I am always extremely interested in the American disgust at the Continental marriage system. Here the inveterate sentimentalism of the nation comes out most decided and clear. In the first place, they say, the European has no respect for women; he orders them about, or betrays them, with equal coolness and cruelty. He is mercenary to the last degree in the matter of the dot, but himself after marriage makes no effort to provide his wife with more than pin-money. After the honeymoon she becomes his housekeeper and the mother of his children; while he spends her dowry on a succession of mistresses and immoral amusements elsewhere.
All of which, as generalization, is true. The complementary series of facts, however, the American complacently ignores. He knows nothing, for instance, of the European attitude to the young girl—how could he? His own sisters and daughters are presented, even before they are in long skirts, as objects of intimacy and flirtation; harmless flirtation, admitted, yet scarcely the thing to produce reverence for the recipient. Instead she is given a free-and-easy consideration, which to the European is appalling. The latter may be a rake and a debauché, but he has one religion ingrained and unimpeachable: in the presence of a young girl he is before an altar. And throughout all European life the young girl is accorded a delicate dignity impossible to her less sheltered American cousin.
What good does that do her, asks the downright American, if the minute she marries she becomes a slave? On the contrary, she gains her liberty, where the American girl (in her own opinion at least) loses hers; but even if she did not it is a matter open to dispute as to which is better off in any case: the woman who is a slave, or the woman who is master? For contentment and serenity, one must give the palm to the European. She brings her husband money instead of marrying him for his; she stands over herself and her expenditure, rather than over him and his check-book; and she tends her house and bears children, rather than roams the world in search of pleasure. Yet she is happy.
She may be deceived by her husband; if so, she is deceived far without the confines of her own home. Within her home, as mother of her husband’s children, she is impregnable. She may be betrayed, but she is never vulgarized; her affairs are not dragged through the divorce court, or jaunted about the columns of a yellow press. Whatever she may not be to the man whom she has married, she is once and forever the woman with whom he shares his name, and to whom he must give his unconditional respect—or kill her. She has so much, sure and inviolate, to stand on.
The American woman has nothing sure. In a land where all things change with the sun, die and are shoved along breathlessly to make room for new, she is lost in the general confusion. Today she is Mrs. Smith, tomorrow—by her own wish, or Mr. Smith’s, or both—she is Mrs. Jones, six months later she is Mrs. Somebody Else; and the conversation, which includes “your children,” “my children,” and “our children,” is not a joke in America: it is an everyday fact—for the children themselves a tragedy.
Young people grow up among such conditions with a flippant—even a horrible—idea of marriage. They look upon it, naturally, as an expedient; something temporarily good, to be entered upon as such, and without any profound thought for the future. “She married very well,” means she married dollars, or position, or a title; in the person of what, it does not matter. If she is dissatisfied with her bargain, she always makes an exchange, and no one will think any the worse of her. For, while Americans are horror-stricken at the idea of a woman’s having a lover without the law, within the law she may have as many as she likes, and take public sympathy and approval along with her; so long as the farce of her purity is carried out, these sentimentalists (whom Meredith calls, in general, “self-worshippers”) smile complaisance.
It is simply another light on the prevailing superficiality that controls them, for that a woman shall be faithful—where she has placed her affections of whatever sort—they neither demand nor appear to think of at all. She may ruin her husband buying chiffons, or maintaining an establishment beyond his means, and not a word of blame is attached to her; on the contrary, when the husband goes bankrupt, it is he who is outcast, while everyone speaks pitifully of “his poor wife.” The only allegiance expected of the woman is the mere allegiance of the body; and this in the American woman is no virtue, for she has little or no passion to tempt her to bodily sin.
Rather, as we have seen, she is a highly nervous organism, demanding nerve food in the shape of sensation—constant and varied. Emotionally, she is a sort of psychic vampire, always athirst for victims to her vanity; experience from which to gain new knowledge of herself. This is true not only of the idle woman of society, but of the best and intentionally most sincere. They are wholly unconscious of it, they would indignantly refute it; yet their very system of living proves it: throughout all classes the American woman, in the majority, is sufficient unto herself, and—no matter in how noble a spirit—self-absorbed.
If she is happily married, she loves her husband; but why? Because he harmoniously complements the nature she is bent on developing. In like fashion she loves her children—do they not contribute a tremendous portion towards the perfect womanhood she ardently desires? And this is not saying that the finer type of American woman is not a devoted mother and wife; it is giving the deep, unconscious motive of her devotion.
But take the finer type that is not married, that remains unmarried voluntarily, and by the thousands. Take the Cynthia Brands, for example. Americans say they stay single because “they have too good a time,” and this is literally true. Why should they marry when they can compass of themselves the things women generally marry for—secure position and a comfortable home? Why, except for overpowering love of some particular man? This the Cynthia Brands—i. e., women independently successful—are seldom apt to experience. All their energy is trained upon themselves and their ambition; and that is never satisfied, but pushes on and on, absorbing emotion—every sort of force in the woman—till her passion becomes completely subjective, and marriage has nothing to offer her save the children she willingly renounces.