Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

There may also be attempts at compensation with members of the same sex—not necessarily in the form of vicious unnatural relations, but in the nature of patronizing friendship with younger girls. Spinsters in the wealthy classes who organize and direct girls’ clubs are usually seeking compensation of this kind, and receive a tremendous amount of credit for humanitarian motives, of which they are entirely innocent. Nevertheless, the misinterpretation of the crowd, which takes their action to be humanitarian, is eagerly seized and adopted by them, because it helps them to give a definite description to the merely compensatory character of their interest in the club, which even they themselves do not, of course, understand.

Among the more wealthy spinsters, there may also be attempts at compensation through frankly humanitarian propaganda, through the endowment or enriching of humanitarian institutions, or through humanitarian labours. This is usually expressed by a very deep concern about the welfare of animals, or the poor, or the babes of the poor, or anything over which the assumption of power constitutes an easy and uncompromising matter. We should remember that the relationship of mother to child derives more than half its exquisite pleasure for the female from the fact that it is a relationship of almost absolute power. This instinct to wield power, therefore, which forms an essential factor in female psychology in its relation to the helpless, and which explains the regret most mothers feel when their children are first able to run about and become independent, has to be reckoned with in the psychology of the spinster. If it cannot in her find its normal expression, it will seek compensation in every possible way, and since humanitarian interests offer an uncompromising outlet for its exercise, humanitarian interests are naturally in very great favour among the spinsters of all classes.

Intimately connected with humanitarian pursuits, particularly when they are adopted with frenzied resolution, is however another and less inviting psychological factor. The theory that males and females contain in their constitution certain elements, more or less accentuated, of the other sex, is now so widely accepted that it has become a commonplace in all speculations upon the sex question. Now among the characteristics which most frequently manifest themselves in women of marked male tendencies is a proneness to sadistic expressions of the sex instinct. The habit of teasing among hysterical girls, and even among female children not yet pubescent, is a sign of this.[111] In the normal life of the married female these sadistic impulses become sublimated either by the action of the stronger male upon her psyche and physique (which draws the masochistic elements in her to the fore) or by the natural expression of her power over her baby or babies. In the unmarried female, or the female without offspring, these sadistic impulses have to be repressed or curbed. The peaceful and orderly expression of them in modern society is hardly possible. But we are told by psychologists that an overpowered instinct asserts itself in an obverse character.[112] In spinsters, therefore, we should expect the sadistic elements in the happiest circumstances to become inverted into intense humanitarianism.[113]

This explains why we so frequently encounter middle-aged spinsters whose hard metallic faces and cruel cold eyes seem so utterly out of keeping with their ardent participation in humanitarian movements of all kinds. I remember one occasion when I happened to call on a lady of this kind. I was appalled by the terrifying hardness of her features, and yet, I must say, I was not in the least surprised when, in the course of the conversation, she asked me (I ought to mention the district where she lived was a very hilly one) whether I did not suffer at the sight of the poor horses in the neighbourhood. These women, who frequently have hearts of stone, nevertheless find compensation for the repression of their sadistic impulses in the exercise of the most ungovernable and most obsessional humanitarianism and sentimentality, but while their neighbours and the local clergy applaud their lives to the echo, no one has the smallest inkling of the true nature of the phenomenon. A child would tell at a glance that these humanitarian and sentimental ladies were not radically kind by nature, and those who live with them every day would probably confirm the child’s first impression; but such is the distrust in England of what the eye can read, and so great and instantaneous is the respect for humanitarian zeal, particularly when it is backed by a heavy banking account, that these women frequently die leaving a big reputation for warm-heartedness behind them.

The fact that this feverish humanitarianism and sentimentality are frequently most mischievous in their effects and create a number of national abuses, besides involving the expenditure of large sums of money on what are frequently the least desirable and least promising elements in the nation, is concealed beneath the dramatic munificence of the wealthy spinster’s life.[114]

In the wealthy classes, as the result of their superior cultivation, the compensation frequently takes an active intellectual form, and when, owing to the vague consciousness of enduring a great grievance (common to most positive spinsters who have not successfully sublimated their reproductive instincts), misanthropy supervenes, there may arise a very pronounced sex-antagonism, leading the spinsters who have developed it to engage in pursuits, or in intellectual pastimes, where they feel they can clash with men, or where they know they can resist or impede men in the natural business of their lives. Spinsters seeking this kind of compensation frequently derive great satisfaction from misogamist meditations. They will display a morbid interest in arguments against marriage, in the statistics of insanity or disease among married women, and in the evidence of excessive parturition (leading to debility) among the wives of the poor. They will exercise their influence to convert young girls to misanthropy, to misogamy, or at least to an indifference to men; and if they can achieve this end, under a religious cloak (which is not difficult with passionate young girls of eighteen, whose “vague voluminous and powerful feelings, if afforded means to do so, settle down and concentrate on a single object,”[115]), they justify themselves on the score that they have led such young girls into paths of purity and devotion.[116]

It would be impracticable here to deal with all the possible manifestations of sex-repression in the female celibate. They have been discussed very fully by other authors, and in detail they would serve no purpose in this book. I have contented myself with hinting broadly at those morbid results of sex-repression in the positive virgin which, while not leading to definite lunacy or insanity, are yet common enough to demand consideration in a discussion upon the spinster’s relation to society; but let not any reader imagine that in the outline given above there has been any desire to dwell upon the black side of a picture which from whatever angle it be viewed cannot at best be a pleasant one. There is a good deal of strong feeling among the majority of people to-day against the belief that sex-repression need necessarily have bad results. These people say that the school of psycho-analysts have grossly exaggerated the facts about the phenomena, and have drawn an unnecessarily lurid description of them. But surely the question is one concerning which it would be suicidal in a scientist to exaggerate or overstate his case. Is it not after all common sense?

Years ago—or to be precise in the year 1840—de Quincey, comparing the mental diseases that arise from excessive expression with those that come from insufficient expression, or the non-expression, of deep sensibilities, wrote as follows concerning this matter:

“Amongst the Quakers (who may be regarded as a monastic people) anomalous forms of nervous derangement are developed, the secret principle of which turns ... upon feelings too much repelled and driven in. Morbid suppression of deep sensibilities must lead to states of disease equally terrific, and possibly even less tractable; not so sudden and critical it may be, but more settled and gloomy.”[117]

This anticipates most of what modern psychology has discovered about repression, and can be applied just as legitimately to repression in the physical as in the psychical sphere. But a very much earlier record of the same common-sense view about repression, or non-expression of natural appetites and sensibilities, is to be found in Aristotle’s Poetics, where the doctrine of catharsis constitutes the kernel of all that modern psychologists would claim in regard to this particular aspect of civilized humanity.