The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations/Part 1/10. Adultery
ADULTERY.
Adherents of the official and theological morality will feel in duty bound to grow indignant over the claim that in reality there is no such thing as adultery. They will believe that the moral world, whose chief aim hitherto seems to have been to create as many crimes as possible, in order to be able to condemn as much as possible, must go to ruin if it is deprived of one of its most piquant crimes. And nevertheless the world will finally have to submit to this loss, and even come to realize that in principle a more severe moral conception is required for the destruction of a piquant crime than for the retention of the same.
If there is to be a breach of marriage, the breach must necessarily extend through that which constitutes marriage, which is its essence, its condition, its sum and substance. Marriage is not a business contract, it is a union of hearts: and love is the condition of this union. A breach of marriage must, therefore, be a breach of love; but love does not break itself; its breaking is, therefore, equivalent to a want of love; and since marriage without love is no longer marriage, so-called adultery can be nothing more than an actual proof that marriage no longer exists.
There can no more be a breach of marriage by adultery than there can be a breach of night, a breach of day, etc. When day dawns it is no longer night; and when night comes it is no longer day. If one of the parties feels an inclination to commit what is called adultery, then the marriage is already broken, even without the completed act. At that very moment marriage ceases to exist, because love has ceased to exist; because the love that is required for marriage either never existed or has been replaced by another.
Pious moralists will say that this is equivalent to giving free rein to adultery under the pretext of the dying out of the old and the awakening of anew love. But then these pious people do not know what love is. Love is no arbitrary thing. He who loves will and can as little abandon his love for any purpose as he who does not love can enforce a love for any purpose.
This is the very "moral" perversion of our moral ideas that has until now made it possible to bring in vogue and to maintain a style of marriage without the one requisite of marriage, love. True morality demands that a marriage which has ceased to be a marriage intrinsically, and which is, therefore, nothing more than a relation of compulsion, hypocrisy, and prostitution, should also cease to be one extrinsically. The hypocrisy of the pious moralists, however, still clings with all its might to the external relation, even after the purpose, the essence, and the contents have been lost and the inner bond has been rent in twain, and if one party withdraws from this compulsion in order to avenge outraged liberty outside of marriage, and to bring to light the fruits of enforced hypocrisy, this proof of a no longer existing marriage is called adultery.
Adultery is said to be a breach of faith. But what is faith? It is nothing more than active love. But if love is to be active, it must above all things exist. So long as I love I cannot become "unfaithful;" and as soon as I become unfaithful I no longer love. To assume fidelity as distinct from love is indeed a contradiction in the premises. Fidelity is love persisting in action and through action. It is, therefore, at bottom not at all a duty, but a frame of mind, or the necessary outcome of this frame of mind. Fidelity without this frame of mind, i.e., merely physical or mechanical abstinence, cannot have the least moral value with regard to the essence and aim of marriage.
But it is again the men and the pious people who have made the discovery that there is also fidelity without love, without faithful sentiments, i.e., self-denial which, for the sake of a foreign imaginary aim, must sacrifice its feelings to a false relationship. As we have seen above, manas the stronger had accustomed him self to use and abuse, by wilful change and in every manner, the degraded weaker sex, in whom his coarse heart could not yet find a lasting charm. Still his feeling must gradually have brought him to reflect whether woman had not really a right, and all the more a right, to follow his example the oftener he set her that example. Woman, however, made no use of this right, because she continued ever to love him in spite of his arbitrariness, and this undeserved fidelity appeared to him so astonishing and difficult that he saw in it an exceptional virtue. And since he was an egotist and a despot, he came to claim this fidelity which in the beginning had excited his astonishment; he came to demand fidelity of the woman even when she no longer loved him, and made a crime of unfaithfulness. We have also seen that among all savage peoples there is such a thing as adultery on the part of woman, but not on the part of man. And even among civilized nations the law makes an essential distinction. Thus adultery on the part of woman is universally a ground for divorce, but adultery on the part of man generally only in such cases where the husband has kept a concubine in the common dwelling.
When a woman becomes unfaithful her love has also ceased. No man will contest that. His own love, however, he wishes to be considered as independent of his fidelity, for he is as much a sophist as a despot. Goethe comforts one of his beloved with the words: Indeed, faithful love by the side of changing desires"! Interesting phenomenon! In other words that would be: The respectability of our existing relationship, and some of your amiable qualities, move me from time to time to come back to you from my excursions into other fields; if I again tire of you I renew my excursions, i.e., I take for myself full liberty to junket about wherever I can find anything. You can be assured, my dearest, that upon my excursions I never talk the least about "love" to any other woman; no, indeed not. I speak to her only of "desire." You will be convinced, my child, that my junketing can be charged only to "desire," which you must by no means ever mistake for "love." My "love" belongs to you alone, my "desire" also to others, which others are satisfied with the mere "desire" without "love," which you of course will not be able to understand, but which is nevertheless a lie. You can see from this, my child, how beautifully we men can reconcile "fidelity" with "change" by separating love from fidelity, and either make the beloved one believe that her competitors are mere mistresses or convince her that she herself is one likewise! We, however, protest against the same liberty and science on your part in the name of all the principles of morality!
Goethe, to be sure, did not express this last sentence in words; but neither this liberal friend of women nor any other one would have declared himself contented if his beloved had surprised him with the news:
Heart-felt love unites us forever and faithful yearnings;
But desire still craves the pleasures of change.
Let us meet in advance an objection which will be raised against the theory of adultery as here set forth. On the basis of the old conceptions it will be said that this theory would logically protect and argue away every violation of duty. But the very end to be sought is the release of the essence and conditions of marriage from the bonds of duty in which it has been chained, and to place it unfettered upon the ground upon which it thrives — upon the ground of spontaneous attachment. The present moralists acknowledge marriages in which the sense of duty takes the place of attachment or makes it unnecessary; a sense of duty, namely, which is stimulated or dictated by external considerations. But true liberty and morality cannot acknowledge such marriages, for they are thoroughly immoral. A duty can never exist at the expense of ethical conceptions and ethical aims. But what is the aim of mar. riage? As we have seen: propagation, love, friendship. And who will and can impose that as a duty if our own free inclination does not prompt usto it? There are, indeed, duties in marriage, but they do not belong here, because in a true marriage they are recognized and practised spontaneously. With regard to adultery, they could at. most consist in the avoidance of a possible danger into which at last every relationship may drift. To rashly expose the affections to every danger, or to wilfully put them to the test, would be to degrade them beforehand. Who would throw the crystal upon the pavement simply to see whether it would break?
If marriage is released from its present bonds and humanity redeemed from the vice of hypocrisy, then will adultery gradually be lost sight of, both as a conception andasadeed. Whoever is capable of or feels the desire to commit adultery will simply dissolve the marriage; whoever has occasion to commit adultery has simply found another person with whom he enters into a new marriage. Thus adultery will become a change of marriage, especially when the possibility of finding a person who will serve as a mere tool for an adulterous act can no longer be assumed after women have become independent of men and no longer know what it is to give themselves up to prostitution. For in order to assume the present condition of adultery we must presuppose the present condition of prostitution.
I can foresee that husbands will be frightened at this theory. But I will give them a word of advice. If you wish to keep your wives from adultery, see to it that they can love you; do not charge it to them as a crime if they love you no longer, and do not force them into hypocrisy if they love some one else. Try to bind them only in so far that they are to tell you openly when another has gained their heart, and then part from them in friendship as is becoming to humane men, in order to let them enter, unhindered, a new relationship which promises them greater happiness. If they can be sure of this humane treatment and this liberty, then you can also generally be.sure that they will not deceive you. But the man who wishes to hold the woman. in the bonds of marriage, although she no longer loves him, is both a fool and a barbarian, and deserves that badge with which women are wont to distinguish tyrannical husbands.
How much has adultery already been moralized over by priests and disputed over by jurists! And what barbarities has it not called forth! Among almost all savages man has the right to kill the adulterous woman without further preliminaries. Among the ancient Egyptians the woman's nose was cut off, because a woman "who incited to forbidden joys had to be deprived of the most beautiful ornament of a beautiful face." Her seducer was punished with lashes, yet she was the "charmer." Among the Hindoos the woman was publicly torn to pieces by dogs, and the seducer was fastened upon a red-hot iron bedstead and roasted alive. Among the Jews the adulteress was stoned, but the adulterer was punished only when he had committed the act with a married woman and had thus (by a violation of "property") offended another man. According to the laws of Solon, the Athenian could sell the adulterous woman as a slave. The Romans permitted the husband to kill both the wife surprised in the act of adultery and, with her, the adulterer. Mohammed granted the husband the right to incarcerate the sinful woman in an especial apartment of his house "until either death released her or God gave her a means of escape." Among the old Teutons the woman, with hair cut off, and disrobed, was cast out of the house by her husband and whipped through the town.
What a list of brutalities and barbarities! And what for? For an imaginary crime against imaginary masters who called themselves husbands and were nothing but despots and barbarians.
- ↑ Herzliche Liebe verbindet uns stets und treues Verlangen, Nur den Wechsel behielt still die Begierde sich vor,