If you look at it squarely it simply is iconoclasm, a social form of image-breaking, the image in this case being traditional man. Observe, however, that woman does not actually destroy the image. She tentatively takes it down from the pedestal. Who knows but that, having dusted it off, she may, after all, decide to put it back on the pedestal again? Meanwhile, man is under scrutiny. It is a trying moment. It is like an examination in a postgraduate course. The American girl is examining man for a new degree. And man has no choice but to struggle for it. He absolutely is without an alternative. He must face the most exacting social service examination ever imposed by human caution or sociological skepticism. To meet the test will be to wear a proud title.
VIII
THE NEW OLD MAID
The complacence of the unmarried is regarded by many as one of the most distressing spectacles in modern life. Perhaps there is some resentment of this as an apparent lack of faith, or at least of hope; others may be inclined to add, of charity. Eliminate these from woman and it may be difficult to mend the situation by making her president of a kindergarten society.
It is natural enough that the unmarried woman rather than the unmarried man should be the particular mark for attack. There are obvious reasons why woman’s resentment of the unmarried man should be concealed or disguised. Woman, outside the resolution committee at a suffrage convention, cannot gracefully seem to resent an impairment of the selecting instinct in man. Even though she were quite securely removed from the possibility of social commiseration she always would be in danger of appearing to speak with something less than strictly abstract feeling. She knows her fundamental limitations in the casting of missiles, and the boomerang of personalities is least to her liking. To her, natural selection may begin to wear the appearance of a huge joke, an immense, fantastic contradiction. “This,” she may say, “is natural, but it is not selection.” Under the circumstances who can blame her if she resort to a paraphrase of evolution and bewilder man by an unnatural rejection?
Man’s resentment is more vocal, and so often does it seem to be touched with real asperity that we well may feel that he has begun to contemplate the situation with more than a languid interest. I suppose there is a fair question as to who began it. Gallantry dictates that a man should neither admit nor declare that he did. The excitements of scientific controversy doubtless often cause the masculine debater to overlook this obligation. Certainly it often is beyond all dispute that the American girl has succeeded, with or without design, in affecting man with a definite awe, and it is claimed that, in certain quarters at least, this awe has resulted in making him afraid to marry her, which, if it were true, would have to be regarded as a calamity of the profoundest moment. To admit the existence of such a condition would be deeply humiliating, since it must belittle both man and woman, though it should be admitted that woman would appear to better advantage as a creature that had frightened man than as one that had ceased to attract him.
As I said one day to the Professor, science is not treating us quite fairly in this emergency. “As a scientific person,” I said to the Professor, “you will remember the things science once undertook to tell us about the great dualities. ‘Witness,’ said science, with not a glimmer of insincerity, ‘the beautiful interdependence of the two lobes of the cerebrum! How marvellous is their union! Each individual in form and function, yet working in an eternal harmony. One cannot get along without the other. Let one side of the brain be hurt and the other droops in sympathetic inactivity.’ This was lovely. It fortified every advocate of the fitness of marriage. ‘Observe,’ we could say to the skeptic, ‘that this duality proceeds throughout nature. Interdependence is universal,’ and so on. But what happens? Just as we have this impressive object lesson in good working order, along comes science, with a frown and a cough, to remark that it was mistaken in the matter of that absolute interdependence theory, that the brain lobes can, after all, each get along quite well at times without the other; that the injury or decay of one is, indeed, sometimes followed by a steady increase in the powers of the other, one taking up the functions lost or dropped by the other. Nor was this the worst thing that happened. You know well enough what they used to say about the marriage of the two lobes of the cerebrum by the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum at least seemed secure. We could have worried along with the corpus callosum. We always could say: the lobes are highly independent in action, but they are firmly married by this wonderful ligament—if it is a ligament. Even this comfort is now taken from us. Science has just rudely snatched away the corpus callosum. ‘The two lobes can get along without it,’ grunts science. ‘People have lived for years with no impairment of their brain power with a totally shrivelled corpus callosum.’ It is hard to keep pace with these cynicisms of science.”
“You simply have been punishing yourself for whimsical analogies,” remarked the Professor dryly. “Moreover, you are quoting abnormalities.”