The Passionate Friends
our seasonal movements in relation to the ritual of politics and sport,
we travel south for the Budget and north for the grouse, we play games
to amuse the men who keep us--not a woman would play a game for its own
sake--we dabble with social reform and politics, for which few of us
care a rap except as an occupation, we 'discover' artists or musicians
or lecturers (as though we cared), we try to believe in lovers or, still
harder, try to believe in old or new religions, and most of us--I
don't--do our best to give the gratifications and exercise the
fascinations that are expected of us....
"Something has to be done for women, Stephen. We are the heart of life,
birth and begetting, the home where the future grows, and your schemes
ignore us and slide about over the superficialities of things. We are
spoiling the whole process of progress, we are turning all the
achievements of mankind to nothingness. Men invent, create, do miracles
with the world, and we translate it all into shopping, into a glitter of
dresses and households, into an immense parade of pride and excitement.
We excite men, we stir them to get us and keep us. Men turn from their
ideas of brotherhood to elaborate our separate cages....
"I am Justin's wife; not a thing in my heavens or my earth that is not
subordinated to that.
"Something has to be done for women, Stephen, something--urgently--and
nothing is done until that is done, some release from their intolerable
subjection to sex, so that for us everything else in life, respect,
freedom, social standing, is entirely secondary to that. But what has to
be done? We women do not know. Our efforts to know are among the most
desolating of spectacles. I read the papers of those suffrage women; the
effect is more like agitated geese upon a common than anything human has
a right to be.... That's why I turn to you. Years ago I felt, and now I
know, there is about you a simplicity of mind, a foolishness of faith,
that is stronger and greater than the cleverness of any woman alive. You
are one of those strange men who take high and sweeping views--as larks
soar. It isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... No, but still
I turn to you. In the old days I used to turn to you and shake your mind
and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about
without my clamor. Once do you remember at Martens I shook you by the
ears.... And when I made you think, you thought, as I could never do.
Think now--about women.
"Stephen, there are moments when it seems to me that this futility of
women, this futility of men's effort _through_ women, is a fated
futility in the very nature of things. We may be saddled with it as we
are with all the animal infirmities we have, with appendixes and
suchlike things inside of us, and the passions and rages of apes and a
tail--I believe we have a tail curled away somewhere, haven't we?
Perhaps mankind is so constituted that badly as they get along now they
couldn't get along at all if they let women go free and have their own
way with life. Perhaps you can't have _two_ sexes loose together. You
must shut up one. I've a horrible suspicion that all these anti-suffrage
men like Lord Cromer and Sir Ray Lankester must know a lot about life
that I do not know. And that other man Sir Something-or-other Wright,
who said plainly that men cannot work side by side with women because
they get excited.... And yet, you know, women have had glimpses of a
freedom that was not mischievous. I could have been happy as a Lady
Abbess--I must have space and dignity, Stephen--and those women had
things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day.
They came to the House of Lords. But they lost all that. Was there some
sort of natural selection?...
"Stephen, you were made to answer my mind, and if you cannot do it
nobody can. What is your outlook for women? Are we to go back to
seclusion or will it be possible to minimize sex? If you are going to
minimize sex how are you going to do it? Suppression? There is plenty of
suppression now. Increase or diminish the pains and penalties? My
nephew, Philip's boy, Philip Christian, was explaining to me the other
day that if you boil water in an open bowl it just boils away, and that
if you boil it in a corked bottle it bangs everything to pieces, and
you have, he says, 'to look out.' But I feel that's a bad image.
Boiling-water isn't frantically jealous, and men and women are. But
still suppose, suppose you trained people not to make such an awful fuss
about things. _Now_ you train them to make as much fuss as possible....
"Oh bother it all, Stephen! Where's your mind in these matters? Why
haven't you tackled these things? Why do you leave it to _me_ to dig
these questions into you--like opening a reluctant oyster? Aren't they
patent? You up and answer them, Stephen--or this correspondence will
become abusive...."
§ 5
It was true that I did ignore or minimize sexual questions as much as I
could. I was forced now to think why I did this. That carried me back to
those old days of passion, memories I had never stirred for many years.
And I wrote to Mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable
fear, that in fact I had dismissed them because they had been beyond my
patience and self-control, because I could not think very much about
them without an egotistical reversion to the bitterness of my own case.
And in avoiding them I was only doing what the great bulk of men in
business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do. They train
themselves not to think of the rights and wrongs of sexual life, not to
tolerate liberties even in their private imaginations. They know it is
like carrying a torch into a powder magazine. They feel they cannot
trust their own minds beyond the experience, tested usages, and
conventions of the ages, because they know how many of those who have
ventured further have been blinded by mists and clouds of rhetoric, lost
in inexplicable puzzles and wrecked disastrously. There in those half
explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands, lurk desires that sting
like adders and hatreds cruel as hell....
And then I went on--I do not clearly remember now the exact line of
argument I adopted--to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not
necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one
soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an
absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went on living and working
for social construction with the cardinal riddles of social order, so
far as they affected her, unsolved. Wasn't I at any rate preparing
apparatus for that huge effort at solution that mankind must ultimately
make? Wasn't this dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought
about the best that we could hope to do at the present time, seeing that
to launch a keel of speculation prematurely was only to strand oneself
among hopeless reefs and confusions? Better prepare for a voyage
to-morrow than sail to destruction to-day.
Whatever I put in that forgotten part of my letter was put less
strikingly than my first admissions, and anyhow it was upon these that
Mary pounced to the disregard of any other point. "There you are," she
wrote, with something like elation, "there is a tiger in the garden and
you won't talk or think about it for fear of growing excited. That is my
grievance against so much historical and political and social
discussion; its hopeless futility because of its hopeless omissions. You
plan the world's future, taking the women and children for granted, with
Egotistical Sex, as you call it, a prowling monster upsetting
everything you do...."
But I will not give you that particular letter in its order, nor its
successors. Altogether she wrote me twenty-two letters, and I one or two
more than that number to her, and--a thing almost inevitable in a
discussion by correspondence--there is a lot of overlapping and
recapitulation. Those letters spread over a space of nearly two and a
half years. Again and again she insists upon the monstrous exaggeration
of the importance of sex in human life and of the need of some reduction
of its importance, and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions
for the achievement of that end. But she comes slowly to recognize that
there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex and the
position of women do not constitute the primary problem in that
bristling system of riddles that lies like a hostile army across the
path of mankind. And she realized too that through art, through science
and literature and the whole enquiring and creative side of man's
nature, lies the path by which those positions are to be outflanked, and
those eternal-looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. Here is a
fragment--saturated with the essence of her thought. Three-quarters of
her earlier letters are variations on this theme....
"What you call 'social order,' Stephen, all the arrangements seem to me
to be _built_ on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you
say) on labor subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is
an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women.
Just as much. 'Wild hopes' indeed! The workers' hopes are nothing to the
women's! It is not only the workers who are saying let us go free,
manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from
this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying
let us go free. They are demanding release just as much from their
intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads
who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work,
the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and
sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer
tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or
help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General
Strike. I have been a striker all my life. We are doing nothing--by the
hundred thousand. Your old social machine is working without us and in
spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the
bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen, I'm grit. What you say about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of
labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the
reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the
woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."
And here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of
her as the quick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic
touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at
last to the tragedy of her death....
"Have you ever thought, Stephen, that perhaps these (repressionist)
people are righter than you are--that if the worker gets free he _won't_
work and that if the woman gets free she won't furl her sex and stop
disturbing things? Suppose she _is_ wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_
trade on her power of exciting imaginative men. A lot of these new
women run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor
innocent of a man to ruin them and then call in fathers, brother,
husbands, friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make the best of
both sides of a sex. Suppose we go on behaving like that. After we've
got all our emancipations. Suppose that the liberation of common people
simply means loafing, no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor
and the beginning of nothing to replace it, and that the liberation of
women simply means the elaboration of mischief. Suppose that it is so.
Suppose you are just tumbling the contents of the grate into the middle
of the room. Then all this emancipation _is_ a decay, even as