Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII.
The Same.
No. 3.—Letitia to Lesbia.
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‘Your reference to the theological aspect of the woman’s rights question, Lesbie, seems to compel us into examining the origin of the difference of sex; since we cannot expect the world to take our word that the female portion of mankind is the superior, unsupported by proof. There is no help for it, then, we must go to the root of the question, or leave it alone.
‘Well, I guess no one will dispute that the beauty of the race inheres mainly in its feminine portion. I do not speak of features merely, but all that constitutes grace,—the beauty of figure and movement, the sweetness of the voice, and the infinite variety of charm which woman generally possesses in contrast with man. That being so, what can there be in man which attracts woman downward toward him? I could understand the theory that the mutual love of human beings, in the angelic state of perfection which we profess to aspire to in professing religion, should require a bodily adaptation for union, but then it might be a similar one, not a different one, one sex, not two sexes. I do not understand why we are divided into two sexes or classes, whereof the one is, generally speaking, beautiful and refined, the other uncomely and coarse. The separation itself is to me unaccountable. How comes it that a genuine hermaphrodite in the flesh is as mythical a creature as the unicorn or griffin of armorial bearings? If the higher beings, the ‘angels’ of immortality, whose state we aspire to reach after the death of this body, combine the two sexes In one person, why is that perfection not copied in our earth-world? If, on the other hand, they do not so unite them—why do they not? I complain (as a philosopher) of arrangements in this earthly existence which introduce the ugly and coarse into the animal economy without necessity. Assuming, if you like, that parthenogenesis is a mere fable, and that the introduction of the zoosperm to the ovum is in all cases indispensable to reproduction, I ask why the zoosperm should not be engendered in woman by herself, or by other women. What is man needed for? And why, being needed as it seems, must he be a coarse and brutal being as compared with woman? And yet again, being as he is coarse and brutal, what is it that attracts woman toward him. To say that her taste is depraved, affords no answer. How came her taste to be depraved? Low qualities for low beings, but the architype of nature can have no business with depraved tastes, unless in the very wide sense that universal good includes all evil.[1] Nor does the principle of evolution, which is the principle of cosmogony, explain this phenomenon. Evolution is the division of function-monopolising homogeneities into function-distributing heterogeneities; in other words, it is the principle of the division of labour. Good; but that does not imply the degradation or corruption of any of the distributed functions. Why should the spiritual hermaphrodite evolve the natural woman and man, the one beautiful or noble, the other by comparison base? That is where I collapse.’
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No. 3.—Lesbia to Letitia.
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‘Do I rightly understand you to mean, Lettie, that women are attracted downwards to men in the sense that they actually prefer a hirsute brute of a man to an Apollo Belvedere, or would do so if they had the choice? If such be your intention, I flatly deny the fact. I say that it is just through lack of that very choice, that women are driven to make the best of a bad situation, and cling to that caricature of the male sex which the races of this planet produce. Quand ou a pas ce que t'on aime, il faut aimer ce que t'on a. You will find that whenever women idealise manhood, in fiction or otherwise, they invariably tend to invest their beau ideal with feminine virtues and attractions; they may put some fierce whiskers and a horsey swagger, etc., to their hero, but if there is anything about him worth admiring, or which his creators admire, it is glaringly feminine. Woman, say what you will, does invariably and instinctively tend to reproduce and to worship her own beauty; she does but tack on the masculine capacities to it, to meet certain earthly and temporary requirements. There are exceptions to this rule, no doubt, but those exceptions are the fruit of perversion, especially early perversion. What indeed may not be accomplished in the way of degradation by this means? By perverted training you may debase a woman as much as or more than a man; you may teach her to care for nothing in the world so much as the brandy-bottle; you may turn her inclinations to all that is corrupt and nauseous. The wonder is that we are not much more debased than is generally the case. Therefore it is not difficult to account for the fact that here and there we do meet with a woman whose tastes and sympathies are on the side of brutality in men, and who herd with men of that stamp, calling unmanly whatever is refined in men, while they call unwomanly whatever is self-helpful in woman. Would you believe it, Lettie, I have even heard women say that they rather like boys to be cruel? What can you expect of boys who are brought up by such females as that? It is not uncommon to hear shallow people say that boys are naturally cruel, mischievous, and coarse, This is a libel and slander from top to bottom. Boys are not naturally anything of the sort; they, like girls, are the victims of society’s folly and perverseness. A different training is devised for each, and is suitable to neither; they are distorted in opposite directions, hence the evils you and I complain of when those girls and boys become grown-up women and men.
‘“From the sole of the foot,” says the same prophet I quoted before, “even unto the crown of the head, there is no soundness, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; they have not been closed nor bound up,” etc., etc. But, I repeat, you must not put any of these things down to nature, unless, indeed, upon the principle humanum est errare. It is not in the nature of women to be servile, nor are they naturally attracted by what is base in men; it is not natural in men to usurp women’s place, and by so doing make a burlesque of religion and defile the spiritual atmosphere. These moral obliquities are repugnant to the better nature in each sex, as disease is opposed to health. We must not acquiesce in them as natural, we must extirpate them as morbid.
‘Nevertheless there is, after all, a sense in which you may correctly say that woman is attracted downwards towards man, but it is that sense in which we are all ‘attracted downward’ to our lower animal functions. If the digestion does not go on as it should, not only the stomach, but through it the thoughts and the temper become deranged; and therefore it may be said that we inevitably take an interest in the state of our own health, or feel attracted towards those conditions which go to constitute it. If, then, you will accept this position for the masculine portion or sex of your hermaphrodite, namely, that it is indispensable to the higher, the feminine portion, as the digestive organs are indispensable to the heart and brain, I will not quarrel with your statement about the downward attraction. It vouches for and explains itself in that relation; you need no longer be puzzled why the higher clings to the lower.
‘You will hardly suspect Mr Bristley’s niece of being a bibliolater, Lettie, therefore I need not fear being misunderstood when I express my belief that the reason why rationalists make light of and ridicule the wisdom contained in the Bible, is because they do not understand it. They will insist upon judging the book, or rather books, by the letter, whereas we are repeatedly told that the letter is exactly what it is not to be judged by: the letter killeth; the spirit, that is, the hidden meaning, giveth life. I am not going to treat you to a verbatim interpretation of any text, but it will aid our inquiry to outline what my uncle considers to be the esoteric purport of the myth of the Fall, which, taken in its literal sense, would, in common with all other biblical marvels, be a silly nursery tale. It will be difficult to make every term clear to you, but in speculations so deep, one must be content with faint sketches of the truth, seeing them for the present ‘through a glass darkly.’ The meaning of the myth we take to be briefly as follows,—
‘Out of the divine Unity, the eternal Womanhood, called by Solomon Wisdom, come forth by Her act the diversified world of nature. By the production last of all of the earthly image of the Eternal Wisdom, namely, woman in the flesh, the reason and object of creation stood explained. The last product was the image of the first origin. Woman was the first and the last, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, beginning in the spiritual world, ending in the natural, and thence returning again to the spiritual. Thus the male of mankind is the last step short of the Divine image, the female is that image itself. The whole varied world which we call Nature was latent in that Divine Wisdom whereof woman is the image; therefore man himself was latent in Her as much as any lower part of nature. This view does away with the plausible theory of spiritual equality between the sexes. Man is neither a separate being equal (spiritually) with woman, nor is he co-essential with her to the perfect humanity, unless you call it co-essential to belong to her in the sense in which our legs and arms belong to us. Therefore in regarding Deity as the Spiritual Hermaphrodite, it is of the first importance to bear in mind that the two factors of hermaphrodism are not of equal dignity—the feminine factor being the divine, the masculine the earthly. The masculine or temporal side of humanity is in principle as much evolved from and involved back to the feminine or eternal side as is any lower organic or even inorganic form of existence. Hence it follows that to sunder the spiritual hermaphrodite, in other words, to evolve the phenomenon of two separate sexes, is to sunder the baser from the nobler part of the Divine Human Being. Reducing this theory to practice, it becomes manifestly the greatest of society’s duties to repair the Fall by bringing about the elevation of womanhood, this being the true and demonstrable scheme of redemption, or the buying back by human labour the lost position of human divinity, the position where the masculine sex is but a power of the feminine, not something apart from and even antagonistic to it. The loss or fall thus described shows the nature of the Original Sin from which we need to be redeemed. It consists in reversing the proper relations of man and woman in spiritual interests, placing man above and woman below. Of this reversal the prophet speaks, “Surely your turning of things upside down shall be reckoned as the (case of the) potter’s clay; for shall the clay say of him that formed it, He formed me not?” etc., etc. By this, the original sin, society has been doing the work opposite to that of re-constructing the spiritual hermaphrodite. It has been stirring in the direction of making the separation more pronounced, the discord greater; and this discord has been the parent of all the discords of the world.
‘I think, Lettie, I have now shown you at least how my uncle would answer your inquiry as to the cause of the downward attraction of woman to man of which you speak. Both that and the degradation of man are explained by the Fall, that is, the disintegration of the hermaphrodite, which disintegration it is the mission and raison d’être of Religion properly so called, to repair.’
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