Herland Charlotte Perkins Gilman (ebook and pdf reader TXT) š
- Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Then that deep ancient chill of male jealousy of even his own progeny touched my heart.
āIād rather have you, Ellador, than all the children in the world. Iād rather have you with meā āon your own termsā āthan not to have you.ā
This was a very stupid saying. Of course I would! For if she wasnāt there I should want all of her and have none of her. But if she went along as a sort of sublimated sisterā āonly much closer and warmer than that, reallyā āwhy I should have all of her but that one thing. And I was beginning to find that Elladorās friendship, Elladorās comradeship, Elladorās sisterly affection, Elladorās perfectly sincere loveā ānone the less deep that she held it back on a definite line of reserveā āwere enough to live on very happily.
I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman was to me. We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are very limited beingsā āmost of them. We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, āin their place,ā which place is the home, where they perform that mixture of duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, in which the services of āa mistressā are carefully specified. She is a very clear writer, Mrs. J. D. D. Bacon, and understands her subjectā āfrom her own point of view. Butā āthat combination of industries, while convenient, and in a way economical, does not arouse the kind of emotion commanded by the women of Herland. These were women one had to love āup,ā very high up, instead of down. They were not pets. They were not servants. They were not timid, inexperienced, weak.
After I got over the jar to my pride (which Jeff, I truly think, never feltā āhe was a born worshipper, and which Terry never got overā āhe was quite clear in his ideas of āthe position of womenā), I found that loving āupā was a very good sensation after all. It gave me a queer feeling, way down deep, as of the stirring of some ancient dim prehistoric consciousness, a feeling that they were right somehowā āthat this was the way to feel. It was likeā ācoming home to mother. I donāt mean the underflannels-and-doughnuts mother, the fussy person that waits on you and spoils you and doesnāt really know you. I mean the feeling that a very little child would have, who had been lostā āfor ever so long. It was a sense of getting home; of being clean and rested; of safety and yet freedom; of love that was always there, warm like sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a featherbedā āa love that didnāt irritate and didnāt smother.
I looked at Ellador as if I hadnāt seen her before. āIf you wonāt go,ā I said, āIāll get Terry to the coast and come back alone. You can let me down a rope. And if you will goā āwhy you blessed wonder-womanā āI would rather live with you all my lifeā ālike thisā āthan to have any other woman I ever saw, or any number of them, to do as I like with. Will you come?ā
She was keen for coming. So the plans went on. Sheād have liked to wait for that Marvel of Celisās, but Terry had no such desire. He was crazy to be out of it all. It made him sick, he said, sick; this everlasting mother-mother-mothering. I donāt think Terry had what the phrenologists call āthe lump of philoprogenitivenessā at all well developed.
āMorbid one-sided cripples,ā he called them, even when from his window he could see their splendid vigor and beauty; even while Moadine, as patient and friendly as if she had never helped Alima to hold and bind him, sat there in the room, the picture of wisdom and serene strength. āSexless, epicene, undeveloped neuters!ā he went on bitterly. He sounded like Sir Almroth Wright.
Wellā āit was hard. He was madly in love with Alima, really; more so than he had ever been before, and their tempestuous courtship, quarrels, and reconciliations had fanned the flame. And then when he sought by that supreme conquest which seems so natural a thing to that type of man, to force her to love him as her masterā āto have the sturdy athletic furious woman rise up and master himā āshe and her friendsā āit was no wonder he raged.
Come to think of it, I do not recall a similar case in all history or fiction. Women have killed themselves rather than submit to outrage; they have killed the outrager; they have escaped; or they have submittedā āsometimes seeming to get on very well with the victor afterward. There was that adventure of āfalse Sextus,ā for instance, who āfound Lucrese combing the fleece, under the midnight lamp.ā He threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit he would slay her, slay a slave and place him beside her and say he found him there. A poor device, it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he came to be in his wifeās bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he have said? But the point is Lucrese submitted, and Alima didnāt.
āShe kicked me,ā confided the embittered prisonerā āhe had to talk to someone. āI was doubled up with the pain, of course, and she jumped on me and yelled for this old harpy [Moadine couldnāt hear him] and they had me trussed up in no time.
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