Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

In most cases it is the anxiety of one’s self contracting or transmitting diseases to the other party and to the children that the physician has to confirm or dispel. It is beyond all question that healthy selfishness, which desires to preserve its own individuality, as well as the growing appreciation of a worthy offspring, will then hinder many an unsuitable marriage. In other cases love might triumph over these considerations for its own part, the married couple abstaining, however, from parentage. In those cases, again, where the law would definitely forbid marriage, this would doubtless be no hindrance to diseased people having offspring outside wedlock. But the same is true, of course, of all legal enactments: the best people do not require them, the worst do not obey them, but through them the ideas of justice of the majority are cultivated.

Only those who are ignorant of the laws of psychological transformation doubt the possibility of the simultaneous enhancement of the feeling of love and the racial sense. Century after century the emotion of love has been growing, while at the same time men have nevertheless sacrificed it to religious prejudices, superficial ideas of duty, tyrannical parental authority, and empty forms. Now, when the sacrifice is called for on behalf of the highest of possible gains—the conquest of disease by health, the ennobling of the human body itself—now, of all times, it is asserted that mankind would be incapable of this sacrifice—because in the course of time the power of love has increased.

On the contrary, it is through the greatness of their feeling for each other that two married people can bear the loss of children, when—knowing that neither of them thus deprives the race of a material asset—they enter upon their union with the resolve not to become parents. Through the same greatness in their love, the party on whose side the danger lies may gain strength to sacrifice individual happiness in order that the other may gain a happiness more significant to himself and to the race with some one else. Such sacrifices occur even now more frequently than is supposed.

But above all it is the extension of the instinct of love through the racial sense which will secure the ennobling of the race without sacrificing individual happiness.

The point of view of racial ennobling found expression even in the Mosaic marriage law. In ancient Greece also this ennobling was a conscious factor. But Christianity’s insistence on the importance of the individual and of humanity weakened the feeling of the individual for the race, as did likewise the doctrine of souls supplied to the bodies from heaven and returning thither. It was only through the enhancement of man’s spiritual force, by the mortification of his sinful body, that Christianity raised the quality of the race. The doctrine of hereditary sin was its only—half-rational and half-irrational—insistence on our connection with our ancestors. Since Christianity regarded the human species as once for all determined by God—though bungled by Adam—restoration, not new creation, was, as already stated, its fundamental idea. In the very conditions of the renewal of life Christianity saw the root and origin of sin in the world. This way of viewing things must be entirely overcome; and fortunately the church has of necessity lost—and will continue to lose—in every conflict with love. But in this way the advance takes place by a turning-aside from the direct line of development: the enhancement of the race. At the present time many symptoms show that love and the racial sense are beginning to approach one another.

Whenever abstract, logical thought confronts real life with a problem that admits of only two solutions, the latter asserts its proud determination not to allow itself to be confined within definitions or ruled by deductions. Life is movement, movement implies variability, transformation, in other words, development in an upward or downward direction. Never will the upward curve assume a more pronounced elevation than when the desire of procreation has reached the point at which it is directed by the selection of personal love, this selection again being directed by a clear-sighted instinct tending to the ennobling of the race.

That the choice of personal love at present appears often either to lack or to oppose this instinct, is no proof that it will always lack or oppose it. Love’s selection has already in certain cases—such as those of near blood-relations, different races, and certain diseases—become an instinct, since law and custom have influenced selection sufficiently long for this to have influenced feeling and instinct. At the present time brother and sister—since they are aware of their relationship—seldom have to suppress a mutual erotic feeling, as such a thing does not arise. No prohibition, but only all the impulses of her blood, hinder the American woman from marrying a negro or a Chinese. The woman who is known to have epilepsy is excluded from marriage less by the law, in this case easily circumvented, than by the fact that no man wants her as his wife. On the other hand, it is known that under conditions favourable to the cultivation of the beauty and strength of the human body, this has in a great degree influenced the erotic selection of either sex—so far as they otherwise possessed freedom of choice. The law of inheritance, which makes it easy for the degenerate to contract marriage, and women’s need of maintenance have, on the other hand, falsified the instinct of the latter in this direction. The prevailing customs and ideas of morality have as a rule deprived future mothers of their full freedom of choice and thus to a great extent neutralised the importance of womanly love’s selection for the spiritual and bodily improvement of the race. To this must be added that the Christian doctrine of fraternity, the eighteenth-century doctrine of equality, the transference of economical power to the third estate—in a word, the whole democratisation of society—have broken down the laws and customs which prevented the mixing of blood between different classes and races. This has certainly favoured the selection of personal love, but at the same time, to a greater extent than formerly, it has favoured a selection governed by pecuniary considerations. In the marriages which were formerly a matter of family arrangement, many other advantages, besides those of money, were taken into consideration. But in this case also, as in that of the marriage of near relations, it was less and less a clear-sighted solicitude to preserve noble blood, more and more an empty pride of birth, a narrow race-prejudice, that raised obstacles to marriage. It was thus necessary for love’s selection to conquer these obstructions, which in addition, even from the point of view of racial enhancement, were often of doubtful value. But all the more must we deplore the influence of money in determining matrimonial selection, above all when this influence makes itself felt at the cost of the inclination which love shows, in spite of everything, of making its choice by preference among equals; an inclination which—besides other easily explicable causes— may also imply an instinct developed in the course of generations, tending to the preservation of the best peculiarities in a class or a race.

Since Christianity and the civilisation influenced by it modestly veiled the natural mission of love and obscured it by transcendentalism, mankind began to be ashamed even of self-examination or self-confession in this relation. We ought again to pay attention to family history, though not to such as used to be recorded in old family Bibles, with the dates of birth, marriage, and death, but such a history as should include the circumstances which determined birth and death. We must resume the casting of horoscopes, but not so much according to the signs in the heavens—although perhaps these will regain something of their former importance—as according to those on earth; and not only from the signs at birth but from those long previous to it. Just as alchemy became chemistry and astrology led to astronomy, it is possible that such a reading of signs might prepare the way for what we may call—while waiting for a word of more extended meaning than Galton’s eugenics or Haeckel’s ontogony—erotoplastics: the doctrine of love as a consciously formative art, instead of a blind instinct of procreation. It would be of infinitely greater significance for humanity if the majority of the women, who now translate their experiences into half-candid and wholly inartistic fiction, were to write down for the benefit of science entirely true family chronicles and perfectly frank confessions.