14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia
The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely
responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid
of passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with
something akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by
the fact that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when
they give attention to the matter, are in a
state of mind conducive
to exact observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely
no reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that
the minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable
dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in
the Northern countries, makes them place a high value upon the
virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to grow more
common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has by no
means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by the
theologians and publicists of the Middle Ages. It would, however,
be rash to assert that this long continued sexual selection has not
made itself felt, even in the normal type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is
to make it measurably easier for a woman to conquer and conceal
emotion than it is for a man. But this is a mere reinforcement of a
native quality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of
the curious preference just mentioned. That preference obviously
owes its origin to the concept of private property and is most evident
in those countries in which the largest proportion of males are
property owners, i.e.,in which the
property-owning caste
reaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and
ignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife
unless he is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorous
susceptibility. Thus he grows uneasy whenever she shows any sign
of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to
be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a hearty response to a
connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions,
there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer
books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal
less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth.
I have a feeling that the husband of this sort--he is very common in
the United States, and almost as common among the middle classes
of England, Germany and Scandinavia--does himself a serious
disservice, and that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got
himself a wife to his austere taste, he finds that she is rather
depressing--that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her
emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and
hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a
man, when
some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding
to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her
reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting
complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is
enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote and
unapproachable; to him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a bit
abandoned. It is as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate
czar or kaiser, should step down from the throne to play dominoes
with him behind the door. The greater the contrast between the
lady's two fronts, the greater his satisfaction-up to, of course, the
point where his suspicions are aroused. Let her diminish that
contrast ever so little on the public side--by smiling at a handsome
actor, by saying a word too many to an attentive head-waiter, by
holding the hand of the rector of the parish, by winking amiably at
his brother or at her sister'husband--and at once the poor fellow
begins to look for clandestine notes, to employ private inquiry
agents, and to scrutinize the eyes, ears, noses and hair of his
children with shameful doubts. This explains many domestic
catastrophes.
