Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the public schools containing information on the most effective way of brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old.
And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations. He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin.
But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists upon being nasty without being covert. Is there anything more unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes.
As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind explodes volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark out of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls them up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He cracks his showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin and the white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to sweep like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last in a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest, butchery, lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but a sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a flaming example of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the most terrible power woman possesses?
Wedekind imagines that people idealize sex and hold it a beautiful force. Poor Wedekind, where did he get such an idea? And then he imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks people into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their lives. He imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with the irresponsibility of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates a sort of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound saints and sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with muddied feet upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes, naked and glorious—the diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her Lulu, the earth spirit.
He introduces her fresh and joyous and vibrating with tabooed emotions. She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of dynamite. But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who shoot each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by her caresses. Queer men, idealists. They tumble about her, whining, cursing, chanting, forswearing their Gods, their souls and their vanities.
And she tumbles with them, from one precipice down to another, faithful only to her nervous system. Her only virtue is a complete absence of the quality. If only Wedekind had invested her with a single human moral conviction—merely for the sake of completing her diabolically. If only he had made it possible for her to sin against something. But she hasn’t anything to sin against—not a conviction, not a moral. In this country she would be tried for her murders and treasons and sent to an asylum for incomplete people. What she does she does simply. When this hussy kills the father who owned her in order to save herself from his threats and then throws herself laughingly into the arms of the son, she does it all without malice. It is all natural, spontaneous. When she rebukes her own father for making love to her (she tells him he’s getting too old for such tricks), when she murders, deceives and pollutes she hasn’t any feeling of doing wrong, any reaction except one of satisfaction. If this isn’t an ideal I’d like to know what is. If everybody was like she is there would be no sorrow or suffering in the world. We would all be simple animals dashing around, biting each other, drinking from each other’s throats, feeling pain only when our nerves were touched and joy only when our nerves were touched. Wedekind imagines that this state is the true reflection of today. He exaggerates what according to his experience may be a logical prejudice and hurls it brutally behind the footlights and into the bookcase.
Lulu, bedraggled, walking the streets of London in the rain, looking for prey, Lulu wheedling quarters out of ragged sensualists, hiding her father and her lover and the woman who desires her while she “entertains” her victims, Lulu spreading disease, and then Lulu running wildly around the dirty garret in her chemise pursued and killed by a red-eyed, nail-bitten Jack the Ripper—that is the end of woman. Poor Wedekind. What an exaggerated opinion of virtue he must have,—an idealist’s. There is but one more thing. It is Wedekind’s master stroke.
He introduces a note of unselfishness and poetry as a climax. Lulu lies stabbed by the delighted and enthusiastic Ripper. And kneeling before the picture of her in her hey-dey is the “Countess,” the woman who loved her—a homo-sexualist—an irritating creature.
“I love you, you are the star in my heavens,” she cries purely. I don’t remember whether the Ripper kills her or not. What a mess!