Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy онлайн

29 страница из 53

If the wife’s charm is the only binding factor in a marriage the marriage is doomed to dissolve actually or potentially. And in order to maintain this merely superficial charm, which no real man needs to feel in a woman, she is obliged to resort to all varieties of artifice from the lip stick and the exotic perfume upward to the forced attempt to be intellectually frank and interesting. Woman as woman has no need for this artifice to maintain charm for primordial man.

It may be that man at the present day is not primordial superficially. But fundamentally he is and so is woman primordial woman, and for all the civilization which is only conscious, the ninety per cent more or less of unconscious action and being in the man acts upon and is inevitably and automatically reacted to by the woman; and any survey of the totality of the relations between them is incomplete if it does not recognize and control the almost unlimited energy of the primordial man and woman beneath the surface. The difficulty is that this recognition is a task; and most married couples attempt to hide it both from themselves and from each other. In such actions of the woman as are dominated, as most conscious acts are, by the egoistic-social[9] impulse, any artifice, great or small, as the case may be, is inevitably registered, to the woman’s detriment, in the unconscious records of the man.