Part 12 (1/2)
Masculine coyness under such conditions has its risks. Johnston mentions the case of an Arab who, in the region of the Muzeguahs, scorned a girl who wanted to be his temporary wife; whereupon ”the whole tribe a.s.serted he had treated them with contempt by his haughty conduct toward the girl, and demanded to know if she was not good enough for him.” He had to give them some bra.s.s wire and blue sood before he could allay the national indignation aroused by his refusal to take the girl. Women have rights which must be respected, even in Africa!
In Dutch Borneo there is a special kind of ”marriage by stratagem”
called _matep_. If a girl desires a particular man he is inveigled into her house, the door is shut, the walls are hung with cloth of different colors and other ornaments, dinner is served up and he is informed of the girl's wish to marry him. If he declines, he is obliged to pay the value of the hangings and the ornaments. (Roth, II., CLx.x.xI.)
”Uncertain, coy, and hard to please” obviously cannot be sung of such women.
In one of the few native Australian stories on record the two wives of a man are represented as going to his brother's hut when he was asleep, and imitating the voice of an emu. The noise woke him, and he took his spear to kill them; but as soon as he ran out the two women spoke and requested him to be their husband. (Wood's _Native Tribes_, 210.)
The fact that Australian women have absolutely no choice in the a.s.signment of husbands, must make them inclined to offer themselves to men they like, just as Indian girls offer themselves to noted warriors in the hope of thus calling attention to their personal attractions.
As we shall see later, one of the ways in which an Australian wins a wife is by means of magic. In this game, as Spencer and Gillen tell us (556), the women sometimes take the initiative, thus inducing a man to elope with them.
WERE HEBREW AND GREEK WOMEN COY?
The English language is a queer instrument of thought. While coyness has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness, shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb ”to coy” may mean the exact opposite--to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy.
It is in _this_ sense that ”coyness” is obviously a trait of primitive maidens. What is more surprising is to find in brus.h.i.+ng aside prejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too it is in this second sense rather than in the first that women are ”coy.”
The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve is stigmatized as the temptress. Rebekah had never seen the man chosen for her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would go with his servant, she answered, promptly, ”I will go.” Rachel at the well suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight. Ruth does all the courting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz. There is no shrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases; no suggestion of disguised feminine affection; and in two of them the women make the advances. Potiphar's wife is another biblical case. The word coy does not occur once in the Bible.
The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminal amours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. In the _Odyssey_ we read about the fair-haired G.o.ddess Circe, decoying the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their appet.i.tes. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him too, saying, ”Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and let us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn to trust each other.” Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always ”casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow,” in order to decoy pa.s.sing sailors. Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home ”because the nymph pleased him no more.” Nor does the human Nausicaa manifest the least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river. Though he has been cast on the sh.o.r.e naked, she remains, after her maids have run away alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe. Then, after seeing him bathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her waiting maids: ”Ah, might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here and content to stay;” while to him later on she gives this broad hint: ”Stranger, farewell! when you are once again in your own land, remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the saving of your life.”
Nausicaa is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as the Greek poets habitually paint her. Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speaking of a temple of Peeping Venus says:
”From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises. Here still grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told. For being at her wit's ends and finding no ease from the pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves of this myrtle.”
Professor Rohde, the most erudite authority on Greek erotic literature, writes (34):
”It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which Euripides followed, in what might be called his tragedies of adultery, that they _always make the woman the vehicle of the pernicious pa.s.sion_; it seems as if Greek feeling could not conceive of a _man_ being seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to pa.s.sionate disregard of all human conventions and laws.”
MASCULINE COYNESS
Greek poets from Stesichorus to the Alexandrians are fond of representing coy men. The story told by Athenaeus (XIV., ch. 11) of Harpalyke, who committed suicide because the youth Iphiclus coyly spurned her, is typical of a large cla.s.s. No less significant is the circ.u.mstance that when the coy backwardness happens to be on the side of a female, she is usually a woman of masculine habits, devoted to Diana and the chase. Several centuries after Christ we still find in the romances an echo of this thoroughly Greek sentiment in the coy att.i.tude, at the beginning, of their youthful heroes.[20]
The well-known legend of Sappho--who flourished about a thousand years before the romances just referred to were written--is quite in the Greek spirit. It is thus related by Strabo:
”There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and toward Cephalonia, that takes its name from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was supposed to stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, in pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king.”
Four centuries after Sappho we find Theocritus harping on the same theme. His _Enchantress_ is a monologue in which a woman relates how she made advances to a youth and won him. She saw him walking along the road and was so smitten that she was prostrated and confined to her bed for ten days. Then she sent her slave to waylay the youth, with these instructions: ”If you see him alone, say to him: 'Simaitha desires you,' and bring him here.” In this case the youth is not coy in the least; but the sequel of the story is too bucolic to be told here.
SHY BUT NOT COY
It is well-known that the respectable women of Greece, especially the virgins, were practically kept under lock and key in the part of the house known as the gynaikonitis. This resulted in making them shy and bashful--but not coy, if we may judge from the mirror of life known as literature. Ramdohr observes, pertinently (III., 270):
”Remarkable is the easy triumph of lovers over the innocence of free-born girls, daughters of citizens, examples of which may be found in the _Eunuchus_ and _Adelphi_ of Terence. They call attention to the low opinion the ancients had of a woman's power to guard her sensual impulses, and of her own accord resist attacks on her honor.”
The Abbe Dubois says the same thing about Hindoo girls, and the reason why they are so carefully guarded. It is hardly necessary to add that since no one would be so foolish as to call a man honest who refrains from stealing merely because he has no opportunity, it is equally absurd to call a woman honest or coy who refrains from vice only because she is locked up all the time. The fact (which seems to give Westermarck (64-65) much satisfaction), that some Australians, American Indian and other tribes watch young girls so carefully, does not argue the prevalence of chaste coyness, but the contrary. If the girls had an instinctive inclination to repel improper advances it would not be necessary to cage and watch them. This inclination is not inborn, does not characterize primitive women, but is a result of education and culture.
MILITARISM AND MEDIAEVAL WOMEN
Greatly as Greeks and Indians differ in some respects, they have two things in common--a warlike spirit and contempt for women. ”When Greek meets Greek then comes a tug of war,” and the Indian's chief delight is scalp hunting. The Greeks, as Rohde notes (42),