Woman, William J. Robinson [classic literature books txt] 📗

emotion, we can hardly hope to succeed in eradicating it entirely. Not in the immediate future, at any rate. But we can modify it.

The statement frequently heard that "human nature is human nature" is only a platitudinous half-truth. The fundamental part of human nature—the desire for happiness and the avoidance of suffering—cannot be changed, nor would we want to change it if we could. It would mean the disappearance of the human race. But that many of our primitive emotions can be greatly modified by culture, by new standards, by new ideals of morality, about this there can be no question.

Just as love in modern man is an entirely different feeling from what it was in primitive man, so jealousy in the advanced thinker is a different feeling from what it was in the savage; and by education and true culture it can be modified still further. We hope that in time to come—I will not venture to say how soon that time will be here—this injurious, degrading, anti-social feeling may be entirely or almost entirely eradicated from the human breast.

The primitive desire—and this primitive desire of the race is still fully exhibited by children—is to take possession of everything nice or useful that somebody else has and which we have not. But our education and our cultural standards, including fear of punishment, have so repressed this desire, have put it so deeply in the background, that normal human beings hardly feel it at all.

It is only improperly brought up people, mental defectives and those unable to adjust themselves to their environment who still have this primitive feeling of taking or stealing. And so with many other feelings and emotions; and so with jealousy.

If we, at the very first notice of a manifestation of jealousy by a child, should frown upon it, if we should explain to the child or adolescent that jealousy is a mean, degrading feeling, that it is a feeling to be ashamed of, a feeling to hide and not to show off or even be proud of—as some are now—then jealousy would manifest itself in a much smaller number of individuals, and those unfortunate enough to be attacked by it would try to repress it, to hide it, to overcome it, so that it would eventually become paler and less acute and its consequences would be less significant, less disastrous for both the victim and for the persons concerned. Feelings, let us bear in mind, are not spontaneous things uninfluenced by any environmental factors. Feelings are like plants; under one environment you may foster their growth and make them develop luxuriantly; under another environment you may dwarf their growth and strangle them.

In order to enable us to inhibit the growth of the demon of jealousy, we must learn what its essence is and what factors are favorable to its development.

Causes of Jealousy

The essential factor in jealousy is fear. Fear of losing the beloved object, fear of losing the person who provides you with sexual satisfaction, or the mere economic fear of losing a material provider. The latter kind of fear is, of course, more often manifested—even though unconsciously—in women. Women who have no love for their husbands are nevertheless often fiercely jealous, because consciously or unconsciously they are afraid that their husbands may desert them for other women, and that they may thus find themselves in a precarious economic condition.

Another factor in jealousy is wounded vanity. We do not like to feel that somebody is considered superior to us. This feeling of wounded vanity is present in other varieties of envy or rivalry. A person who loses in a race or gets a lower mark in his examination than his rival may be filled with a feeling of envy and hatred almost equal in intensity to, though never as painful as, sexual jealousy.

Another factor in jealousy is anger over loss of what we consider our property. In our present social order the man considers his wife his absolute property, and so does the wife consider her husband. And there is anger that a stranger should dare to rob us or make use of our property, just as there would be anger if a thief came and robbed us of a valuable material possession. This anger or rage part of jealousy is not a sign of love. It is very far from being so. Because it manifests itself also in men and women who have not a particle of love for their spouses; it manifests itself in spouses who have nothing but hatred and loathing for their partners.

Another important factor is pain, pain that the person we love has ceased to love us. When we love a person and our love is not reciprocated, we feel pain which may rise to the degree of agony, even when there is no rival in the field. But when a person who loved us has ceased to love us—or we imagine so—and has transferred the love to another person that pain is so much the greater.

I will digress here for a moment to state that the fear that a person has ceased to love us because he loves somebody else is often groundless. It is based upon the erroneous and vicious idea that a man cannot possibly love two women at the same time, or that a woman cannot love two men at the same time. Psychologists, particularly those who have made a special study of sexual psychology, know that this idea is false. They know that love may be directed at the same time towards two or three individuals. They know that a second love not only does not necessarily destroy or diminish a first love, but may deepen and strengthen the latter.

Another element is pure envy. Just mean envy that somebody should have what we haven't, or what we have but are in danger of losing. Just as we envy others an automobile, a fine house, a high social position, etc., when we have not got them or have been deprived of them.

A point that I would like to mention is, that if husbands who have become impotent—having lost either the desire or the power, but particularly the latter—become jealous, their jealousy knows no bounds. No strongly potent man ever reaches the same intensity in jealousy as is reached by a sexually weak or impotent man. The knowledge that another man has displaced him and that he himself could not replace that other man even if he were permitted to fills him with impotent rage; and, as is well known, impotent rage is always more intense than rage that is potent. Women are free from this kind of rage, because women are never impotent in this sense. (They may be frigid, but they are never devoid of the potentia coeundi, except in extremely rare cases of atresia vaginae or the absence of the external genitals.)

There are a number of other components which go to make up this "queen of torments" or "king of torturers" jealousy, but those I have enumerated are the essential ones.

What are they? Fear, vanity, anger, envy and pain. None of them admirable qualities, none of them, with the exception of the first and the last, even deserving our compassion. All of them anti-social and anti-individual qualities. Should not everything be done to eradicate such a rank weed, which draws its sustenance from roots each one of which is dipped in poison?

We are told that in our primitive state jealousy was a social instinct; that by killing and keeping away rivals it helped to found and cement the family and to keep it pure. I do not care to enter here into a discussion of this point. But whatever useful rôle jealousy may have played in the remote ages (I doubt that it has), it is now an utterly useless, utterly vicious, utterly anti-social and anti-individual emotion. It is opposed to social life and it destroys individual happiness. And everything possible should be done to smother it, to strangle it, to eliminate it entirely from human life.

Yes, I find no compensation whatever for jealousy; I find no place for it in our modern life and I am in complete agreement with Forel, who calls jealousy "a heritage of animals and barbarians." "That is what I would say," he says, "to all those who, in the name of offended honor, would grant it rights and even place it on a pedestal. It is ten times better for a woman to marry an unfaithful than a jealous husband.... Jealousy transforms marriage into a hell.... Even in its more moderate and normal form, jealousy is a torment, for distrust and suspicion poison love. We often hear of justified jealousy. I maintain that jealousy is never justifiable; it is always a stupid, atavistic inheritance, or else a pathological symptom."

But can anything be done to eradicate this agonizing, tormenting emotion? I believe it can, and the ways and means to the eradication of this evil will be found on analyzing its components. We may not be able to destroy all the components; if we destroy the greater part of them much will have been accomplished.

The underlying factors of jealousy are: the primitive instinct, also present in many animals, our ethical and religious ideas and our economic system. The primitive instinct we can repress and modify; we can hardly hope to eradicate it entirely. But our ideas and economic system we can change. It is easier to change ideas than it is a system, and it is with our ideas we should commence.

The first idea we must endeavor to destroy is that it is impossible for a human being to love more than one other human being at the same time. We must show that the love of the modern educated and esthetic man and woman is an exceedingly complex feeling, and that a man may deeply and sincerely love one woman for certain qualities and just as deeply and sincerely love another woman for certain other qualities. Of course, love cannot be measured by the yard or bushel, nor can it be weighed on the most delicate chemical balance. And it may be impossible to determine whether he loves both women exactly alike or he loves one woman more than the other. But that one love does not exclude another, that it may even intensify the other love, that is certain, and is the opinion of every advanced sexologist.

Max Nordau, a man of high and austere ideals, a man whom nobody will accuse of a tendency to licentiousness, says in his Conventional Lies: "It may sound very shocking, yet I must say it: we can even love several individuals at the same time, with nearly equal tenderness, and we do not necessarily lie when we assure each one of our passion. No matter how deeply we may be in love with a certain individual, we do not cease to be susceptible to the influence of the entire sex."

And Iwan Bloch, than whom no greater investigator in the field of sexology ever lived, asks the question: "Is it possible for any one to be simultaneously in love with several individuals?" And he immediately says: "I answer this question with an unconditional 'yes.'" And he says further: "It is precisely the extraordinary manifold spiritual differentiation of modern civilized humanity that gives rise to the possibility of such a simultaneous love for two individuals. Our spiritual nature exhibits the most varied coloring. It is difficult always to find the corresponding complements in one single individual."

Prof. Robert Michels says: "It is Nature's will that the normal male should feel a continuous and powerful sexual attraction towards a considerable number of women.... In the male the stimuli capable of arousing sexual excitement (this term is not to be understood here in the grossly physical sense) are so