Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 22

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Arnold Bennett (in Pictorial Review, November 1922), writes: “She absolutely must exercise charm, whether things are going right or going wrong.... Women were born to exercise charm.... A large proportion of women, especially pretty ones, suffer from the illusion that in order to exercise charm they need only continue to exist. A mistake! To exercise charm is an active and not a passive function. It cannot be efficiently done without thought and hard work. It is sometimes very trying and exhausting, like earning money—but it is not less essential than earning money if life is to be fully lived.”

Many women prefer to earn money rather than follow this unremunerative trade of exercising charm; because they realize that earning money is productive and exercising charm is not. They can get in dollars a measure of their efforts. In personal charm, however, there is no measurable factor, except in reaction on the male, and that is an autoerotic element in his mental make-up.

Feminine charm is to be sure active and not passive. It is, however, reactive and not spontaneously active. It reacts to the positive action of the man, which is the response characteristic of true femininity anywhere, any time. As to its necessitating thought and hard work and being trying and exhausting, the contrary is the truth. No man can but dislike a woman who has thought and worked hard, been tried and become exhausted by this thoroughly artificial and unnatural attempt to “exercise charm.” His unconscious and real reaction to this trying position into which the woman puts herself to retain his affection by exercising charm is one of revolt. He may not know it but it is there all the time, and comes out in the unhappy moments.

And this attempt recommended by Mr. Bennett is only a superficial attempt. It never really succeeds permanently. It is the reason why men avoid designing women. They say to themselves unconsciously that this forced effort is an overcompensation for a real (i.e., unconsciously perceived) inferiority.

The only thing rightly to be called charm is the pleasantness of the natural reaction on the woman’s part to the binary situation, the situation of man and woman in social intercourse. Her forcing herself is always repugnant to him, if he is normally himself. The word charm,[10] therefore, applies to a type or action on her part that is conditioned solely on her being with him. It is character and conduct, ingenuous, instinctive, spontaneous; revealing, without traditional or conventional inhibitions, the essence of true womanliness, and brought out only in the situation that is really, and in the highest sense, erotic, where the erotic holds sway over the more ignoble egoistic-social impulse.

Her charm for her husband will consist in the fact that she is woman and wife first and foremost. That is enough for a man who is first and foremost man and husband. Uninhibited woman, unwarped by sex inhibitions, spontaneously making her direct response, her natural reaction uninterrupted, unperverted, unbroken by archaic traditions that have overweighted the egoistic social instincts and debased the erotic—such a woman has and will always have the maximum of charm for unperverted man. The eternal femininity, the universal femininity, is always at the core of every woman’s being.

Virile love alone is competent to tear away the impediments that perturb its reactions, and when this is done true monogamy is inevitable, for there is no preventive mechanism obstructing the total fusion of their bodies and souls. That kind of charm any woman naturally exerts over any man, but it has nothing in common with the conventional charm of the cosmetic and costumer’s art.

The monogamic husband, if he reads beneath the surface, feels this charm in all other women as well as in his wife; but, as he knows what it amounts to in care and attention, to uncover the soul of his wife, he realizes that to undertake the task with another woman would not be worth the candle. He could do it, but he knows he would get no more satisfaction from another woman than from his wife.