i did not answer mary's letter for seven or eight days.
during that period my mind was full of her to the exclusion of every other interest. i re-read all that she had to say many times, and with each reading the effect of her personality deepened. it was all so intensely familiar, the flashes of insight, the blazing frankness, the quick turns of thought, and her absurd confidence in a sort of sane stupidity that she had always insisted upon my possessing. and her unembarrassed affectionateness. her quick irregular writing seemed to bring back with it the changing light in her eyes, the intonations of her voice, something of her gesture....
i didn't go on discussing with myself whether we two ought to correspond; that problem disappeared from my thoughts. her challenge to me to justify myself took possession of my mind. that thrust towards self-examination was the very essence of her ancient influence. how did i justify myself? i was under a peculiar compulsion to answer that to her satisfaction. she had picked me up out of my work and accumulating routines with that demand, made me look at myself and my world again as a whole.... i had a case. i have a case. it is a case of passionate faith triumphing over every doubt and impossibility, a case real enough to understand for those who understand, but very difficult to state. i tried to convey it to her.
i do not remember at all clearly what i wrote to her. it has disappeared from existence. but it was certainly a long letter. throughout this book i have been trying to tell you the growth of my views of life and its purpose, from my childish dreams and harbury attitudes to those ideas of human development that have made me undertake the work i do. it is not glorious work i know, as the work of great artists and poets and leaders is glorious, but it is what i find best suits my gifts and my want of gifts. greater men will come at last to build within my scaffoldings. in some summary phrasing i must have set out the gist of this. i must have explained my sense of the supreme importance of mental clarification in human life. all this is manifest in her reply. and i think too i did my best to tell her plainly the faith that was in me, and why life seemed worth while to me....
her second letter came after an interval of only a few days from the despatch of mine. she began abruptly.
"i won't praise your letter or your beliefs. they are fine and large—and generous—like you. just a little artificial (but you will admit that), as though you had felt them give here and there and had made up your mind they shouldn't. at times it's oddly like looking at the alps, the real alps, and finding that every now and then the mountains have been eked out with a plank and canvas earl's court background.... yes, i like what you say about faith. i believe you are right. i wish i could—perhaps some day i shall—light up and feel you are right. but—but—— that large, respectable project, the increase of wisdom and freedom and self-knowledge in the world, the calming of wars, the ending of economic injustice and so on and so on——
"when i read it first it was like looking at a man in profile and finding him solid and satisfactory, and then afterwards when i thought it all over and looked for the particular things that really matter to me and tried to translate it into myself—nothing is of the slightest importance in the world that one cannot translate into oneself—then i began to realize just how amazingly deficient you are. it was like walking round that person in profile and finding his left side wasn't there—with everything perfect on the right, down to the buttons. a kind of intellectual lorelei—sideways. you've planned out your understandings and tolerances and enquiries and clearings-up as if the world were all just men—or citizens—and nothing doing but racial and national and class prejudices and the exacting and shirking of labor, and you seem to ignore altogether that man is a sexual animal first—first, stephen, first—that he has that in common with all the animals, that it made him indeed because he has it more than they have—and after that, a long way after that, he is the labor-economizing, war-and feud-making creature you make him out to be. a long way after that....
"man is the most sexual of all the beasts, stephen. half of him, womankind, rather more than half, isn't simply human at all, it's specialized, specialized for the young, not only naturally and physically as animals are, but mentally and artificially. womankind isn't human, it's reduced human. it's 'the sex' as the victorians used to say, and from the point of view of the lex julia and the point of view of mr. malthus, and the point of view of biologists and saints and artists and everyone who deals in feeling and emotion—and from the point of view of all us poor specialists, smothered up in our clothes and restrictions—the future of the sex is the centre of the whole problem of the human future, about which you are concerned. all this great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us if you ignore us, we women are going to be the goths and huns of another decline and fall. we are going to sit in the conspicuous places of the world and loot all your patient accumulations. we are going to abolish your offspring and turn the princes among you into undignified slaves. because, you see, specialized as we are, we are not quite specialized, we are specialized under duress, and at the first glimpse of a chance we abandon our cradles and drop our pots and pans and go for the vast and elegant side possibilities—of our specialization. out we come, looking for the fun the men are having. dress us, feed us, play with us! we'll pay you in excitement,—tremendous excitement. the state indeed! all your little triumphs of science and economy, all your little accumulations of wealth that you think will presently make the struggle for life an old story and the millennium possible—we spend. and all your dreams of brotherhood!—we will set you by the ears. we hold ourselves up as my little christian nephews—philip's boys—do some coveted object, and say quis? and the whole brotherhood shouts 'ego!' to the challenge.... back you go into individualism at the word and all your brotherhood crumbles to dust again.
"how are you going to remedy it, how are you going to protect that great state of your dreams from this anti-citizenship of sex? you give no hint.
"you are planning nothing, stephen, nothing to meet this. you are fighting with an army all looting and undisciplined, frantic with the private jealousies that centre about us, feuds, cuts, expulsions, revenges, and you are giving out orders for an army of saints. you treat us as a negligible quantity, and we are about as negligible as a fire in the woodwork of a house that is being built....
"i read what i have written, stephen, and i perceive i have the makings of a fine scold in me. perhaps under happier conditions——... i should certainly have scolded you, constantly, continually.... never did a man so need scolding.... and like any self-respecting woman i see that i use half my words in the wrong meanings in order to emphasize my point. of course when i write woman in all that has gone before i don't mean woman. it is a woman's privilege to talk or write incomprehensibly and insist upon being understood. so that i expect you already to understand that what i mean isn't that men are creative and unselfish and brotherly and so forth and that women are spoiling and going to spoil the game—although and notwithstanding that is exactly what i have written—but that humans are creative and unselfish et cetera and so forth, and that it is their sexual, egotistical, passionate side (which is ever so much bigger relatively in a woman than in a man, and that is why i wrote as i did) which is going to upset your noble and beautiful apple-cart. but it is not only that by nature we are more largely and gravely and importantly sexual than men but that men have shifted the responsibility for attraction and passion upon us and made us pay in servitude and restriction and blame for the common defect of the species. so that you see really i was right all along in writing of this as though it was women when it wasn't, and i hope now it is unnecessary for me to make my meaning clearer than it is now and always has been in this matter. and so, resuming our discourse, stephen, which only my sense of your invincible literalness would ever have interrupted, what are you going to do with us?
"i gather from a hint rather than accept as a statement that you propose to give us votes.
"stephen!—do you really think that we are going to bring anything to bear upon public affairs worth having? i know something of the contemporary feminine intelligence. justin makes no serious objection to a large and various circle of women friends, and over my little sitting-room fire in the winter and in my corners of our various gardens in the summer and in walks over the heather at martens and in scotland there are great talks and confessions of love, of mental freedom, of ambitions, and belief and unbelief—more particularly of unbelief. i have sometimes thought of compiling a dictionary of unbelief, a great list of the things that a number of sweet, submissive, value-above-rubies wives have told me they did not believe in. it would amaze their husbands beyond measure. the state of mind of women about these things, stephen, is dreadful—i mean about all these questions—you know what i mean. the bold striving spirits do air their views a little, and always in a way that makes one realize how badly they need airing—but most of the nicer women are very chary of talk, they have to be drawn out, a hint of opposition makes them start back or prevaricate, and i see them afterwards with their husbands, pretty silken furry feathery jewelled silences. all their suppression doesn't keep them orthodox, it only makes them furtive and crumpled and creased in their minds—in just the way that things get crumpled and creased if they are always being shoved back into a drawer. you have only to rout about in their minds for a bit. they pretend at first to be quite correct, and then out comes the nasty little courage of the darkness. sometimes there is even an apologetic titter. they are quite emancipated, they say; i have misunderstood them. their emancipation is like those horrid white lizards that grow in the kentucky caves out of the sunlight. they tell you they don't see why they shouldn't do this or that—mean things, underhand things, cheap, vicious, sensual things.... are there, i wonder, the same dreadful little caverns in men? i doubt it. and then comes a situation that really tries their quality.... think of the quandary i got into with you, stephen. and for my sex i'm rather a[pg 301] daring person. the way in which i went so far—and then ran away. i had a kind of excuse—in my illness. that illness! such a queer untimely feminine illness....
"we're all to pieces, stephen. that's what brought down rome. the women went to pieces then, and the women are going to pieces to-day. what's the good of having your legions in the grampians and marching up to philae, while the wives are talking treason in your houses? it's no good telling us to go back to the ancient virtues. the ancient virtues haven't kept. the ancient virtues in an advanced state of decay is what was the matter with rome and what is the matter with us. you can't tell a woman to go back to the spinning-wheel and the kitchen and the cradle, when you have power-looms, french cooks, hotels, restaurants and modern nurseries. we've overflowed. we've got to go on to a lot of new virtues. and in all the prospect before me—i can't descry one clear simple thing to do....
"but i'm running on. i want to know, stephen, why you've got nothing to say about all this. it must have been staring you in the face ever since i spent my very considerable superfluous energies in wrecking your career. because you know i wrecked it, stephen. i knew i was wrecking it and i wrecked it. i knew exactly what i was doing all the time. i had meant to be so fine a thing for you, a mothering friend, to have that dear consecutive kindly mind of yours steadying mine, to have seen you grow to power over men, me helping, me admiring. it was to have been so fine. so fine! didn't i urge you to marry rachel, make you talk of her. don't you remember that? and one day when i saw you thinking of rachel, saw a kind of pride in your eyes!—suddenly i couldn't stand it. i went to my room after you had gone and thought of you and her until i wanted to scream. i couldn't bear it. it was intolerable. i was violent to my toilet things. i broke a hand-glass. your dignified, selfish, self-controlled mary smashed a silver hand-mirror. i never told you that. you know what followed. i pounced on you and took you. wasn't i—a soft and scented hawk? was either of us better than some creature of instinct that does what it does because it must? it was like a gust of madness—and i cared, i found, no more for your career than i cared for any other little thing, for honor, for rachel, for justin, that stood between us....
"my dear, wasn't all that time, all that heat and hunger of desire, all that secret futility of passion, the very essence of the situation between men and women now? we are all trying most desperately to be human beings, to walk erect, to work together—what was your phrase?—'in a multitudinous unity,' to share what you call a common collective thought that shall rule mankind, and this tremendous force which seizes us and says to us: 'make that other being yours, bodily yours, mentally yours, wholly yours—at any price, no matter the price,' bars all our unifications. it splits the whole world into couples watching each other. until all our laws, all our customs seem the servants of that. it is the passion of the body swamping the brain; it's an ape that has seized a gun, a beautiful modern gun. here am i, justin's captive, and he mine, he mine because at the first escapade of his i get my liberty. here are we two, i and you, barred for ever from the sight of one another, and i and you writing—i at any rate—in spite of the ill-concealed resentment of my partner. we're just two, peeping through our bars, of a universal multitude. everywhere this prison of sex. have you ever thought just all that it means when every woman in the world goes dressed in a costume to indicate her sex, her cardinal fact, so that she dare not even mount a bicycle in knickerbockers, she has her hair grown long to its longest because yours is short, and everything conceivable is done to emphasize and remind us (and you) of the fundamental trouble between us? as if there was need of reminding! stephen, is there no way out of this? is there no way at all? because if there is not, then i had rather go back to the hareem than live as i do now imprisoned in glass—with all of life in sight of me and none in reach. i had rather justin beat me into submission and mental tranquillity and that i bore him an annual—probably deciduous—child. i can understand so well now that feminine attitude that implies, 'well, if i must have a master, then the more master the better.' perhaps that is the way; that nature will not let us poor humans get away from sex, and i am merely—what is it?—an abnormality—with whiskers of enquiry sprouting from my mind. yet i don't feel like that....
"i'm pouring into these letters, stephen, the concentrated venom of years of brooding. my heart is black with rebellion against my lot and against the lot of woman. i have been given life and a fine position in the world, i made one fatal blunder in marrying to make these things secure, and now i can do nothing with it all and i have nothing to do with it. it astounds me to think of the size of our establishments, stephen, of the extravagant way in which whole counties and great countries pay tribute to pile up the gigantic heap of wealth upon which we two lead our lives of futile entanglement. in this place alone there are fourteen gardeners and garden helps, and this is not one of our garden places. three weeks ago i spent a thousand pounds on clothes in one great week of shopping, and our yearly expenditure upon personal effect, upon our magnificence and our margins cannot be greatly less than forty-five thousand pounds. i walk about our house and gardens, i take one of the carriages or one of the automobiles and go to some large pointless gathering of hundreds and thousands and thousands of pounds, and we walk about and say empty little things, and the servants don't laugh at us, the butlers don't laugh at us, the people in the street tolerate us.... it has an effect of collective insanity.... you know the story of one of those dear barons of the cinque ports—a decent plumber-body from rye or winchelsea—one of the six—or eight—who claimed the privilege of carrying the canopy over the king"—she is speaking of king edward's coronation of course—"how that he was discovered suddenly to be speaking quite audibly to the sacred presence so near to him: 'it is very remarkable—we should be here, your majesty—very remarkable.' and then he subsided—happily unheard—into hopeless embarrassment. that is exactly how i feel, stephen. i feel i can't stand it much longer, that presently i shall splutter and spoil the procession....
"perhaps i don't properly estimate our position in the fabric, but i can't get away from the feeling that everything in social life leads up to this—to us,—the ridiculous canopy. if so, then the universe means—nothing; it's blowing great forms and shapes as a swamp blows bubbles; a little while ago it was megatheriums and plesiosauriums—if that's the name for them—and now it is country-houses and motor-cars and coronation festivals. and in the end—it is all nonsense, stephen. it is utter nonsense.
"if it isn't nonsense, tell me what it is. for me at any rate it's nonsense, and for every intelligent woman about me—for i talk to some of them, we indulge in seditious whisperings and wit—and there isn't one who seems to have been able to get to anything solider than i have done. each of us has had her little fling at maternity—about as much as a washerwoman does in her odd time every two or three years—and that is our uttermost reality. all the rest,—trimmings! we go about the world, stephen, dressing and meeting each other with immense ceremony, we have our seasonal movements in relation to the ritual of politics and sport, we travel south for the budget and north for the grouse, we play games to amuse the men who keep us—not a woman would play a game for its own sake—we dabble with social reform and politics, for which few of us care a rap except as an occupation, we 'discover' artists or musicians or lecturers (as though we cared), we try to believe in lovers or, still harder, try to believe in old or new religions, and most of us—i don't—do our best to give the gratifications and exercise the fascinations that are expected of us....
"something has to be done for women, stephen. we are the heart of life, birth and begetting, the home where the future grows, and your schemes ignore us and slide about over the superficialities of things. we are spoiling the whole process of progress, we are turning all the achievements of mankind to nothingness. men invent, create, do miracles with the world, and we translate it all into shopping, into a glitter of dresses and households, into an immense parade of pride and excitement. we excite men, we stir them to get us and keep us. men turn from their ideas of brotherhood to elaborate our separate cages....
"i am justin's wife; not a thing in my heavens or my earth that is not subordinated to that.
"something has to be done for women, stephen, something—urgently—and nothing is done until that is done, some release from their intolerable subjection to sex, so that for us everything else in life, respect, freedom, social standing, is entirely secondary to that. but what has to be done? we women do not know. our efforts to know are among the most desolating of spectacles. i read the papers of those suffrage women; the effect is more like agitated geese upon a common than anything human has a right to be.... that's why i turn to you. years ago i felt, and now i know, there is about you a simplicity of mind, a foolishness of faith, that is stronger and greater than the cleverness of any woman alive. you are one of those strange men who take high and sweeping views—as larks soar. it isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... no, but still i turn to you. in the old days i used to turn to you and shake your mind and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about without my clamor. once do you remember at martens i shook you by the ears.... and when i made you think, you thought, as i could never do. think now—about women.
"stephen, there are moments when it seems to me that this futility of women, this futility of men's effort through women, is a fated futility in the very nature of things. we may be saddled with it as we are with all the animal infirmities we have, with appendixes and suchlike things inside of us, and the passions and rages of apes and a tail—i believe we have a tail curled away somewhere, haven't we? perhaps mankind is so constituted that badly as they get along now they couldn't get along at all if they let women go free and have their own way with life. perhaps you can't have two sexes loose together. you must shut up one. i've a horrible suspicion that all these anti-suffrage men like lord cromer and sir ray lankester must know a lot about life that i do not know. and that other man sir something-or-other wright, who said plainly that men cannot work side by side with women because they get excited.... and yet, you know, women have had glimpses of a freedom that was not mischievous. i could have been happy as a lady abbess—i must have space and dignity, stephen—and those women had things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day. they came to the house of lords. but they lost all that. was there some sort of natural selection?...
"stephen, you were made to answer my mind, and if you cannot do it nobody can. what is your outlook for women? are we to go back to seclusion or will it be possible to minimize sex? if you are going to minimize sex how are you going to do it? suppression? there is plenty of suppression now. increase or diminish the pains and penalties? my nephew, philip's boy, philip christian, was explaining to me the other day that if you boil water in an open bowl it just boils away, and that if you boil it in a corked bottle it bangs everything to pieces, and you have, he says, 'to look out.' but i feel that's a bad image. boiling-water isn't frantically jealous, and men and women are. but still suppose, suppose you trained people not to make such an awful fuss about things. now you train them to make as much fuss as possible....
"oh bother it all, stephen! where's your mind in these matters? why haven't you tackled these things? why do you leave it to me to dig these questions into you—like opening a reluctant oyster? aren't they patent? you up and answer them, stephen—or this correspondence will become abusive...."
