1 Feminine Types Yet Uncharacterized.

I FEMININE TYPES YET UNCHARACTERIZED
"Woman," said the great Goethe to Eckermann
one afternoon, resting his cup of Rhine wine on the
table, "Woman is the sole remaining object upon
which we may pour out our ideality. As to men,
there is nothing more to be done. Homer has
taken them all."
Our moderns, nevertheless, are yet far from
taking possession of the new world thus pointed
out on the horizon by our Father of Weimar. The
student of the literature of character, even the most
recent, invariably turns from it disappointed to
find it so poorly balanced that, while surcharged
with varied masculine types, carefully drawn and
distinct, it presents hardly a feminine character
in the least degree original and unforeseen. And
his justifiable disappointment condemns us. Will
neither novels nor plays, neither the writings of
moralists, the greatest of epics, the most piquant
of memoirs even when written by women or by
specialists in feminism will they never cease to
exhibit this shameful poverty?
In explanation of "it, certainly, several theories
exist. There are always theories with which to
excuse our failures. But a following up of the
present inquiry will, better than idle discussion,
effectually destroy this supposed resemblance of
all women to one another, this classification
according to the merely sexual aspects of their
life; maidens, sweethearts, wives, mothers, etc.
Truly an easy simplification, but one which in
reality denotes, on the part of the author making
use of it, a field of vision limited by a state of
erotic obsession. . . .Take a turn in the air,
my dear sir, and return refreshed to pursue the present
study! You have been too greatly occupied
by their femininity to be able to see them as complete
individuals (and by this I mean from foot TO
HEAD, of which they have, believe me, quite as
much as you) !
Let us imagine for a moment a new Amazonate,
wherein the blue-stockings, monopolizing literature,
in their turn do not deign filled with pride and
selfish desire to consider anything in man except
their sexual ideal. Many a physiognomy in our
eyes marvelous, would in theirs, fixed upon
shapely limbs or graceful elegance, lose all its glory,
and the figures of athletes or of handsome pages
would soon eclipse the profiles, to us so distinct, of
Hamlet, of Ulysses, of Job, of Newton, of Boniface
VIII or of Junius Brutus.
A view so imperfect (and of which the symptoms
may perhaps be diagnosed in more than one
feminine romance) would however be justified by
a social state. Thus that of the antique city
explains the small number of its feminine creations.
Antigone was the ideal Daughter, Electra,
the Sister, Alceste and Penelope represent the
Wife, near at hand or far away during absence, war
and labors. In Andromache was incarnated the
Young Mother ; Hecuba and Jocaste represent the
Aged Mother and her griefs; Helen realized the
Inconstant Beauty, Medea the Dangerous Mistress,
and Ariadne the Sacrificed. For woman, in
whatever was not relative to man, had no place in
that literature of the agora, civic tragedy, epic
chanted in the public square, history recited to
the four winds, lyricism dedicated to gymnasts,
philosophy of gardens and banquets. But we,
who for a century have so presumptuously claimed
the creation of a literature of the soul, of the individual,
of the home; we who see women mingling
in all things, sharing all activities, truly we are
inexcusable !
And we are duly punished. Note, in brief, this
principle, which we shall verify more than once
in the course of the book ; poverty of subdivision of
a general type brings about a poverty rigorously
proportionate in the elements which in turn compose
each individual type.
Each new character, once drawn in literature,
represents a veritable discovery, in the scientific
sense of the word, in that it brings to light a latent
and heretofore unfamiliar part of our soul, of
which we become conscious in the suddenly
aroused interest; a conquest wrested by our consciousness,
aided by this example, from the subconscious
wherein it stirs as deeply buried as
within an animal. From the day, then, when in
the above hypothesis we ceased to distinguish
between Hamlet and Job, we should already have
ceased to discern in the former his catholic conscience,
his tendency to dreaming, etc., and, in
the Arab, his patience, the unshakeable firmness of
his faith, and so forth, perceiving in them only
those points which they have in common, their
lack of eroticism, among others. And thus a
corresponding confusion would reign anew among
the inward faculties of each human being of the
time.
Now, absurd and humiliating as such a confusion
may appear to us, we tolerate in ourselves
one precisely similar with respect to the very many
women whom we classify merely as "cold" and
"mystic". Need we be surprised, after this, if,
in all women, each one of whom might personify a
special region and clearly illustrate it for us, we
find ourselves inevitably arrested at some time by
the incomprehensible, upon the frontier of a
strange country inaccessible to our logic, or, if
you will, to our consciousness, which is the author
of its own defeat. And as love alone which is
to say the inconscient can serve us as guide,
however hazardous a one, we do not hesitate to
test it.
A consequence still more serious: to forget, to
refuse to understand this or that type of woman,
because not amorous, is to condemn ourselves to
an ignorance of almost all women, outside their
compliant but servile, fugitive and uncertain
dependence upon ourselves; it is to condemn
ourselves furthermore to an ignorance and misunderstanding,
not only of half of the human race,
but of HALF OF OUR OWN INDIVIDUALITY. For
every man has within him, morally, the feminine
character complete, neglected and believed
by him annihilated at the time of puberty, hidden
in a shadow rich in reality with inexplicable revelations,
just as, on the other hand, every woman
possesses also the male character. (How else
would it be possible for the father to bequeath to
the daughter, and the mother to the son, a portion,
sometimes so considerable, of their characters,
while nevertheless the masculine and feminine
types do not become less distinct?)
Again, a cause of the silence to which antique
society reduced woman might be found in the
nature of each man, as it is even yet found in those
(otherwise often beautiful and strong) of the
Moslem, the Buddhist, the polytheist, of the
non-Christian, to use a general term, for the
Hindu, the Persian, the Chinese or Malay cannot
be called uncivilized. Man, then, was a Citizen
or a Subject; he was not a Soul, in the absolute
sense of the word, separate and complete. Even
when such a man loved a woman, he showed, in
consequence of the contrast between the radiation
of his pride and his blindness toward her, a sort of
pederasty, an idolatry of Passion, a monologue
before Flesh. He fell upon and assaulted her; he
never contemplated her fairly face to face.
Whether one regrets or commends the change
everywhere inaugurated by Christianity, the OTHER
BEING, freed from the oppression hereditary since
the "fall," has begun to speak in our hearts, and,
we must admit, more clearly from century to
century. It is this dialogue in us which we hear
in the Sacred Writings, in the greatest of poets
and the profoundest of philosophers. From this
dualism vainly proscribed and which Nature,
one might say, has symbolized in the symmetry
of the two halves of our bodies as divided by a
perpendicular line result the many disconcerting
contradictions of our conduct, the perversions
of our will, the antinomies over which Racine
wept, by which Poe was fascinated, from which
Hegel reasoned. And the "mauvais menage"
wherein each of us contends with himself, results
from the persistence of our vanity in its ignorance,
or rather its indolence in the interpretation of
one-half of the human race.
Shall we not attempt it?
This will be, however, but a beginning. For,
equilibrium once re-established between the sexes,
we shall be led to re-establish it between the divers
types of our own. We cannot sufficiently wonder
at the lacunae which, from this point of view also,
literature presents, and at the great number of
characters encountered in life, whose portraits
we never meet in books or upon the stage. To
assure himself of this, the reader need but enumerate
his relatives and friends, for example, defining
them with the precision for which he will here
find the means.