Marriage In Free Society Part 1

Marriage In Free Society.

by Edward Carpenter.

MARRIAGE

I.

OF the great mystery of human Love, and that most intimate personal relation of two souls to each other--perhaps the firmest, most basic and indissoluble fact (after our own existence) that we know; of that strange sense--often, perhaps generally, instantaneous--of long precedent familiarity and kinship, that deep reliance on and acceptation of another in his or her entirety; of the tremendous strength of the chain which thus at times will bind two hearts in lifelong dedication and devotion, persuading and indeed not seldom compelling the persons concerned to the sacrifice of some of the other elements of their lives and characters; and, withal, of a certain inscrutable veiledness from each other which so frequently accompanies the relation of the opposite s.e.xes, and which forms at once the abiding charm, and the pain--sometimes the tragedy--of their union; of this palpitating winged living thing, which one may perhaps call the real Marriage--I would say but little; for indeed it is only fitting or possible to speak of it by indirect language and suggestion, nor may one venture to rudely drag it from its sanctuary into the light of the common gaze.

Compared with this, the actual marriage, in its squalid perversity as we too often have occasion of knowing it, is as the wretched idol of the savage to the reality which it is supposed to represent; and one seems to hear the Aristophanic laughter of the G.o.ds as they contemplate man's little clay image of the Heavenly Love--which, cracked in the fire of daily life, he is fain to bind together with rusty hoops of law, and parchment bands, lest it should crumble and fall to pieces altogether.

The whole subject, wide as life itself--as Heaven and h.e.l.l--eludes anything like adequate treatment, and we need make no apology for narrowing down our considerations here to just a few practical points; and if we cannot navigate upward into the very heart of the matter--namely, into the causes which make some people love each other with a true and perfect love, and others unite in obedience to but a counterfeit pa.s.sion--yet we may fairly, I imagine, and with profit, study some of the conditions which give to actual marriage its present form, or which in the future are likely to provide real affection with a more satisfactory expression than it has as a rule to-day.

Yet the subject, even so limited, is one on which it is extremely difficult to get a calm audience. Marriage customs (however much they may differ from race to race) are at any one time and among any one folk remarkably tenacious, being sanctioned by almost a violence of public opinion; and as in the case of theology or politics, their mere discussion is liable to infuriate people--perhaps from the very fact that the subject is so complex and so deeply rooted in personal feeling.

Nevertheless--since alterations have to take place in these as in other customs, and since, as many things indicate, we are moving towards a distinct period of change in matters matrimonial--it would seem that the more rationally we can survey these questions beforehand, the better.

It will probably be felt that certain present difficulties in the marriage-relation are not merely casual or local, but are deeply intertwined with a long series of historical causes, which have led up to that exaggerated differentiation, and consequent misunderstanding, between the s.e.xes, of which we have spoken in a former paper.* Behind the relation of any individual man and woman to each other stands the historical age-evolved relation of the two s.e.xes generally, spreading round and enclosing the former on all sides, and creating the social environment from which the individuals can hardly escape. Two young people in the present day may come together, but their relation is already largely determined by causes over which they have no control.

* Woman: Labour Press Society, Manchester.

As a rule they know but little of each other; society has kept the two s.e.xes apart; the boy and the girl have been brought up along different lines; they hardly understand each other's nature; their mental interests and occupations are different; and as they grow up their worldly interests and advantage are seen to be different, often opposed; public opinion separates their spheres and their rights and their duties, and their honor and their dishonor* very sharply from each other. The subject of s.e.x is a sealed book to the girl; to the youth it is possibly a book whose most dismal page has been opened first; in either case with its very mention is probably connected a painful and irrational sense of wickedness.

In this state of confusion of mind, of mutual misunderstanding, and often of suffering, the s.e.x-glamor suddenly descends upon the two individuals and drives them into each other's arms. It envelopes in a gracious and misty halo all their differences and misapprehensions. They marry without misgiving; and their hearts overflow with grat.i.tude to the white-surpliced old gentleman who reads the service over them. It is only at a later hour, and with calmer thought, that they realise that it is a life-sentence which he has so suavely pa.s.sed upon them--not reducible (as in the case of ordinary convicts) even to a term of 20 years.

* See Webster's Dictionary, which gives as one of the meanings of Honor, "any particular virtue much valued, as bravery in men and chast.i.ty in females."

The married life, in so strange and casual a way begun, or drifted into, is hardly, one might think, likely to turn out well. Sometimes, of course, it does; but in many cases, perhaps the majority, there follows a painful awakening. A brief burst of satisfaction, accompanied, probably through sheer ignorance, by gross neglect of the law of trans.m.u.tation; satiety on the physical plane, followed by vacuity of affection on the higher planes, and that succeeded by boredom, and even nausea; the girl, full perhaps of a tender emotion, and missing the sympathy and consolation she expected in the man's love, only to find its more materialistic side--"This, this then is what I am wanted for."

The man, who looked for a companion, finding he can rouse no mortal interest in his wife's mind save in the most exasperating trivialities;--whatever the cause may be, a veil has fallen from before their faces, and there they sit, held together now by the least honorable interests, the interests which they themselves can least respect, but to which Law and Religion lend all their weight. The monetary dependence of the woman, the mere s.e.x-needs of the man, the fear of public opinion, all form motives, and motives of the meanest kind, for maintaining the seeming tie; and the relation of the two hardens down into a dull neutrality, in which lives and characters are narrowed and blunted, and deceit becomes the common weapon which guards divided interests.

A sad picture! and of course in this case a portrayal deliberately of the seamy side of the matter. But who shall make light of the agonies often gone through in those first few years of married life?

It may be said--and often of course is said--that such cases as these only prove that marriage was entered into under the influence of a pa.s.sing glamor and delusion, and that there was not much real devotion to begin with. And no doubt there is truth enough in such remarks.

But--we may say in reply--because two young people make a mistake in youth, to condemn them, for that reason, to lifelong suffering and mutual degradation, or to see them so condemned, without proposing any hope or way of deliverance, but with the one word "serves you right" on the lips, is a course which can commend itself only to the grimmest and dullest Calvinist. Whatever safe-guards against a too frivolous view of the relationship may be proposed by the good sense of society in the future, it is certain that the time has gone past when Marriage can continue to be regarded as a supernatural inst.i.tution to whose maintenance human bodies and souls must be indiscriminately sacrificed; a humaner, wiser, and less panic-stricken treatment of the subject must set in; and if there are difficulties in the way they must be met by patient and calm consideration of human welfare--superior to any law, however ancient and respectable.

I take it then that, without disguising the fact that the question is a complex one, and that our conclusions may be only very tentative, we have to consider as rationally as we conveniently can, first, some of the drawbacks or defects of the present marriage-customs, and secondly such improvements in these as may suggest themselves to us, and as may seem feasible.

And if we turn to the question of how things stand in the present day, one of the first points to strike us--and one that we have already touched on in another paper*--is the serious want of any special teaching to young folk on matters of love and s.e.x, and the responsibility resting on parents and teachers to supply this want. That one ought to distinguish a pa.s.sing s.e.x-spell from a true comradeship and devotion is no doubt a wise remark, but that it is often difficult, even for adults, to do so makes it all the more necessary that young people should have some rational ideas on the subject, and above all that they should get some understanding of the nature of that true love which alone can make marriage a success. The search for a fitting mate, especially among the more sensitive and highly-organised types of mankind, is a most complex affair. And it is indeed hard that the young man or woman should have to set out--as they mostly have to do to-day--on this difficult quest without a word of suggestion or help, as to the choice of the way or the very real perplexites and doubts that beset it.

*s.e.x-Love, and its place in a Free Society. Labour Press, Manchester.

Then, besides this more general teaching, it is also highly necessary that those in question should have some knowledge of the use and guardianship of their own s.e.x-functions. If the youth and girl whom we have supposed as about to be married had been 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 civilised 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 (does it not seem strange?) has never been taught how to use the female in this most important moment of their joint lives. Perhaps he is unaware that love in the female is, in a sense, more diffused than in the male, less specially s.e.xual; 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.*

Among the middle and well-to-do cla.s.ses especially, the conditions of high civilisation, by inducing an overfed masculinity in the males and a nervous and hysterical tendency in the females,** increase the difficulties mentioned; and it is among the 'cla.s.ses' too that public opinion, largely by repressing the utterance and ignoring the existence of s.e.x-feeling, has created the special evils of s.e.x-starvation and s.e.x-ignorance on the one hand, and of mere licentiousness on the other.

* It must be remembered too that to many women (though of course by no means a majority) the thought of s.e.x brings little sense of pleasure, and the fulfilment of its duties const.i.tutes a real, even though a willing, sacrifice.

** Thus Bebel in his book on Woman speaks of "the idle and luxuriant life of so many women in the upper cla.s.ses, the nervous stimulant afforded by exquisite perfumes, the over- dosing with poetry, music, the stage--which is regarded as the chief means of education, and is the chief occupation, of a s.e.x already suffering from hypertrophy of nerves and sensibility."

Among the comparatively uncivilised ma.s.s of the people, where a good deal of familiarity between the s.e.xes exists before marriage, and where indeed marriage not unfrequently follows on s.e.x-connection, these special evils are not so prominent. But among the ma.s.ses the crying need for some sensible and coherent teaching for the young is only too clear; and it is perhaps among the ma.s.ses that the neglect of the law of trans.m.u.tation works to more evil results than among the cla.s.ses; since among the former--s.e.x-intercourse being comparatively accessible, and obstacles to marriage (from monetary and other considerations) comparatively infrequent--the feeling is liable to flow far too much along the mere physical channels; and the romance and sweet comradeship of love, especially after marriage, comes too often to be replaced by an inert and indeed rather brutish sentiment of simple juxtaposition.

So far with regard to difficulties arising from personal ignorance or inexperience in youth. But stretching beyond and around all these are those other difficulties which are due to the marked special relation of the woman to the man in civilised society generally, and of the man to the woman; and which arise from deep-lying historic and economic causes.

Into the large subject of these causes it is not necessary to enter here. Suffice it to say that the difference in physical strength between the s.e.xes, together with woman's disability during the period of child-birth and rearing, gave man from early times an advantage, which complicating itself during the historical period has ultimated (though not of course in the present day only) in what may be called the slavery of woman, her subordination to man, and dependence on him for the means of subsistence; the result being that, till a comparatively few years ago, the woman was condemned to the most special and indeed narrow sphere of life and action; her education, as for this sphere, was most limited, and quite different from that of the man; and her interests were wholly diverse from and often quite opposed to his. Under these circ.u.mstances there was naturally little common ground for Marriage, _except_ s.e.x. And the same remains largely true even down to to-day. The s.e.x-needs once satisfied, and the emotional charm weakened or undone, man and wife not unfrequently wake up with something like dismay to find how little they have left in common; to find that they have nothing in which they can take interest together; that they cannot work at the same things, that they cannot read the same books, that they cannot keep up half-an-hour's conversation together on any topic, and that secretly they are cherishing their own thoughts and projects quite apart from each other.

It must suffice too to remind the reader quite briefly that this divergence has crept deep down into the moral and intellectual natures of the two s.e.xes, exaggerating the naturally complementary relation of the male and female into a painful 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 st.u.r.dy 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 'humour' 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-a.s.sertion. She finds that her very willingness to be sacrificed only fosters in the man, perhaps for his own self-defence, 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 st.u.r.dy 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 clothespeg, a warning and a wonderment to pa.s.sers by!

However, as a third 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. .h.i.therto 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 pa.s.sed 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.

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 oxherd--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 s.e.xes, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s 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 s.e.xes, 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 s.e.xes 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 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 matrimonial relation, society allows practically the utmost pa.s.sional 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 cla.s.ses) beyond that limit, the slightest familiarity, or any expression of affection which might by any possibility be interpreted as deriving from s.e.xual feeling, is sternly anathematised.

Marriage, by a kind of absurd fiction, is represented as an oasis situated in the midst of an arid desert--in which latter, it 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. Not only, as already pointed out, have the man and the wife too few joint interests in the great world, few common plans, projects, purposes, 'causes,' recreations; but--by this insistance of public opinion--all outside interests of a _personal_ nature, except of the most abstract kind, are also debarred; if there happens to be any natural jealousy in the case it is heightened and made the more imperative; and 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 s.e.x--and this does not always exclude jealousy--they must be condemned to have no intimate friendships of any kind except what they can find at their own fireside.

It is necessary here to point out, 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 genuine affectional a.s.sociation 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 s.e.xual, 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 s.e.xes, it is obvious that changes in the form of the marriage inst.i.tution 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?

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 a careful 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 are bound to see 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 recognise 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociations, 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 a.s.sociation of the s.e.xes--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.