Of course the husband likes to have his wife appear attractive to him; but that does not require any branch of the cosmetic art except what she can do without drugs, pastes, powders and other mechanical aids. Of course he wants her to interest him mentally but that does not require her to do or say anything spectacular or anything that has any “news value.”
In her own femininity (which by the way is never enhanced but only lessened by strenuous efforts to appear charming either to himself or others), he has the field which he can, and will, in proportion to his psychic virility, cultivate into his own particular Garden of Eden. In her own essential womanliness he has the ground where he can plant and build, without external aid, the garden and the mansion, the work of his own hands, according to his own design, the outward expression of all that is fine and masculine in his own imagination. Any failure in the execution of this plan is due to the shaking of his own hand, the lack of attention on his own part to the necessary details.
§ 18
Arnold Bennett (in Pictorial Review, November 1922), writes: “She absolutely must exercise charm, whether things are going right or going wrong.... Women were born to exercise charm.... A large proportion of women, especially pretty ones, suffer from the illusion that in order to exercise charm they need only continue to exist. A mistake! To exercise charm is an active and not a passive function. It cannot be efficiently done without thought and hard work. It is sometimes very trying and exhausting, like earning money—but it is not less essential than earning money if life is to be fully lived.”
Many women prefer to earn money rather than follow this unremunerative trade of exercising charm; because they realize that earning money is productive and exercising charm is not. They can get in dollars a measure of their efforts. In personal charm, however, there is no measurable factor, except in reaction on the male, and that is an autoerotic element in his mental make-up.
Feminine charm is to be sure active and not passive. It is, however, reactive and not spontaneously active. It reacts to the positive action of the man, which is the response characteristic of true femininity anywhere, any time. As to its necessitating thought and hard work and being trying and exhausting, the contrary is the truth. No man can but dislike a woman who has thought and worked hard, been tried and become exhausted by this thoroughly artificial and unnatural attempt to “exercise charm.” His unconscious and real reaction to this trying position into which the woman puts herself to retain his affection by exercising charm is one of revolt. He may not know it but it is there all the time, and comes out in the unhappy moments.
And this attempt recommended by Mr. Bennett is only a superficial attempt. It never really succeeds permanently. It is the reason why men avoid designing women. They say to themselves unconsciously that this forced effort is an overcompensation for a real (i.e., unconsciously perceived) inferiority.
The only thing rightly to be called charm is the pleasantness of the natural reaction on the woman’s part to the binary situation, the situation of man and woman in social intercourse. Her forcing herself is always repugnant to him, if he is normally himself. The word charm,[10] therefore, applies to a type or action on her part that is conditioned solely on her being with him. It is character and conduct, ingenuous, instinctive, spontaneous; revealing, without traditional or conventional inhibitions, the essence of true womanliness, and brought out only in the situation that is really, and in the highest sense, erotic, where the erotic holds sway over the more ignoble egoistic-social impulse.
Her charm for her husband will consist in the fact that she is woman and wife first and foremost. That is enough for a man who is first and foremost man and husband. Uninhibited woman, unwarped by sex inhibitions, spontaneously making her direct response, her natural reaction uninterrupted, unperverted, unbroken by archaic traditions that have overweighted the egoistic social instincts and debased the erotic—such a woman has and will always have the maximum of charm for unperverted man. The eternal femininity, the universal femininity, is always at the core of every woman’s being.