JEALOUSY AND POLYGAMY
The moral mission of Jealousy, as stated on a preceding page, is, by means of watchfulness and the inspiring of fear, to ensure fidelity and chastity. Darwin says that from the strength of the feeling of jealousy all through the animal kingdom, as well as from the analogy of the lower animals, especially those which come nearest to man, he “cannot believe that absolutely promiscuous intercourse prevailed in times past, shortly before man attained to his present rank in the zoological scale.” This may be true, yet it is astonishing to find how many of the lower tribes are utterly unconcerned regarding the morals both of married and unmarried women. A vast number of cases illustrating this absence of jealousy are collected in Waitz’s Anthropology, Spencer’s Sociology, the works of Lubbock, and especially in Ploss’s Das Weib, i. 205-214. In some cases girls are allowed to do as they please until after marriage, when they are jealously guarded; in other cases the reverse is true. In some parts of Africa a breach of faith on the wife’s part is regarded as an attack not on the husband’s honour but on his property; hence a pecuniary compensation is all that is required. Lubbock enumerates a large number of races among whom the lending of a wife or daughter is a common and obligatory form of hospitality. And the Chibchas of South America went so far in their indifference to virginity that they considered a virgin bride to be unfortunate, “as she had not inspired affection in men.”
Jealousy for the possession of a woman, however, was much sooner developed than jealous regard for her conduct. The statement of Sir John Lubbock about the men of an Indian tribe, that they “fight for the possession of the women, just like stags,” and similar statements regarding other savages, imply that, just like stags, these men feel the pangs of primitive Jealousy.
Among polygamous nations the women, too, often fight for the men, whose favourites in their absence are apt to suffer much at the hands of jealous rivals. It is among the polygamous semi-civilised nations in general that Jealousy asserts itself in the most shrill and dissonant manner. It is not that bitter-sweet romantic Jealousy which by its constant fluctuations between hope and doubt fans a modern lover’s passion into brighter flames; it is a more vicious kind of conjugal Jealousy which destroys domestic peace and plots the ruin of rivals. In Madagascar, Mr. Spencer tells us, “the name for Polygyny—‘fampovafesana’—signifies ‘the means of causing enmity’”[enmity’”]; and that kindred names are commonly applicable to it we are shown by their use among the Hebrews: in the Mishna a man’s several wives are called ‘tzârot,’ that is, troubles, adversaries, or rivals. In modern Persia, where polygamy prevails, the same state of affairs is encountered. Says Ploss: “If there are several women in the house, each one inhabits a separate division; in the houses of the wealthy each wife, moreover, has her own servants. Constantly apprehending evil intentions, no woman touches the dishes of a rival.”
It is among the polygamous nations of the East, too, that history records such a profusion of bloody wars of succession waged by half-brothers; for how could fraternal or any other kind of domestic affection flourish in families where the mothers are constantly goaded by Jealousy into deadly hatred of one another?