspiriting expression of the
idea which through the poems of Walt Whitman and the writings of various
moderns, has renovated the modern soul and made us see, without any
obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles, the goodness of the whole body.
This is as much a part of the woman's movement as the demand for a vote
(or, rather, it is more central and essential a part); and only by
realizing this is it possible to understand that movement.
The body is no longer to be separated in the thought of women from the
soul: "The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have
grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul
will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to
a nation, but to all humanity. She will dance, not in the form of nymph,
nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in its greatest and
purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's body and the
holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature,
showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of
her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the
message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall
dance the freedom of woman.
"She will help womankind to a new knowledge of the possible strength and
beauty of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the earth
nature and to the children of the future. She will dance, the body
emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not
in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war
with spirituality and intelligence, but joining itself forever with this
intelligence in a glorious harmony.
"Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit, who will
inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet
been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early
Italian, than all women of past centuries--the highest intelligence in
the freest body!"
If the woman's movement means anything, it means that women are
demanding everything. They will not exchange one place for another, nor
give up one right to pay for another, but they will achieve all rights
to which their bodies and brains give them an implicit title. They will
have a larger political life, a larger motherhood, a larger social
service, a larger love, and they will reconstruct or destroy
institutions to that end as it becomes necessary. They will not be
content with any concession or any triumph until they have conquered all
experience.