The Forerunner Part 56

"This agreement to hold for six months from date if mutually satisfactory. In case of disagreement two weeks' notice is to be given on either side, or two weeks' wages if preferred by the employer." It was dated, and signed "Miss D. C. Bell."

And with inward amus.e.m.e.nt and great display of penmanship they added "Mrs. Isabel J. p.o.r.ne," and the contract was made.

[Erratum]

Apology is due to Mr. Horace Traubel, by whose kind permission "Little Leafy Brothers," in our February issue, was reprinted from "The Conservator," for not giving proper acknowledgment. Also to our readers for the same omission.

OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; or, THE MAN-MADE WORLD

V.

MASCULINE LITERATURE.

When we are offered a "woman's" paper, page, or column, we find it filled with matter supposed to appeal to women as a s.e.x or cla.s.s; the writer mainly dwelling upon the Kaiser's four K's--Kuchen, Kinder, Kirche, Kleider. They iterate and reiterate endlessly the discussion of cookery, old and new; of the care of children; of the overwhelming subject of clothing; and of moral instruction. All this is recognized as "feminine" literature, and it must have some appeal else the women would not read it. What parallel have we in "masculine" literature?

"None!" is the proud reply. "Men are people! Women, being 'the s.e.x,'

have their limited feminine interests, their feminine point of view, which must be provided for. Men, however, are not restricted--to them belongs the world's literature!"

Yes, it has belonged to them--ever since there was any. They have written it and they have read it. It is only lately that women, generally speaking, have been taught to read; still more lately that they have been allowed to write. It is but a little while since Harriet Martineau concealed her writing beneath her sewing when visitors came in--writing was "masculine"--sewing "feminine."

We have not, it Is true, confined men to a narrowly construed "masculine sphere," and composed a special literature suited to it. Their effect on literature has been far wider than that, monopolizing this form of art with special favor. It was suited above all others to the dominant impulse of self-expression; and being, as we have seen essentially and continually "the s.e.x;" they have impressed that s.e.x upon this art overwhelmingly; they have given the world a masculized literature.

It is hard for us to realize this. We can readily see, that if women had always written the books, no men either writing or reading them, that would have surely "feminized" our literature; but we have not in our minds the concept, much less the word, for an overmasculized influence.

Men having been accepted as humanity, women but a side-issue; (most literally if we accept the Hebrew legend!), whatever men did or said was human--and not to be criticized. In no department of life is it easier to contravert this old belief; to show how the male s.e.x as such differs from the human type; and how this maleness has monopolized and disfigured a great social function.

Human life is a very large affair; and literature is its chief art. We live, humanly, only through our power of communication. Speech gives us this power laterally, as it were, in immediate personal contact. For permanent use speech becomes oral tradition--a poor dependence.

Literature gives not only an infinite multiplication to the lateral spread of communion but adds the vertical reach. Through it we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future. In its servicable common forms it is the indispensable daily servant of our lives; in its n.o.bler flights as a great art no means of human inter-change goes so far.

In these brief limits we can touch but lightly on some phases of so great a subject; and will rest the case mainly on the effect of an exclusively masculine handling of the two fields of history and fiction.

In poetry and the drama the same influence is easily traced, but in the first two it is so baldly prominent as to defy objection.

History is, or should be, the story of our racial life. What have men made it? The story of warfare and conquest. Begin at the very beginning with the carven stones of Egypt, the clay records of Chaldea, what do we find of history?

"I Pharaoh, King of Kings! Lord of Lords! (etc. etc.), "went down into the miserable land of Kush, and slew of the inhabitants thereof an hundred and forty and two thousands!" That, or something like it, is the kind of record early history gives us.

The story of Conquering Kings, who and how many they killed and enslaved; the grovelling adulation of the abased; the unlimited jubilation of the victor; from the primitive state of most ancient kings, and the Roman triumphs where queens walked in chains, down to our omni present soldier's monuments: the story of war and conquest--war and conquest--over and over; with such boasting and triumph, such c.o.c.k-crow and flapping of wings as show most unmistakably the natural source.

All this will strike the reader at first as biased and unfair. "That was the way people lived in those days!" says the reader.

No--it was not the way women lived.

"O, women!" says the reader, "Of course not! Women are different."

Yea, women are different; and _men are different!_ Both of them, as s.e.xes, differ from the human norm, which is social life and all social development. Society was slowly growing in all those black blind years.

The arts, the sciences, the trades and crafts and professions, religion, philosophy, government, law, commerce, agriculture--all the human processes were going on as well as they were able, between wars.

The male naturally fights, and naturally crows, triumphs over his rival and takes the prize--therefore was he made male. Maleness means war.

Not only so; but being male, he cares only for male interests. Men, being the sole arbiters of what should be done and said and written, have given us not only a social growth scarred and thwarted from the beginning by continual destruction; but a history which is one unbroken record of courage and red cruelty, of triumph and black shame.

As to what went on that was of real consequence, the great slow steps of the working world, the discoveries and inventions, the real progress of humanity--that was not worth recording, from a masculine point of view.

Within this last century, "the woman's century," the century of the great awakening, the rising demand for freedom, political, economic, and domestic, we are beginning to write real history, human history, and not merely masculine history. But that great branch of literature--Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and all down later times, shows beyond all question, the influence of our androcentric culture.

Literature is the most powerful and necessary of the arts, and fiction is its broadest form. If art "holds the mirror up to nature" this art's mirror is the largest of all, the most used. Since our very life depends on some communication; and our progress is in proportion to our fullness and freedom of communication; since real communication requires mutual understanding; so in the growth of the social consciousness, we note from the beginning a pa.s.sionate interest in other people's lives.

The art which gives humanity consciousness is the most vital art. Our greatest dramatists are lauded for their breadth of knowledge of "human nature," their range of emotion and understanding; our greatest poets are those who most deeply and widely experience and reveal the feelings of the human heart; and the power of fiction is that it can reach and express this great field of human life with no limits but those of the author.

When fiction began it was the legitimate child of oral tradition; a product of natural brain activity; the legend constructed instead of remembered. (This stage is with us yet as seen in the constant changes in repet.i.tion of popular jokes and stories.)

Fiction to-day has a much wider range; yet it is still restricted, heavily and most mischievously restricted.

What is the preferred subject matter of fiction?

There are two main branches found everywhere, from the Romaunt of the Rose to the Purplish Magazine;--the Story of Adventure, and the Love Story.

The Story-of-Adventure branch is not so thick as the other by any means, but it is a st.u.r.dy bough for all that. Stevenson and Kipling have proved its immense popularity, with the whole brood of detective stories and the tales of successful rascality we call "picaresque" Our most popular weekly shows the broad appeal of this cla.s.s of fiction.

All these tales of adventure, of struggle and difficulty; of hunting and fishing and fighting; of robbing and murdering, catching and punishing, are distinctly and essentially masculine. They do not touch on human processes, social processes, but on the special field of predatory excitement so long the sole province of men.

It is to be noted here that even in the overwhelming rise of industrial interests to-day, these, when used as the basis for a story, are forced into line with one, or both, of these two main branches of fiction;--conflict or love. Unless the story has one of these "interests" in it, there is no story--so holds the editor; the dictum being, put plainly, "life has no interests except conflict and love!"

It is surely something more than a coincidence that these are the two essential features of masculinity--Desire and Combat--Love and War.

As a matter of fact the major interests of life are in line with its major processes; and these--in our stage of human development--are more varied than our fiction would have us believe. Half the world consists of women, we should remember, who are types of human life as well as men, and their major processes are not those of conflict and adventure, their love means more than mating. Even on so poor a line of distinction as the "woman's column" offers, if women are to be kept to their four Ks, there should be a "men's column" also; and all the "sporting news" and fish stories be put in that; they are not world interests; they are male interests.

Now for the main branch--the Love Story. Ninety per cent. of fiction is In this line; this is preeminently the major interest of life--given in fiction. What is the love-story, as rendered by this art?

It is the story of the pre-marital struggle. It is the Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her--and it stops when he gets her! Story after story, age after age, over and over and over, this ceaseless repet.i.tion of the Preliminaries.

Here is Human Life. In its large sense, its real sense, it is a matter of inter-relation between individuals and groups, covering all emotions, all processes, all experiences. Out of this vast field of human life fiction arbitrarily selects one emotion, one process, one experience, as its necessary base.

"Ah! but we are persons most of all!" protests the reader. "This is personal experience--it has the universal appeal!"

Take human life personally then. Here is a Human Being, a life, covering some seventy years; involving the changing growth of many faculties; the ever new marvels of youth, the long working time of middle life, the slow ripening of age. Here is the human soul, in the human body, Living. Out of this field of personal life, with all of its emotions, processes, and experiences, fiction arbitrarily selects one emotion, one process, one experience, mainly of one s.e.x.

The "love" of our stories is man's love of woman. If any dare dispute this, and say it treats equally of woman's love for man, I answer, "Then why do the stories stop at marriage?"

There is a current jest, revealing much, to this effect:

The young wife complains that the husband does not wait upon and woo her as he did before marriage; to which he replies, "Why should I run after the street-car when I've caught it?"