Читать книгу A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or, Woman affranchised - Madame d' Héricourt - Страница 5

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Several women have sharply criticised Michelet's "Love."

Why are intelligent women thus dissatisfied with so upright a man as Michelet?

Because to him woman is a perpetual invalid, who should be shut up in a gynæceum in company with a dairy maid, as fit company only for chickens and turkeys.

Now we, women of the west, have the audacity to contend that we are not invalids, and that we have a holy horror of the harem and the gynæceum.

Woman, according to Michelet, is a being of a nature opposite to that of man; a creature weak, always wounded, exceedingly barometrical, and, consequently, unfit for labor.

She is incapable of abstracting, of generalizing, of comprehending conscientious labors. She does not like to occupy herself with business, and she is destitute, in part, of judicial sense. But, in return, she is revealed all gentleness, all love, all grace, all devotion.

Created for man, she is the altar of his heart, his refreshment, his consolation. In her presence he gains new vigor, becomes inspirited, draws the strength necessary to the accomplishment of his high mission as worker, creator, organizer.

He should love her, watch over her, maintain her; be at once her father, her lover, her instructor, her priest, her physician, her nurse, and her waiting-maid.

When, at eighteen, a virgin in reason, heart and body, she is given to this husband, who should be twenty-eight, neither more nor less, he confines her in the country in a charming cottage, at a distance from her parents and friends, with the rustic maid that we just mentioned.

Why this sequestration in the midst of the nineteenth century, do you ask?

Because the husband can have no power over his wife in society, and can have full power over her in solitude. Now, it is necessary that he should have this full power over her, since it belongs to him to form her heart, to give her ideas, to sketch within her the incarnation of himself. For know, readers, that woman is destined to reflect her husband, more and more, until the last shade of difference, namely, that which is maintained by the separation of the sexes, shall be at last effaced by death, and unity in love be thus effected.

At the end of half a score years of housekeeping, the wife is permitted to cross the threshold of the gynæceum, and to enter the world, or the great Battle of Life. Here she will meet more than one danger; but she will escape them all if she keeps the oath she has taken to make her husband her confessor.... It is evident that Michelet respects the rights of the soul. The husband, who at this epoch has become absorbed in his profession, has necessarily degenerated, hence there is danger that the wife may love another; may become enamored, for instance, of her young nephew. In the book, she does not succumb, because she confesses everything to her husband; still it may happen that she succumbs, then repents, and solicits correction from her lord and master. The latter should at first refuse, but, if she insists, rather than drive her to despair, Michelet—who would on no account drive a woman to despair—counsels the husband to administer to his wife the chastisement that mothers infliction inflict on their darlings.

There must be no separation between the husband and wife; when the latter has given herself away, she is no longer her own property. She becomes more and more the incarnation of the man who has espoused her; fecundation transforms her into him, so that the children of the lover or of the second husband resemble the first impregnator. The husband, being ten years older than the wife, dies first; the woman must preserve her widowhood; her rôle henceforth until death is to fructify within her and about her the ideas which her husband has bequeathed, to remain the center of his friendships, to raise up to him posthumous disciples, and thus remain his property until she rejoins him in death.

In case the husband survives, which may happen, the author does not tell us whether he should re-marry. Probably not, since love exists only between two; unless Michelet, who reproves polygamy in this world, admits it as morality in the life to come.

You see, my readers, that in Michelet's book, woman is created for man; without him she would be nothing; he it is who pronounces the fiat lux in her intellect; he it is who makes her in his image, as God made man in his own.

Accepting the Biblical Genesis, we women can appeal from Adam to God; for it was not Adam, but God, who created Eve. Admitting the Genesis of Michelet, there is no pretext, no excuse for disobedience; woman must be subordinate to man and must yield to him, for she belongs to him as the work to the workman, as the vessel to the potter.

The book of Michelet and the two studies of Proudhon on woman, are but two forms of the same thought. The sole difference that exists between these gentlemen is, that the first is as sweet as honey, and the second as bitter as wormwood.

Nevertheless, I prefer the rude assailant to the poet; for insults and blows rouse us to rebel and to clamor for liberty, while compliments lull us to sleep and make us weakly endure our chains.

It would be somewhat cruel to be harsh to Michelet, who piques himself on love and poetry, and, consequently, is thin skinned; we will therefore castigate him only over the shoulders of M. Proudhon, who may be cannonaded with red-hot shot; and we will content ourselves with criticising in his book what is not found in that of Proudhon.

The two chief pillars of the book on Love are,

First, that woman is a wounded, weak, barometrical, constantly diseased being;

Second, that the woman belongs to the man who has fructified and incarnated himself in her; a proposition proved by the resemblance of the children of the wife to the husband, whoever may be the father.

Michelet and his admirers and disciples do not dispute that the only good method of proving the truth of a principle, or the legitimateness of a generalization, is verification by facts; neither do they dispute that to make general rules of exceptions, to create imaginary laws, and to take these pretended laws for the basis of argument, belongs only to the aberrations of the Middle Age, profoundly disdained by men of earnest thought and severe reason. Let us apply these data unsparingly to the two principal affirmations of M. Michelet.

It is a principle in biology that no physiological condition is a morbid condition; consequently, the monthly crisis peculiar to woman is not a disease, but a normal phenomenon, the derangement of which causes disturbance in the general health. Woman, therefore, is not an invalid because her sex is subject to a peculiar law. Can it be said that woman is wounded because she is subjected to a periodical fracture, the cicatrice of which is almost imperceptible? By no means. It would be absurd to call a man perpetually wounded who should take a fancy to scratch the end of his finger every month.

Michelet is too well informed to render it necessary for me to tell him that the normal hemorrhage does not proceed from this wound of the ovary, about which he makes so much ado, but from a congestion of the gestative organ.

Are women ill on the recurrence of the law peculiar to their sex?

Very exceptionally, yes; but in the indolent classes, in which transgressions in diet, the lack of an intelligent physical education, and a thousand causes which I need not point out here, render women valetudinarians.

Generally, no. All our vigorous peasant women, our robust laundresses, who stand the whole time with their feet in water, our workwomen, our tradeswomen, our teachers, our servant-maids, who attend with alacrity to their business and pleasures, experience no uncomfortableness, or at most, very little.

Michelet, therefore, has not only erred in erecting a physiological law into a morbid condition, but he has also sinned against rational method by making general rules of a few exceptions, and by proceeding from this generalization, contradicted by the great majority of facts, to construct a system of subjection.

If it is of the faculty of abstracting and generalizing that Michelet, as he employs it, robs woman, we can only congratulate her on the deprivation.

Not only is woman diseased, says Michelet, in consequence of a biological law, but she is always diseased; she has uterine affections, hereditary tendencies, which may assume a terrible form in her sex, etc.

We would ask Michelet whether he considers his own sex as always diseased because it is corroded by cancer, disfigured by eruptions, tortured as much as ours by hereditary tendencies; for hereditary tendencies torture it as much as ours, and it is decimated and enfeebled far more fearfully by shameful diseases, the fruits of its excesses.

Of what, then, is Michelet thinking, in laying such stress on the diseases of women in the face of the quite as numerous diseases of men?

The wife should never be divorced or re-marry, because she has become the property of the husband. This is proved by the fact that the children of the lover or of the second husband resemble the first husband.

If this is true, there are no children that resemble their mother.

There are no children that resemble the progenitors or collateral relatives of their parents.

Every child resembles the first that knew his mother.

Can you explain, then, why it is that so often he does not resemble him?

Why he resembles a grandfather, an uncle, an aunt, a brother, a sister of one of the parents?

Why, in certain cities in the south of France, the inhabitants have preserved the Greek type, ascribed to the women, instead of that of their barbaric fathers?

Why negresses who conceive from a white, bring into the world a mulatto, oftenest with thick lips, a flat nose, and woolly hair?

Why many children resemble portraits which had attracted the attention of the mother?

Why, in fine, physiologists, impressed by numerous facts, have thought themselves justified in declaring woman the preserver of the type?

In the face of these undeniable facts, I ask you, yourself, what becomes of your theory?

It returns to the domain of chimeras.

Some think that woman possesses a plastic force, which makes her mould her fruit after the model which love, hate, or fear has impressed within her brain; so that the child thus becomes merely a sort of photograph of a cerebral image of the mother.

By the aid of this theory, we might explain the resemblance of the child to the father, to the first husband, to beloved relatives or to friends, either living or dead; but it would be impossible, thereby, to explain how a woman can reproduce in her child the features of a progenitor of her husband or of herself, whose portrait, even, she has never seen; or how, in spite of her wishes, the child resembles no one that she loves, etc. Let us keep a discreet silence; the laws of generation and of resemblance are unknown. If we succeed in discovering them, it will be only by long and patient observation, with the aid of judicious criticism, and an honorable determination to be impartial. Laws are not created, but discovered; ignorance is more healthful for the mind than error; to make general rules of a few facts, without taking into account facts more numerous by thousands which contradict them, is not to form a science, but a system of poetical metaphysics; and these metaphysics, however gracefully draped they may be, are opposed to reason, to science, and to truth.

Michelet will pardon me this short lesson in method. I should not presume to give it to him, were not men repeating, like well-trained parrots, after him and Proudhon, that woman is destitute of high intellectual faculties, that she is unsuited to science, that she has no comprehension of method, and other absurdities of like weight.

Allegations such as these place women in a wholly exceptional position, with respect to courtesy and reserve: they owe no consideration to those who deny them these; their most important business at the present time is to prove to men that they deceive themselves, and that they are deceived; that a woman is fully capable of teaching the chief among them how a law is discovered, how its reality is verified, how, and on what conditions we have a right to believe, and to style ourselves, rational, and rationalists.

Before concluding, let us dwell on a few passages of the book on Love. I am curious to know what woman Michelet addresses when he says:

"Spare me your elaborate discussions on the equality of the sexes. Woman is not only our equal, but in many points our superior. Sooner or later she will know everything. The question to decide here is, whether she should know all in her first season of love.

Oh, how much she would lose by it! Youth, freshness, poetry—does she wish, at the first blow, to abandon all these? Is she in such haste to grow old?"

Pardon me, sir; you have already decreed that there are no longer any old women; nothing, therefore, can make woman grow old.

"There is knowledge of all kinds," you say; "likewise, at all ages, the knowledge of woman should be different from that of man. It is less science that she needs, than the essence of science, and its living elixir."

What is this essence, and this living elixir of science? Poetry aside, can you, in exact and definite terms, explain to me what they mean?

Can you prove to me, a woman, that I desire to possess knowledge differently from you?

Take care! disciple of liberty, you have not the right to think and to wish in my place. I have, like you, an intellect and a free will, to which you are bound, by your principles, to pay sovereign respect. Now I forbid you to speak for any woman; I forbid you in the name of what you call the rights of the soul.

"You by no means deny," you say, "that, strictly speaking, a young woman can read everything, and inform herself of everything; can pass through all the ordeals to which the mind of man is subjected, and still remain pure. You only maintain," you add, "that her soul, withered by reading, palled by novels, living habitually on the stimulus of play-houses, on the aqua-fortis of criminal courts, will become, not corrupted, perhaps, but vulgar, common, trivial, like the curb-stone in the street. This curb-stone is a good stone; you have only to break it to see that it is white within. This does not hinder it from being sadly soiled outside, in every respect as dirty as the street gutter from which it has been splashed.

"Is this, madam, the ideal to which you lay claim for her who should remain the temple of man, the altar of his heart, whence he daily rekindles the flame of pure love?"

A truce to imagery and oratorical outbursts; none of us demand for woman any degradation whatever. There would be no need for us to demand what you censure, since it is thoroughly authorized and practised. I by no means wish to accuse you of bad faith, of want of reflection, and of too much moral tolerance; yet let us strip off your poetic mantle, and translate your thought into prose; the drapery will no longer make us forget the idea.

When instruction has been demanded for the people, has any one ever taken it into his head to fancy that the point in question was to make them read novels, to swell the attendance on criminal courts, and to multiply theatres?

No, you will say.

What authorizes you, then, to believe that those who demand a solid education for woman, are seeking that of of which you, on your part, do not dream for the people?

On the other hand, do you cultivate the intellect of man by novels, theatres, and spectacles of criminal courts? Is it in these things that his knowledge consists? No, you will say. What is there, then, in common between that which you censure, and the knowledge that we desire for woman; and why attribute to us absurd ideas, that you may have the pleasure of wrangling with phantoms?

All your fine ladies are nurtured on novels, plays, and judicial excitements; yet they are neither vulgar, nor trivial, nor comparable to curb-stones sullied by the mud of the streets; what you tell them, therefore, is no more true than kind.

But if you pay them doubtful compliments, which they do not deserve, you absolve them too easily, in turn. Listen to our principles, that you may not run the risk of appearing unjust with respect to us.

Corruption in our eyes, is not merely the want of chastity, or the shameful suit of gallantry, but all habitual improper sentiment, all weakening of the moral sense, and we absolutely condemn everything which has power to lessen the sensibility of the soul, and to turn it aside from the practice of justice, of virtue, and of self-respect.

In consequence, we profess that the spectacles of criminal courts habituate the heart to insensibility, and should be avoided as much as executions.

We profess that the modern drama is generally evil, because it excites interest for adulterers, robbers, seducers and prostitutes; that the intellect is subjected in theatres to an unhealthy and enervating atmosphere.

We profess, lastly, that novels should be read with great moderation, because, in general, when they do not corrupt the morals, they pervert the judgment and waste precious time.

Though we love and esteem Art, we are indignant at the bad use which is made of it, and we have little esteem for those who avail themselves of it to lead the heart astray, and to pervert the moral sense.

We say to woman: Educate yourselves, be worthy and chaste; life is earnest, employ it earnestly.

You see that woman in the image of the stained curb-stone, is by no means the ideal of which we dream.

Can you, a man of heart, can you treat women as wretched and corrupt because they are willing no longer to be slaves?

And besides, do you think that liberty, which in man engenders individuality and virtue, would produce in woman moral degradation?

Ah! leave these calumnies to those who have no heart; they ill befit you, who may deceive yourself through the lofty poetry of your soul, but who can wish for evil only because you believe it to be good.

The women who ask to be free, great, mistaken poet, are those who are conscious of their dignity, of the true rôle of their sex in humanity; those who desire that the women who follow them in the career of labor should no longer be obliged to live by man, because to live by him is at least to prostitute their dignity, and almost always, their whole person. They wish that woman should be the equal of man, in order to love him holily, to devote herself without calculation, to cease to deceive him or to rule him by artifice, and to become to him a useful auxiliary, instead of a servant or a toy. They know our influence over you; slaves, we can only debase you; at present, we render you cowardly, selfish, and dishonest; we send you out every morning, like vultures, upon society, to provide for our foolish expenses or to endow our children; we, women of emancipation, are unwilling that our sex should longer play this odious rôle, and be, through its slavery, an instrument of demoralization and of social degradation,—and this you impute to us as a crime!

Ah! I do not believe it; you yourself will say that I ought not to believe it.

Looking from a deplorably narrow stand point, you fancied that you saw all woman-kind in a few valetudinarians, your kind heart was moved for them, and you sought to protect them. Had you looked far and high, you would have seen the workers of thought and muscle; you would have comprehended that inequality is to them a source of corruption and suffering.

Then, in your lofty and glowing style, you would have written, not this book of Love which repels all intelligent and reflective women, but a great and beautiful work to demand the right of half the human race.

The misfortune, the irreparable misfortune, is that instead of climbing to the mountain top to look at every moving thing under the vast horizon, you have shut yourself up in a narrow valley, where, seeing nothing but pale violets, you have concluded that every flower must be also a pale violet; whilst Nature has created a thousand other species, on the contrary, strong and vigorous, with a right, like you, to earth, air, water and sunshine.

Whatever may be your love, your kindness and your good intentions towards woman, your book would be immensely dangerous to the cause of her liberty, if men were in a mood to relish your ethics: but they will remain as they are; and the dignity of woman, kept waking by their brutality, their despotism, their desertion, their foul morals, will not be lulled to sleep under the fresh, verdant, alluring and treacherously perfumed foliage of this manchineel tree, called the book of Love.

In Michelet's later work, "Woman," by the side of many beautiful pages full of heart and poetry are found things that we regret to point out, for the sake of the author.

M. Michelet has evidently amended, as we shall press on him; but as a spice of vengeance, he pretends that their language has been dictated by directors, philosophers and others. We know some of these ladies personally, and can assure him that they have had no director of any kind—quite the contrary.

Is it also in consequence of rancor that the author pretends that woman loves man, not for his real worth, but because he pleases her, and that she makes God in her own image, "a God of partiality and caprice, who saves those who please him?" "In feminine theology," adds Michelet, "God would say: I love thee because thou art a sinner, because thou hast no merit; I have no reason to love thee, but it is sweet to me to forgive."

Very well, your sex loves woman for her real worth; we never hear a man, enamored of some unworthy creature, say: "What matters it, I love her!" Your love is always wise, and given reasonably; none but deserving women can please you. I ask why so many honest women are abandoned and unhappy, while so many that are impure and vicious, yet sought and adored, are in possession of the art of charming, of ruining and of perverting men?

Michelet deplores the state of divorce which is established between the sexes; we deplore it likewise; but our complaints do not remedy it. Men shun marriage from motives that do them no credit: they have at their pleasure the poor girls whom want places at their mercy; they shun marriage because they do not wish a real, that is, an autonomous wife at their side; for themselves, they wish liberty, for their wife, slavery.

On their side, women tend to enfranchisement, which is well for them as it is for men: they should not suffer themselves to be turned aside from their pursuit; on the other hand, as men are attracted by a costly toilette, and neglect plainly dressed women, if the latter, in the wish to please and retain them, imitate public women, whose is the fault? Is it ours, who desire to please you and to be loved by you, or yours, who can only be attracted by dress? If you loved us for our real worth, and not because our dresses and jewels please your eye, we would not ruin you.

Let us point out in a few lines the contradictions and differences that are found between Michelet's first and second works.

In both, woman is the flame of love and of the fireside religion, harmony, poetry, the guardian of the domestic hearth, a housewife whose cares are ennobled by love: civilization is due to her grace, she should be the representative of grace if not of beauty.

In both books, the household must be isolated; the wife must have no intimate friendship; mother, brothers and sisters prevent her from becoming absorbed as she ought to be in her husband. What we think of this absorption is already known; we will only say here that if the friends and relatives of the wife should be expelled, those of the husband should be none the less so; the mother and friends of the husband have more power to injure the wife than those of the wife to injure the husband; numerous sad facts prove this.

In "Love," woman is a receptive power, incapable of comprehending conscientious works; she must receive everything from her husband in the intellectual and moral point of view.

In "Woman," she is half of the couple, in the same ratio as man is capable of the most lofty speculations, and thoroughly understands administration. She gives the child the education that before all else will influence the rest of his life. "So long as woman is not the partner of labor and of action," says the author, "we are serfs, we can do nothing—she may even be the equal of man in medical science; she is a school, she is sole educatress, etc."

Very well, thus far; and doubtless Michelet would have been consistent, had he not got into his head a masculine and a feminine ideal which spoils everything; he reasoned to himself: "Man is a creator, woman a harmony whose end and destination is love;" and, consequently, he marks out for the latter a plan of education different from that by which man should be developed; the natural sciences are suited to woman, history should only be taught her to form in her a firm moral and religious faith. As love is her vocation, to each season of the life of woman should correspond an object of love; flowers, the doll, poor children, next the lover, then the husband and children, then the care of young orphans, prisoners, etc.

In "Love," the wife alone seems bound to confess to the husband. In "Woman," the obligation is mutual.

The widow, in "Love," should not marry again, in "Woman," she may espouse a friend of the husband, or still better, the one whom he may choose on his deathbed; if she is too old, she may watch over a young man; but she will do better to protect young girls, to make peace in families, to facilitate marriages, to superintend prisons, etc.

We will carry the analysis no further; our objections to the author's doctrine will be found in the article on Proudhon, and in the sequel of the work.