Part 28 (1/2)
One of the most important reasons why young savages approaching p.u.b.erty are eager to receive their ”decorations” remains to be considered. Tattooing, scarring, and mutilating are usually very painful processes. Now, as all who are familiar with the life of savages know, there is nothing they admire so much as courage in enduring torture of any kind. By showing fort.i.tude in bearing the pain connected with tattooing, etc., these young folks are thus able to win admiration, gratify their vanity, and show that they are worthy to be received in the ranks of adults. The Sea Dyaks are proud of their scars, writes Brooke Low.
”The women often prove the courage and endurance of the youngsters by placing a lighted ball of tinder in the arm and letting it burn into the skin. The marks ... are much valued by the young men as so many proofs of their power of endurance.”
(Roth, II., 80.) Here we have an ill.u.s.tration which explains in the most simple way why scars _please_ both the men and the women, without making necessary the grotesque a.s.sumption that either s.e.x admires them as things of beauty. To take another case, equally eloquent: Bossu says of the Osage Indians that they suffer the pain of tattooing with pleasure in order to pa.s.s for men of courage. If one of them should have himself marked without having previously distinguished himself in battle, he would be degraded and looked upon as a coward, unworthy of such an honor. (Mallery, 1889-90, 394.)
Grosse is inclined to think (78) that it is in the male only that courage is expected and admired, but he is mistaken, as we may see, _e.g._, in the account given by Dobrizhoffer (II., 21) of the tattooing customs of the Abipones, whom he studied so carefully. The women, he says,
”have their face, breast, and arms covered with black figures of various shapes, so that they present the appearance of a Turkish carpet.” ”This savage ornament is purchased with blood and many groans.”
The thorns used to puncture the skin are poisonous, and after the operation the girl has her eyes, cheeks, and lips so horribly swelled that she ”looks like a Stygian fury.” If she groans while undergoing the torture, or shows signs of pain in her face, the old woman who operates on her exclaims, in a rage: ”You will die single, be a.s.sured.
Which of our heroes would think _so cowardly a girl_ worthy to be his wife?” Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is admired in a girl because it makes her ”prepared to bear the pains of parturition in time.” In some cases vanity supplies an additional motive why the girls should submit to the painful operation with fort.i.tude; for those of them who ”are most p.r.i.c.ked and painted you may know to be of high rank.”
Here again we see clearly that the tattooing is admired for other than esthetic reasons, and we realize how foolish it is to philosophize about the peculiar ”taste” of these Indians in admiring a girl who looks like ”a Turkish carpet” or ”a Stygian fury.” If they had even the rudiments of a sense of beauty they would not indulge in such disgusting disfigurements.
MUTILATION, FAs.h.i.+ON, AND EMULATION
Grosse declares (80) that ”we know definitely at least, that tattooing is regarded by the Eskimo as an embellishment.” He bases this inference on Cranz's a.s.sertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo their daughters in early youth ”for fear that otherwise they would not get a husband.” Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particular instance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is. A favorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, to drag her from her tent by the hair. This young woman, moreover, has never washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth. Yet we are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the _beauty_ of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl's dirty face that he would refuse to marry her unless she had them! Like other champions of the s.e.xual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for a comically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before his eyes. That reason is fas.h.i.+on. The tattoo marks are tribal signs (Bancroft, I., 48) which _every_ girl _must_ submit to have in obedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an object of scorn and ridicule all her life.
The tyranny of fas.h.i.+on in prescribing disfigurements and mutilations is not confined to savages. The most amazing ill.u.s.tration of it is to be found in China, where the girls of the upper cla.s.ses are obliged to this day to submit to the most agonizing process of crippling their feet, which finally, as Professor Flower remarks in his book on _Fas.h.i.+on and Deformity_, a.s.sume ”the appearance of the hoof of some animal rather than a human foot.” There is a popular delusion that the Chinese approve of such deformed small feet because they consider them beautiful--a delusion which Westermarck shares (200). Since the Chinese consider small feet ”the chief charm of women,” it might be supposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure of fascinating men by a ”beauty” to acquire which they have to undergo such horrible torture;
”but Dr. Strieker a.s.sures us that in China a woman is considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted feet to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman's foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed under the dress.”
To explain this apparent anomaly Westermarck a.s.sumes that the object of the concealment ”is to excite through the unknown!” To such fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of s.e.xual selection lead. In reality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese consider crippled feet--looking like ”the hoof of an animal”--beautiful any more than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probability the origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced to the jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effective way of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulging in amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose being common in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-binding became an inexorable fas.h.i.+on which the foolishly conservative women were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the anti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubborn opponents in the women themselves. The _Missionary Review_ for July, 1899, contains an article summing up a report of the _Tien Tsu Hui,_ or ”Natural Foot Society,” which throws a bright light on the whole question and from which I quote as follows:
”The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the women will support it. One Chinese even promised his daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that his youngest should be under his personal supervision night and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her.
But at her new home she was so _ridiculed_ by the hundreds who came to see her--and her feet--that she lost her reason.
The other girl also became insane as a result of the _persecutions_ which she had to endure.”
Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous pa.s.sion of the _men_ by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by the other women, slaves of fas.h.i.+on all. These same motives are the source of most of the ugly fas.h.i.+ons prevalent even in civilized Europe and America. Theophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense of beauty, but only a sense of fas.h.i.+on; and if explorers and missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between fas.h.i.+on and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer by hundreds of ”false facts” and ludicrous inferences.[113]
The ravages of fas.h.i.+on are aggravated by emulation, which has its sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to which mutilations and fas.h.i.+ons often go among both, civilized and uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described in detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear their jewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the same reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can get. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusing story of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being asked why, she replied that her great desire was to ama.s.s a large quant.i.ty of beads and then return to Tonga, ”because in England beads are so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and _I should not have the pleasure of being envied.”_ Bancroft (I., 128) says of the Kutchin Indians: ”_Beads are their wealth,_ used in the place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with necklaces and strings of various patterns.” Referring to the tin ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has ”counted as many as sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar”; while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they ”deck themselves with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. _Quant.i.ty rather than quality is aimed at.”_
PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION
Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so far in this long chapter, a.s.sume that savages and barbarians have no esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty _may_ exist even among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is little more than a childish pleasure in bright and l.u.s.trous sh.e.l.ls and other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility (language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to _esthetics_--that is, _the love of beauty for its own sake._ Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants _years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty;_ and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courts.h.i.+p without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to marry a particular girl or man; for most of the ”decorations”
described in the preceding pages are not elements of _personal_ beauty at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that these ”decorations” do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous pa.s.sion and preference of the opposite s.e.x, except non-esthetically and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show, much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve among the lower races as a stimulant of s.e.xual pa.s.sion. This we should expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty faces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he saw in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but they were not attractive to the natives. Zoller saw at least one beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago (354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful figures when young--every joint and limb well turned. But as we shall see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness, whether natural or inflicted by fas.h.i.+on, does not among these races act as a bar to marriage. ”Beauty is of no estimation in either s.e.x,”
we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): ”It is strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he may choose for a wife.” Belden found that the squaws were valued ”only for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is taken of their personal beauty,” etc., etc. Nor can the fact that savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard for personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for the simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the tribe.
Advocates of the s.e.xual selection theory make much ado over the fact that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and features--black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thick lips, etc.--and dislike what we consider beautiful. But the likes of these races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with a sense of beauty than their dislikes. It is merely a question of habit.
They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislike ours because they are strange. In their aversion to our faces they are actuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out and run away in terror at sight of a negro--not because he is ugly, for he may be good-looking, but because he is strange.
Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or mutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeb.a.l.l.s, has escaped the uglifying process. ”Nothing is too absurd or hideous to please them,” writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking ill.u.s.tration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which, gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches. Bancroft (I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the Thlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block is withdrawn ”the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather, displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle.”
The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked; another says that the plug ”distorts every feature in the lower part of the face”; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a lip ”ornament” so large ”that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip she could almost conceal her whole face with it”; and a fourth gives a description of this ”abominably revolting spectacle,” which is too nauseating to quote.
DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)
”Abominably revolting,” ”hideous,” ”filthy,” ”disgusting,”
”atrocious”--such are usually the words of observers in describing these shocking mutilations. Nevertheless they always apply the word ”ornamentation” to them, with the implication that the savages look upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to say was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fas.h.i.+on.