Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Dancing is an early, and a beautiful art; direct expression of emotion through the body; beginning in subhuman type, among male birds, as the bower-bird of New Guinea, and the dancing crane, who swing and caper before their mates. Among early peoples we find it a common form of social expression in tribal dances of all sorts, religious, military, and other. Later it becomes a more explicit form of celebration, as among the Greeks; in whose exquisite personal culture dancing and music held high place.

  But under the progressive effects of purely masculine dominance we find the broader human elements of dancing left out, and the sex-element more and more emphasized. As practiced by men alone dancing has become a mere display of physical agility, a form of exhibition common to all males. As practiced by men and women together we have our social dances, so lacking in all the varied beauty of posture and expression, so steadily becoming a pleasant form of dalliance.

  As practiced by women alone we have one of the clearest proofs of the degrading effect of masculine dominance: — the dancing girl. In the frank sensualism of the Orient, this personage is admired and enjoyed on her merits. We, more sophisticated in this matter, joke shamefacedly about “the bald-headed row,” and occasionally burst forth in shrill scandal over some dinner party where ladies clad in a veil and a bracelet dance on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found — the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers. That we, as a race, present this pitiful spectacle, a natural art wrested to unnatural ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends, has one clear cause.

  Architecture, in its own nature, is least affected by that same cause. The human needs secured by it, are so human, so unescapably human, that we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It meets our social demands, it expresses in lasting form our social feeling, up to the highest; and it has been injured not so much by an excess of masculinity as by a lack of femininity.

  The most universal architectural expression is in the home; the home is essentially a place for the woman and the child; yet the needs of woman and child are not expressed in our domestic architecture. The home is built on lines of ancient precedent, mainly as an industrial form; the kitchen is its working centre rather than the nursery.

  Each man wishes his home to preserve and seclude his woman, his little harem of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural relations; or grow in larger beauty as our lives develop.

  The deadlock for architectural progress, the low level of our general taste, the everlasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is the natural result of the proprietary family and its expression in this form.

  In sculpture we have a noble art forcing itself into some service through many limitations. Its check, as far as it comes under this line of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the human body, the vicious standards of sex-consciousness enforced under the name of modesty, the covered ugliness, which we do not recognize, all this is a deadly injury to free high work in sculpture.

  With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and athletic; with the high standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without free womanhood; we should show a different product in this great art.

  An interesting note in passing is this: when we seek to express socially our noblest, ideas, Truth; Justice; Liberty; we use the woman’s body as the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity and not biassed by sex, gives us a strong, grand figure, beautiful indeed, but never decorated. Fancy Liberty in ruffles and frills, with rings in her ears — or nose.

  Music is injured by a one-sided handling, partly in the excess of the one dominant masculine passion, partly by the general presence of egoism; that tendency to self-expression instead of social expression, which so disfigures our art; and this is true also of poetry.

  Miles and miles of poetry consist of the ceaseless outcry of the male for the female, which is by no means so overwhelming as a feature of human life as he imagines it; and other miles express his other feelings, with that ingenuous lack of reticence which is at its base essentially masculine. Having a pain, the poet must needs pour it forth, that his woe be shared and sympathized with.

  As more and more women writers flock into the field there is room for fine historic study of the difference in sex feeling, and the gradual emergence of the human note.

  Literature, and in especial the art of fiction, is so large a field for this study that it will have a chapter to itself; this one but touching on these various forms; and indicating lines of observation.

  That best known form of art which to my mind needs no qualifying description — painting — is also a wide field; and cannot be done full justice to within these limits. The effect upon it of too much masculinity is not so much in choice of subject as in method and spirit. The artist sees beauty of form and color where the ordinary observer does not; and paints the old and ugly with as much enthusiasm as the young and beautiful — sometimes. If there is in some an over-emphasis of feminine attractions it is counterbalanced in others by a far broader line of work.

  But the main evils of a too masculine art lie in the emphasis laid on self-expression. The artist, passionately conscious of how he feels, strives to make other people aware of these sensations. This is now so generally accepted by critics, so seriously advanced by painters, that what is called “the art world” accepts it as established.

  If a man paints the sea, it is not to make you see and feel as a sight of that same ocean would, but to make you see and feel how he, personally, was affected by it; a matter surely of the narrowest importance. The ultra-masculine artist, extremely sensitive, necessarily, and full of the natural urge to expression of the sex, uses the medium of art as ingenuously as the partridge-cock uses his wings in drumming on the log; or the bull moose stamps and bellows; not narrowly as a mate call, but as a form of expression of his personal sensations.

  The higher the artist the more human he is, the broader his vision, the more he sees for humanity, and expresses for humanity, and the less personal, the less ultra-masculine, is his expression.

  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 sex or class; 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 sex,’ 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 sex;” they have impressed tha
t sex 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 sex 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 nobler 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 cock-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 sexes, 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 passionate 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 repetition 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 sturdy 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 class 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 repetition 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 al
l 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 sex.

  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?”

  Woman’s love for man, as currently treated in fiction is largely a reflex; it is the way he wants her to feel, expects her to feel; not a fair representation of how she does feel. If “love” is to be selected as the most important thing in life to write about, then the mother’s love should be the principal subject: This is the main stream. This is the general underlying, world-lifting force. The “life-force,” now so glibly chattered about, finds its fullest expression in motherhood; not in the emotions of an assistant in the preliminary stages.

  What has literature, what has fiction, to offer concerning mother-love, or even concerning father-love, as compared to this vast volume of excitement about lover-love? Why is the search-light continually focussed upon a two or three years space of life “mid the blank miles round about?” Why indeed, except for the clear reason, that on a starkly masculine basis this is his one period of overwhelming interest and excitement.