The Female Eunuch (21 page)
But a pebble of the brook Warbled out these metres meet:
‘Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to Its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’
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If altruism is chimeric, it does not follow that all love behaviour is basically egotistical. The narcissism that I pointed to as the basis for love is not a phenomenon of the ego, which is only the conscious, self-conscious part of the personality, but a function of the whole personality. Egotism in love is not the love of one for another of its own kind, but the assumption of a unity existing between two people which must be enforced and protected against all attempts to social- ize it. If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attach-
ment, or an enlarged egotism.
2
Freud assumed that sexual passion
was exclusive because jealousy seemed so integral a part of it, and indeed we shall see that most experiments in group marriage founder upon the difficulties that almost everybody experiences when trying with the best will in the world to conquer sexual egotism. The jeal- ousy of a man about his woman is obviously egotistical in a way which differs markedly from female jealousy. A woman becomes the extension of a man’s ego like his horse or his car. She can be stolen, and the offence rests with the thief not with the
possession. And so men attempt to restore their damaged image when they offer violence to men who dance with or ogle their wives. It is not usually the assumption that women are promiscuous which provokes male jealousy in our society but rather the assumption that they are merely acquiescent in sexual relations. It would appear that men most often flirt with other men’s women because of a desire to get at the men, not desire for the women, and hence the cock- fighting syndrome which is even in twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon society ludicrously prevalent. For some people love relationships define themselves in terms of jealous exclusivity. ‘I just like being near her. I don’t particularly want to have great conversations with
her. I just feel awful when I see her with somebody else.’
3
The terms
of such passion are all negative. ‘I never wanted anyone but you; you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved’ is taken as sufficient justific- ation for undisputed possession. Because the lover cannot live without his beloved she must remain with him even against her will. And this is most often recognized as love. As long as the beloved stays she may be treated with great generosity but once she leaves she is an object of hatred and reprisal. The connotations of such a symbiosis are summarized in a macabre story which appeared in Italian newspapers. Meo Calleri stole Maria Teresa Novara from her parents’ house at Asti in Piedmont and installed her in an under- ground room unknown to anyone. There he kept her supplied with food and fumetti, in the margins of which she kept a kind of journal which described her days waiting for her lover to come to her. But one day he was drowned in a car accident. Nobody knew of his love- nest, and his unfortunate hostage suffocated slowly, lying heavily made-up waiting for him on the narrow bed. Too true she could not
live without him.
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And yet the affirmative answer to the questions ‘Do you feel that you cannot live without him?’ and ‘If you lost him tomorrow would you feel that life had no further meaning, and that you would never feel the same for
anyone else?’
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is assumed by one contemporary sentimental coun- sellor to be evidence that a woman is in love, truly in love. If men regard women’s fidelity as a necessary prop to their ego and cuckol- dom as the deepest shame, and they do even in England, women are prepared to tolerate infidelity because they so badly need actual security, and not apparent security. They suffer torments of jealousy because they are terrified of abandonment, which seems to them mostly to be all too probable. No man expects to be abandoned until he is
Envying stood the enormous Form, at variance with Itself In all its Members, in eternal torment of love & jealousy,
Driven forth by Los time after time from Albion’s cliffy shore,
Drawing the free loves of Jerusalem into infernal bondage That they might be born in Contentions of Chastity & in
Deadly Hate between Leah and Rachel, Daughters of Deceit & Fraud
Bearing the Images of various Species of Contention And Jealousy & Abhorrence & Revenge & Deadly Murder,
Till they refuse liberty to the Male, & not like Beulah Where every Female delights to give her maiden to her husband,
Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, pl.69, 11. 6–15
faced with evidence that he is being cuckolded or left. As Compton Mackenzie made one of his
Extraordinary Women
observe:
Voltaire had said that no man could ever imagine why any woman should wish
coucher
with anybody except him; but I think he could have said also that after a certain age no man can ever be quite sure that the woman
qui couche avec lui veut coucher avec lui
. But from the first moment that a woman
couche avec un homme
she is always
thinking that he is wanting
coucher avec une autre femme
.
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Man is jealous because of his
amour propre
; woman is jealous be- cause of her lack of it. Once a boy who wanted me to live with him assured me when I asked him whether or not he would be possessive that he would make love to me so much that I shouldn’t be capable of wanting anybody else. This kind of arrogance is what makes ac- tual betrayal so unbearable for men: its utter impossibility for wo- men, who imagine that they have no way of controlling the sexuality of their menfolk, is what makes for feminine insecurity. A woman is so aware of being appreciated by her husband as a thing, and a stereotyped thing at that, that she herself can see no reason why he should not covet the bosom exposed to him by another guest at dinner, especially if she is miserably afraid that in terms of the ste- reotype the exposed bosom shapes up better than hers. Of course, many women do assume control of their mates’ sexuality and one of the easiest ways of doing it is by perverting them to some practice to which they become addicted. I remember a woman boasting to me once that she had something in bed that I did not have therefore a mutual friend of ours must have loved her better than he did me. I eventually found out that what she had in bed was a desire to be beaten and humiliated, which forced our mutual friend to recapitu- late to a tendency in himself that he had always mistrusted, which made him very unhappy. Women are happy to replace spontaneous association for pleasure’s sake with addiction because it is more binding. There are hundreds of cases in England where wives consent to dress up in leather or rubber, and beat their husbands or shit upon them or whatever they require, because the compulsivity of the activity is their security.
This kind of abasement may be justified by the woman to herself as an extreme form of altruism, when it is obviously like most other forms of feminine altruism, disguised egotism. When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming
you can’t do this to me
, they reveal that all that they have offered
in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff. The ulti- mate expression of this kind of love-egotism is the suicide attempt, and it is practised by both sexes. Our society encourages the substi- tution of addiction for spontaneous pleasure and specifically encour- ages women to foster dependencies which will limit their mates’ tendencies to roving and other forms of instability. But, while pop- ular moralists encourage a wife to cope indirectly with her husband’s infidelities using his guilt to cement the marital symbiosis, they allow the man considerable power of surveillance and limitation, even over apparently innocent activities, as far as his wife is concerned. Almost any woman’s magazine will supply an example of this mechanism. This example comes from a letter addressed to ‘Evelyn Home’ of
Woman
:
A party a year ago is still a volcanic topic between my wife and me. A week after it, one of the male guests who’d danced with my wife visited her while I was at work. Rightly or wrongly I called at his home where his wife laughed and said her husband was just friendly. My own wife made a stormy scene and said I could trust her; if not, she will jump into bed with the next caller and give me
something real to worry about.
I insist that, once married, neither partner should have such visit- ors. Should I stand by this or copy my wife’s brand of conduct?
For a year this poor wretch has pondered this question. His wife has a male visitor in the daytime, and he broods for a year. Indeed, he thinks so little of her that he takes the matter up with the other man’s wife, who laughs at him, his disloyalty, his insecurity and his presumption. His wife though shows no great love, for she threatens him. and does not take up the issue of principle. This is marriage, the foundation of society! But Evelyn Home does not reject his morality. She endorses his basic suppositions about the friends of his wife and dignifies the relationship with the name love.
As you don’t admire your wife’s brand of conduct, don’t copy it—but do ask yourself why she welcomed another man’s attentions. I don’t doubt that his visit was merely social, but your wife was clearly delighted at the compliment.
Do you tell her often that you love her? If not, start now, for she needs reassurance. And think over the kind of life she leads. Would you be bored in her place? Would you need extra mental activity or interests? Maybe your wife needs them too, if she’s to stay happily
faithful.
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People who buy books may laugh at such views, dismiss them as typical of a certain civilization, but this is to set aside the fact that the moral attitudes of a concept like ‘Evelyn Home’, whose name sweats domesticity, are computer-proven to be the ones that the great majority of female readers find acceptable.
The love that one can fall into is exclusive; all other loves, including the love for the offspring of such love, cause jealousy. Hence the proverbial hatred for the mother-in-law, another example of how the single-couple household pulls away from the larger social fabric. It is itself a repetition of the Oedipal situation and it reproduces the Oedipus complex in the offspring, so that the family is the battle- ground of the house of Atreus, all caught in the net and all being hacked piecemeal to a lingering death. Lovers live only for each other, dead to the outside world. A dead man makes a good employ- ee and his dead wife sits obliterated in her red-brick mausoleum waiting for her husband to come home so that they can continue their game of ritual murder—whether by caresses or taunts and blows makes little difference, for each man kills the thing he loves, as Oscar Wilde remarked with characteristic irresponsibility. The techniques which are employed to keep young children at the level of dolls and cripples are employed in the marital love situation to seal off the egotistical unit. Baby-talk, even to the extent of calling the husband ‘daddy’ or ‘poppa’, and the wife ‘momma’ or ‘mother’ and both partners alike ‘baby’, keeps the discourse to a correctly fatuous level.
Even between lovers who would shy at baby-talk the accumulation of little sentimentally significant objects and rituals is a part of the mutual egotism of love. Objects, places, droll words, games, presents are hung about as charms warding off the intrusion of the outside world. Women’s egotism operates more completely in this than men’s, for women regard the disregard of their toys and rituals as the greatest heartlessness. To give away a pet object or to call another person by a pet name is to signify the end of the affair; it cannot be forgiven. Ultimately many of the expedients of
égoisme à deux
bring about the separation of lovers, for where there are no visible ties none can be visibly broken. (If you don’t give me your fraternity pin I can’t send it back.)
One of the most chilling aspects of love egotism is the desire of males and females to feel proud of their partners. Most men desire women who can be shown off to the boys, women desired by other men, although evidently subjugated to the desire for their owners
It would shame me to return her to her parents: I will make a covering for my head from her hair and grind her bones for mortar. I will not release her, but I will wed another.
Disappointed groom, Battak, Sumatra
alone. Much of the outrage that men feel when the wives have flirted with other men is due to the fact that kudos of having a pretty and desirable wife has been dissipated by the impression that she is not content and happy with her master. The number of teenage songs which mourned the fickleness of beautiful women and yearned for paper dolls which other fellas couldn’t steal is evidence about the prevalence of this kind of egotism. When a man commits himself to his dream girl one of his most urgent desires is to show her to his friends, while women are less concerned, for they are prepared
to neglect all their own acquaintances and acquire that of their mate. There is a parallel egotism in female attitudes towards men only when a woman is a member of a group which may declare some men simply too wet, too corny, too
bleahh
to go out with, and no as- surances about their deep-down lovableness or riches or whatever will serve to counteract this uneasiness about the public impression. A woman shows her own value to her sisters by choosing a success- ful and personable man. It is probably a part of the process of natural selection, operating at the very outset of the courting game, and a healthy egotism at that, if only the criteria involved in such judge- ments were not so ersatz and commercial, and so trivial. One man of my acquaintance, explaining why he was besottedly in love with his secretary, to the utter detriment of his marriage, explained that his secretary had had famous lovers, had been a hippie when it was still the done thing and moved out of Haight Ashbury when it ceased to be okay to live there. She had long legs, long blonde hair, and a fashionable figure, she knew all about acid and had been initiated by Leary and Kesey: how could he not love her? His wife, who had been a trendy catch ten years before, was not making it so well (partly because she had been married to him) so it was better for everybody that he go with the trend. Women too bask in the reflected glory of their chosen mates. It would be nonsensical to marry a cel- ebrated and artistic man while remaining indifferent to his achievement: everyone wants to be recognized and rewarded but it might be a better world if achievement was more variously regarded, and if people did not think in terms of catching people’s love but of loving them. ‘I got him’ is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is ‘I lost him’. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives’ bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being out- stripped or belittled. Lillian Hellman loved Dashiel Hammett all her life, and continues to do so although he is dead. Her love for him did
