The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Why, then, do we find in this line of development such hideously inartistic things? Because the discords of domestic industries and functions prevent a sense of harmony even here. Because the woman, confined to a primitive, a savage plane of occupation, continues to manifest an equally savage plane of æsthetic taste.

One of the most marked features of early savage decoration is in its distortion and mutilation of the body to meet arbitrary standards of supposed beauty. An idea of beauty, true or false, is apprehended, its line of special evolution rapidly followed, and there is no knowledge of physiology or grasp of larger harmonies of bodily grace to check the ensuing mutilation.

The Zulus decorate their cattle by cutting the dewlap into fringe, and splitting and twisting the growing horns into fantastic shapes. Some savage women tie the gastrocnemius muscle tightly above and below, till the "calf of the leg" looks like a Dutch cheese on a broomstick. Some tie strings about the breasts till they dangle half detached; some file the teeth or pluck out the eyebrows.

In the home, among women, still appear these manifestations of a crude beauty-sense, unchecked by larger knowledge. Our best existent examples are in the Chinese foot-binding custom, and ours of waist-binding. The initial idea of the corset is in a way artistic. We perceive that the feminine form has certain curves and proportions, tending thus and so; and following the tendency we proceed to exaggerate those curves and proportions and fix them arbitrarily. This is the same law by which we conventionalise a flower for decorative purposes, turning the lily of the field into the fleur-de-lis of the tapestry. The Egyptians did it, to an extreme degree, in their pictorial art, reducing the human body to certain fixed proportions and attitudes.

The application of these principles to living bodies is peculiar to the savage, and its persistence among our women is perhaps the strongest proof of the primitive nature of the home. As women enter the larger life of the world these limitations are easily outgrown; the working-woman cannot make a conventionalised ornament of her body, and the business woman does not care to; the really educated woman knows better, and the woman artist would be bitterly ashamed of such an offence against nature; only the home-bound woman peacefully maintains it.

To the scientific student, man or woman, the sturdy reappearance of this very early custom is intensely interesting; he sees in the "newest fashion" of holding and binding the body a peculiar survival of the very oldest fashion in personal decoration known to us. The latest corset advertisement ranks ethnologically with the earliest Egyptian hieroglyph, the Aztec inscriptions, and races far behind them.

The woman's love of beauty finds its freest expression along lines of personal decorations, and there, as in the decoration of the house, we see the same crippling influence.

She loves beautiful textures, velvet, satin, and silk, soft muslin and sheer lawn; she loves the delicate fantasy of lace, the alluring richness of fur; she loves the colour and sparkle of gems, the splendour of burnished metal, and, in her savage crudity of taste, she slaps together any and every combination of these things and wears them happily.

A typical extreme of this ingenuous lack of artistic principles is the recent, and still present, enormity of trimming lace with fur. This combines the acme of all highly wrought refinement of texture and exquisite delicacy of design, a fabric that suggests the subtleties of artistic expression with a gossamer tenuity of grace; this, and dressed hide with the hair still on, the very first cover for man's nakedness, the symbol of savage luxury and grandeur, of raw barbaric wealth, which suggests warmth, ample satisfying warmth and crude splendour in its thick profusion! We cut up the warmth and amplitude into threads and scraps which can only suggest the gleanings of a tan-yard rag-picker, and use these shabby fragments to trim lace! Trim what is in itself the sublimated essence of trimming, with the leavings of the earliest of raw materials! Only the soul which spends its life in a group of chambers connected merely by mechanical force; in a group of industries connected merely by iron tradition, could bear a combination like that—to say nothing of enjoying it. Domestic art is almost a contradiction in terms.

The development of art, like the development of industry, requires the specialisation, the life-long devotion, impossible to the arbitrary combinations of home life. Where you find great beauty you find a great civic sense, most clearly in that high-water mark of human progress in this direction, ancient Greece. Within the limits of their cities, the Greeks were more fully "civilised" than any people before or since. They thought, felt, and acted in this large social contact; and so developed a sufficient breadth of view, a wide, sweet sanity of mind, which allowed of this free growth of the art-sense. Great art is always public, and appears only in periods of high social development. The one great art of the dark ages—religious architecture—flourished in that universal atmosphere of "Christendom," the one social plane on which all met.