Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

During each new phase of the development of love women, probably earlier and certainly more consciously than men, have connected the demand for unity with the idea of love. The sense of unity is quite another and a far later phenomenon than monogamy. The enforced fidelity in monogamy, the voluntary fidelity in love, gave rise in woman first to control of desire, then to the weakening of desire through control. Thus by degrees erotic unity became with many women an organic condition, or, as is significantly said, a physical necessity. Not with all, not even with the majority, but still sufficiently frequently to enable us to call the unity of soul and senses in love—as also a lifelong fidelity in a single love—the provision of nature for innumerable women, while with men both are still exceptions so rarely to be met with that they are often called unnatural. But he who concludes from this that one has only to demand the same of men for the effect to be the same, is attributing the same effect to two different causes. For the erotic conditions of man and woman are and will remain different causes. The purity which a man is capable of attaining must always, therefore, to a certain degree be different from a woman’s, but not on that account of less worth. He will certainly remain more polygamous than she, but this does not involve a division of himself in the satisfaction of his erotic needs. Love possesses, nay, besets, dominates, and determines woman’s whole being in an entirely different way from man’s. He is more strongly possessed at rapidly passing moments, by the erotic emotion, but at the same time he liberates himself more quickly and completely. On the other hand, in the degree in which a woman is womanly, is she completely determined by love. This gives a unity, completeness, and equilibrium to her sensuousness which man lacks. When he is warm, he often believes woman is cool; when he sees her warm, he thinks that she is so in the same way as himself. Women are undoubtedly to be found, shifting, like men, between sudden ardour and abrupt chill, and these women are ever the most exciting erotically. With the majority of women, however, love is, for the reasons already given, a constant warmth, a never-quenched fervour. But this makes the woman suffer through the man, who in the intervals of his passion is so much more tranquil than she, so little capable of her unremitting tenderness. Therefore she seldom finds herself occupying his thoughts and feelings so completely as he occupies hers.

A woman has aptly said that “it is precisely woman’s greater sensuousness that makes her less sensuous than man: on account of motherhood—and all that it implies—she is sensuous, so to speak, from head to foot and chronically, while man is so only acutely and locally.” If one transfers one’s thoughts from erotics to motherhood, the truth of this will at once be clear: the feeling of motherhood is the most thoroughly sensuous and therefore the most thoroughly soulful of emotions; the same transport of the senses in which the mother exclaims that she could “eat” her child, expresses itself in the affection which would prompt her to die for it. But the author just quoted goes on to consider that even with men the erotic emotions could be transposed or released in many ways besides the one which to most of them still represents the whole expression of “love.” What Rousseau revealed to his unbelieving contemporaries will perhaps one day become true in a psycho-physical sense: that a look may fill a lover with voluptuousness; that the great emotions are the chief conditions of love’s happiness; that the lightest touch of the loved one’s hand gives greater bliss than the possession of the most beautiful women without love—feelings which all great lovers in all times have confirmed, and as to which even the most contrary natures give the same testimony. The peasant’s love, which knows nothing of caresses, comes lower in the scale of happiness than that of the cultivated person, who finds in love all the refined delights of the senses; and this again is far below the happiness of those who even in the encounter of two ideas or two moods can experience all the transport of love.

The conviction that sensuousness can only be controlled through being spiritualised is what directs those women who are now hoping to convert men, not to the duty of monogamy, but to the joy of unity.

Before woman’s will could thus become conscious, her long struggle for liberation had to take place. Marriage had to cease to be a trade among the upper classes, as prostitution still is among the hungry lower classes. Love must have become free at least in the sense that a woman had no choice but charity from her family or forced sale to her husband; her personality must have attained consideration, not only for her value as a woman and dignity as a human being, but also individually. Not until—by her own labour and activity—she no longer exclusively depended on a man’s courtship for both her livelihood and her life’s destiny, did woman’s salvation come to be, not “that the man wills” (Nietzsche), but that she herself can exercise her will. Language already reflects the change of custom. We seldom hear it asked nowadays of a woman: Why has she not married? but it is all the more frequently enquired: What has her love-story been, since she has never married?

Here also the line of development is a zigzag. Women sometimes act as though their whole liberation was of no avail. But in spite of much that is contradictory, the evolution of love—above all through the new woman’s claims of love—is to him who stands high enough to have a full view of the situation, the most certain of realities.

Evidence of this evolution can be found in life as well as in literature, where it now takes every kind of form, from experiences translated into genuine poetry down to the productions which tempt one to think that these people have only loved to get “copy” for a book. The feminine fiction of the present day reminds one of a relief on a sacrificial altar in the Roman Forum, where the ox, the sheep, and the pig proceed in file to meet the knife. Hecatombs of these animals—in the likeness of husbands or lovers—are now sacrificed to Eros by the new woman. It may not be very long before the vow of fidelity is exchanged for an oath of silence and the marriage contract contains a provision that in case of a rupture love-letters are not to be used as literature.

No doubt it will ever remain true that a living book on love is never written with other ink than blood. But such books are not those which resemble a trial in which the prosecutor, witness, judge, and executioner are united in one person.

But whether powerful or weak, discreet or audacious, noble or ignoble—the new woman’s books are always instructive to those who seek to follow the course of love’s evolution.