marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2013-07-08 02:13 pm
marycatelli) wrote2013-07-08 02:13 pm
first comes marriage
Got thrown out of a pseudo-medieval-setting book recently. . . the heroine didn't want to get married. Her friend laughed at the very notion, but no, she didn't want to. . .
And this in a culture where she might as well have said that she didn't want to curtsey to the king.
The odd thing was that her mother kept trying to marry her off to unpleasant old widowers, and she probably couldn't have married without her mother's leave. Yet it kept returning to objecting to marriage. And not with any fear of childbirth.
Other books I've read had her fear domestic tyranny. None of them seem to doubt that avoiding matrimony was the way to pull that off. As if your mother didn't keep you under her thumb. As if your stepmother was not a real possibility. As if your sister-in-law couldn't be as much a pest as any husband. At least you would be mistress of your own household. (One reason why clergy fought tooth-and-nail against the law allowing you to marry your dead spouse's sibling was that a lot of unmarried Victorian women had to take refuge with their married sisters, and they did not want the master of the house to think she was sexually available.)
Nor do these heroines ever considering a living mother-in-law to be a liability. All right, they probably won't face Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law, who, you may not know, tried to have her two children and Sleeping Beauty herself killed so she could eat them. Or the mother-in-law in Six Swans, who kidnapped her grandchildren at birth and smeared her daughter-in-law's mouth with blood so she could claim she killed and ate them. Still problems less drastic than that could be unpleasant.
To be sure, there were eras in which people would try to evade marriage. Women were less able to evade than men -- but then, a lot of pressure could be applied to men, too. Plato in his Laws discusses the proper way to enact laws, the better sort using both influence and force, by justifying as well as prescribing penalties.
That there should be a law requiring men to marry he takes for granted.
Even when there were no laws, there could be plenty of pressure.
And this in a culture where she might as well have said that she didn't want to curtsey to the king.
The odd thing was that her mother kept trying to marry her off to unpleasant old widowers, and she probably couldn't have married without her mother's leave. Yet it kept returning to objecting to marriage. And not with any fear of childbirth.
Other books I've read had her fear domestic tyranny. None of them seem to doubt that avoiding matrimony was the way to pull that off. As if your mother didn't keep you under her thumb. As if your stepmother was not a real possibility. As if your sister-in-law couldn't be as much a pest as any husband. At least you would be mistress of your own household. (One reason why clergy fought tooth-and-nail against the law allowing you to marry your dead spouse's sibling was that a lot of unmarried Victorian women had to take refuge with their married sisters, and they did not want the master of the house to think she was sexually available.)
Nor do these heroines ever considering a living mother-in-law to be a liability. All right, they probably won't face Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law, who, you may not know, tried to have her two children and Sleeping Beauty herself killed so she could eat them. Or the mother-in-law in Six Swans, who kidnapped her grandchildren at birth and smeared her daughter-in-law's mouth with blood so she could claim she killed and ate them. Still problems less drastic than that could be unpleasant.
To be sure, there were eras in which people would try to evade marriage. Women were less able to evade than men -- but then, a lot of pressure could be applied to men, too. Plato in his Laws discusses the proper way to enact laws, the better sort using both influence and force, by justifying as well as prescribing penalties.
The laws relating to marriage naturally come first, and therefore we may begin with them. The simple law would be as follows:—A man shall marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five; if he do not, he shall be fined or deprived of certain privileges. The double law would add the reason why: Forasmuch as man desires immortality, which he attains by the procreation of children, no one should deprive himself of his share in this good. He who obeys the law is blameless, but he who disobeys must not be a gainer by his celibacy; and therefore he shall pay a yearly fine, and shall not be allowed to receive honour from the young.
That there should be a law requiring men to marry he takes for granted.
Even when there were no laws, there could be plenty of pressure.
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:
Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:
Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.
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Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:
Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish…
Interesting, to consider that passage compared to early 20th century eugenics movements.
Interesting also to see it in regard to university-indoctrinated militant feminism, the KGB's most successful “autonomous stealth weapon,” which since the 1960s has selectively targeted intelligent, literate, wealthy young women and convinced them to edit themselves out of the Western gene pool by indeed being “harsh and rude and barren” - to be as ugly as they can make themselves, physically and behaviorally, and to celebrate being “childfree” - and which has a collateral effect on similar Western men by driving them away. [Google the phrase men on strike and you may find your eyebrows rising.] This, plus the near-total destruction of public education (by university-trained “education majors”) will have long-term consequences - as intended.
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May be, but meanwhile Mr Herrick was saying much the same thing. [Note that he speaks of marrying, not just, y' know, getting busy.]
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Besides, you lost your looks a lot younger in those days. No sanitiation, bad nutrition, exposure to all sorts of weather, etc. You had best hurry.
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Have you noticed that Tolkien specifically stated that the people of his protagonist races (the Elves, the Dwarves, the Men of Westernesse, and the Hobbits) were long-lived by modern standards? It's occurred to me that one reason he did this was to give his characters lots of time in which to make life decisions and hence make them more like people from the (industrial) society in which he and his readers grew up and lived. Also from the Inklings, C. S. Lewis made his protagonists in the Narnia series children (and in some cases youths), which is another way of getting around the same problem.
A lot of fantasy is very unrealistic about the economic and social effects of pre-industrial technologies. I think a lot of the hatedom directed towards GRRM's A Song and Ice and Fire stems from the fact that GRRM is much more relaistic about these factors.
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Tolkien being what he was, he simply didn't worry about such grimy details. Just as today no one outside of adverts waxes rhapsodic over his household appliances, so the presence of domestic staff was simply taken as given. Certainly Bilbo Baggins had a housekeeper, even if she wasn't live-in, and just as certainly Merry's house in Brandybuck had domestic servants - but such were literally beneath notice at Tolkien's social level. Just so, we never see who makes all the pretty clothes and things the Elves possess automatically - like Wells' Eloi, and it might have been interesting (though it would have changed the whole story) to see what kind of Morlocks did for the Elves while they danced and sang in the starlight &c.
Meanwhile, we DO glimpse the farmers and villeins of Rohan, because they were churned to the surface by disaster and appear as refugees, but they're what might be called local color and don't affect the story.
It was not, I gather, at all uncommon for the paterfamilias of an English household to not even know the names of his servants: His wife hired 'em & fired 'em and didn't bother him with such trifles. You can glimpse this in A A Milne's other works, such as When We Were Very Young, where the child speaks of 'Nanny' and 'Cook' as occupation-names, much as 'Fletcher' and 'Cooper' and 'Baker' had become.
[In Barbara Hambly's excellent Those Who Hunt the Night, the main character is an Oxford don who is also a Government spy, and therefore not only keeps a knife in his boot but is fully familiar with his house and can navigate it blindfolded, including the kitchens and scullery, which in their own houses some of his colleagues had never even seen!]
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This is going to affect the future.
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Ironicially, this effect has worked far more extremely upon the Great Russian population themselves. But yes -- and the amazing thing is that these women claim to "believe" in biological evolution -- but don't seem to grasp that their decisions are editing out their own contributions to the gene pool. Or that there's a problem with doing so.
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The Woman in White -- which interestingly was published right around the same time as The Origin of Species -- demonstrates kinship-based altruism in action. Whether or not there's anything sexual going on, the only two people in that triangle who are likely to have children are Frank and Laurie. Marian, however, is kinship-altruistically attached to Laura as her half-sister and will probably help take care of Laura's eventual offspring from Frank. She also strongly cares for Frank, with whom in law she will never have and in fact probably never have fruitful sexual intercours but who will help care for Marian's children. Interestingly (though I'm pretty sure Collins didn't have this in mind!) this situation works perfectly from the point-of-view of Dawkinsian selfish-genetic theory: Marian is unlikely to ever wed and hence can best secure her own genetic legacy through a strong emotional attachment to Laurie, and Laurie's chosen mate, since Frank and Laurie's children will have a good portion of the same genes that Marian carries in her own body.
And this was written by a man and in a time that knew little of biological evolution, and nothing of the details of genetic evolution (since genetics wouldn't be discovered for another half-century and DNA wouldn't be understood for another century. Yet Wilkie Collins demonstrated the dynamics of such an arrangement with such intensity that it's hard to tell the difference between the platonic and the romantic love in the arrangement; by contrast, the university-educated women you're discussing, who may have been taught the explicit governing theories, utterly miss the point.
Sad.
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To be sure, they could regard themselves as an elite for escaping evolution and treating it as a means to themselves, not themselves as a means to it.
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Where are you getting that about Russia? Because I know the exact opposite to be true - the “national liberation front” called “Women's Lib” was not inflicted upon the Soviet people (why would it be?) and even today, twenty years after the Big Oops, Russian women still don't buy into the forcibly-fashionable “We Must Be Men with Boobs” mindset. There are ex-pat websites all over the Internet rejoicing in the graceful beauty, good manners and family-oriented priorities they've found in the women of Russia. I saw it for myself in 1996, and when I got back here, the total revulsion I felt towards these vulgar, ignorant, shockingly rude пиндос суки I'd taken as normal was difficult to conceal.
Russian men, however, appear to already be the drunken abusive losers that militant feminism's destruction of the nuclear family is turning American men into, so there is that overlap, at least.
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One of the funny things about the Western Left is that it managed to so-idealize Russia yet never grasped how many of its own prejudices were inflicted upon them by the Russians specifically to render them ineffectual. For instance, at the same time as the Western Left was turning against atomic energy, civil defense and spaceflight, the Russians were boasting in their popular magazines about nuclear power plant, shelter and spacecraft programmes. The very theories of diplomacy and war which I learned as a young man, and which the Politically-Correct dismiss as "right wing propaganda" came, in large part, from the Soviet academies. In some narrow ways, the Soviets were highly rational thinkers: unfortunately for them, life isn't totally like a game of chess.
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It amused observers that the country which idealized collectivism produced only individual champions - chess grandmasters, Olympic athletes, scientists, &c., while their sports teams got blown off the field routinely. [It wasn't just that one hoopla-ed American hockey game they lost - the Soviet Red Army hockey team got routinely punished when they went up against the Canadian All-Stars. It was embarrassing.]
Yes, while the “nuclear freeze” movement as a whole was acting with the blessing and covert support of the Party, it turns out that the carefully-choreographed outcry against the neutron bomb was directly engineered by the KGB for their own purposes, as it was the one theatre-tactical nuclear weapon which would stop a Soviet armored blitzkrieg with the least collateral damage and thus, was most likely to be used.
I used to be quite angry at the “useful fools” of the Western Left - and this was before it turned out that Carl Sagan had cooked his data to produce the outcome he desired, that the Earth of his “nuclear winter” doom scare was a dry, featureless billiard ball because it had to be for what he was saying to happen. He was simply, literally a bad scientist, producing junk science for political purposes.
[Not the only such, of course; it's practically the defining characteristic of “Women's Studies,” the “academic discipline which is neither academic nor disciplined.” But that damage has taken longer to accomplish.]
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… And meanwhile, the Japanese field an Olympic basketball team every olympiad! Like that Jamaican bobsled team, no one would be more astounded than they if they ever actually succeeded, but they cheerfully try anyway despite losing out, well, as quickly as you'd expect. It's literally the thought that counts, and they're greatly respected for persevering!
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Note the implicit Tenchi Solution with which Wilkie Collins resolves the romance in The Moonstone. This must have sometimes happened in real life as well, with a literal menage a trois -- sometimes more, sometimes less sexual. Collins couldn't, of course, make it clear how sexual was their arrangement, but it is plain that there was at least extremely strong affection on the part of all three of them.
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Yes, it sometimes occurred. We know of one case because the other woman kept having children. It was a very important rule among the Victorian upper-class that a wife did not engage in affairs until after she had had the heir and the spare -- and then, that it was poor taste to comment on a likeness, because accidents did happen.
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No, I mean literal menage a trois. Fundamentally, a menage a trois is three people living closely together. Sex isn't required for this.
I've just realized something embarassing. I've confused The Moonstone with The Woman in White. The three characters from The Woman in White in question are Walter Hartright, Laura Fairlie, and Marian Holcombe.
Walter falls in love with Laura, they wed, and both live with each other and with Marian, who is Laura's half-sister. In addition to Walter's love for Laura, Laura is very strongly-attached to Marian, and Walter feels an intense friendship for Marian. I'm well-aware of the fact that strong, even romantically-strong non-sexual friendships were more common in Victorian times than they are today, and this was especially the case where kinship was involved, but ... well, read the book. The emotions involved just seem very strong, that's all.
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(1) Marian's "mannishness," coupled with her very strong attachment to her half-sister Laura, suggests a possible lesbian relationship in the triangle (though again: romantic does not have to mean sexual), and
(2) The intensity of Walter's friendship with Marian suggests that Walter might be viewing her a bit homo-erotically, as if she were a schoolboy crush who would be all the more emotionally-acceptable to him subconsciously because he knows she's actually a woman.
Finally,
(3) It doesn't help that Laura's more than a bit weak and passive, and all three of them are in a dangerous situation, creating an emotional dynamic in which both Walter and Marian have to cooperate to protect Laura, which
(a) puts Marian in the situation of Laura's "protector," which is the masculine-romantic position, and
(b) forces Walter and Marian into even closer comradeship than would normally be the case even given their strong natural friendship.
The first time I read the book, I didn't quite get this all, though I did notice there was something odd about the relationship of both Walter and Laura to Marian. (To be precise, I kind of wondered why Frank preferred Laura to Marian, but then I've always been personally attracted to tomboys over girly-girls). I then had the possible alternative interpretation pointed out to me on TVTropes at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheWomanInWhite?from=Main.TheWomanInWhite
specifically
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Polyamory
Whatever the case, it counts as a happy ending for all three concerned: if it's all platonic save between Walter and Laura, then Marian gets to live with her beloved half-sister and Fire-Forged Friend Walter; if it is sexual, well, then it goes on behind closed doors and they're all happy that way too.
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And this in a culture where she might as well have said that she didn't want to curtsey to the king.
To be fair, both are believable as an expression of the character's immaturity. Though she'd curtsey to people of higher social status out of fear; indulgent parents might humor the other peculiarity until they had a specific match in mind.
However, when they did have a specific match in mind, they'd probably insist on it. Up until the 18th century, it was considered extremely (perhaps foolishly) liberal of parents to give their daughter the right of refusal of an unwanted match. This was all the more the case as one moved up the social ladder, because marriages involving noble or gentle families were of greater import than those involving commoners; even the mercantile classes were careful about whom their children married.
When one combines this with the facts that we are talking about girls who were usually minors, and that it was considered utterly-normal to physically-discipline a recalcitrant child, things could get ugly if a girl didn't like the match and her parents really wanted her to marry the man.
But in any case, girls looked forward to marrying in general. Marriage meant that they would become either a female head of household or at least of a sub-household within the larger one; lack of marriage would mean being permanently dependent upon one's relatives. There was also no other honorable way for anyone of the middle classes or above to have children, or even sexual relations.
Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:
Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die ...
The interesting thing about this is that it was written well before biological evolution had been discovered, yet it contains the core of the Darwinian reason why non-reproduction constitutes biological failure. At least it shows a better understanding of evolution than does the behavior of many modern feminists or pseudo-feminists.
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But it's unsurprising that evolution doesn't require knowledge. Hasn't for billions of years.
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Quite true.
One of the funny things about this is that, in human societies, cultural evolution has operated to make the basic demands of biological evolution part of "folk wisdom." The university-eductated feminists claim to revere such folk wisdom (because it's pre-industrial) yet they totally miss and actively reject its main precepts, as regards marriage and children. Which is to say they are rejecting those of its precepts most central to the human condition!
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You may note in the Symposium, they lightly talk about men who must be forced by law to marry and begot children. The idea that there are men who can't do their duty is utterly alien to the whole mindset.