Part 32 (2/2)
”the widow was _bound_ to supply the grave of her husband with provisions for a year, after which she took up the bones and carried them with her for another year, at last placing them upon the roof of her house, and then only was she _allowed_ to marry again.”
The widows of the Tolkotin Indians in Oregon were subjected to such maltreatment that some of them committed suicide to escape their sufferings. For nine days they were obliged to sleep beside the corpse and follow certain rules in regard to dressing and eating. If a widow neglected any of these, she was on the tenth day thrown on the funeral pile with the corpse and tossed about and scorched till she lost consciousness. Afterward she was obliged to perform the function of a slave to all the other women and children of the tribe.[124]
So far as I am aware, no previous writer on the subject has emphasized the obligatory character of all these performances by widows. To me that seems by far the most important aspect of the question, as it shows that the widows were not prompted to these actions by affectionate grief or self-sacrificing impulses, but by the command of the men; and if we bear in mind the superlative selfishness of these men we have no difficulty in comprehending that what makes them compel the women to do these penances is the desire to make them eager to care for the comfort and welfare of their husbands lest the latter die and they thus bring upon themselves the discomforts arid terrors of widowhood.
Martius justly remarks that the great dependance of savage women makes them eager to please their husbands (121); and this eagerness would naturally be doubled by making widowhood forbidding. Bruhier wrote, in 1743, that in Corsica it was customary, in case a man died, for the women to fall upon his widow and give her a sound drubbing. This custom, he adds significantly, ”prompted the women to take good care of their husbands.”
It is true that the widowers also in some cases subjected themselves to penance; but usually they made it very much easier for themselves than for the widows. In his _Lettres sur le Congo_ (152) Edouard Dupont relates that a man who has lost his wife and wants to show grief shaves his head, blackens himself, _stops work_, and sits in front of his chimbeque several days. His neighbors meanwhile feed him [no fasting for _him_!], and at last a friend brings him a calabash of malofar and tells him ”stop mourning or you will die of starvation.”
”It does not happen often,” Dupont adds, ”that the advice is not promptly followed.”
Selfish utilitarianism does not desert the savage even at the grave of his wife. An amusing ill.u.s.tration of the shallowness of aboriginal grief where it seems ”truly touching” may be found in an article by the Rev. F. McFarlane on British New Guinea.[125] Scene: ”A woman is being buried. The husband is lying by the side of the grave, apparently in an agony of grief; he sobs and cries as if his heart would break.” Then he jumps into the grave and whispers into the ears of the corpse--what? a last farewell? Oh, no! ”He is asking the spirit of his wife to go with him when he goes fis.h.i.+ng, and make him successful also when he goes hunting, or goes to battle,” etc.; his last request being, ”_And please don't be angry if I get another wife_!”
The simple truth is that in their grief, as in everything else, savages are nothing but big children, crying one moment, laughing the next. Whatever feelings they may have are shallow and without devotion. If the widows of Mandans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do not marry until a year after the death of their husband this is not on account of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they are not allowed to. Where custom prescribes a different course, they follow that with the same docility. When a Kansas or Osage wife finds, on the return of a war-party, that she is a widow, she howls dismally, but forthwith seeks an avenger in the shape of a new husband. ”After the death of a husband, the sooner a squaw marries again, the greater respect and regard she is considered to show for his memory.” (Hunter, 246.) The Australian custom for women, especially widows, is to mourn by scratching the face and branding the body. As for the grief itself, its quality may be inferred from the fact that these women sit day after day by the grave or platform, howling their monotonous dirge, but, as soon as they are allowed to pause for a meal they indulge in the merriest pranks. (K.E. Jung, 111.)
MOURNING FOR ENTERTAINMENT
In many cases the mourning of savages, instead of being an expression of affection and grief, appears to be simply a mode of gratifying their love of ceremonial and excitement. That is, they mourn for entertainment--I had almost said for fun; and it is easy to see too, that vanity and superst.i.tion play their role here as in their ”ornamenting” and everything else they do. By the Abipones ”women are appointed to go forward on swift steeds to dig the grave, and _honor_ the funeral with lamentations.” (Dobrizhoffer II., 267.) During the ceremony of making a skeleton of a body the Patagonians, as Falkner informs us (119), indulge in singing in a mournful tone of voice, and striking the ground, to _frighten away_ the Valichus or Evil Beings.
Some of the Indians also visit the relatives of the dead, indulging in antics which show that the whole thing is done for effect and pastime.
”During this visit of condolence,” Falkner continues,
”they cry, howl, and sing, in the most dismal manner; straining out tears, and p.r.i.c.king their arms and thighs with sharp thorns, to make them bleed. For this _show of grief_ they are _paid_ with gla.s.s beads,” etc.
The Rev. W. Ellis writes that the Tahitians, when someone had died, ”not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but tore their hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark's teeth or knives in a most shocking manner.” That this was less an expression of genuine grief than a result of the barbarous love of excitement, follows from what he adds: that in a milder form, this loud wailing and cutting with shark's teeth was ”an expression of joy as well as of grief.” (_Pol. Res_., I., 527.) The same writer relates in his book on Hawaii (148) that when a chief or king died on that island,
”the people ran to and fro without their clothes, appearing and acting more like demons than human beings; every vice was practised and almost every species of crime perpetrated.”
J.T. Irving tells a characteristic story (226-27) of an Indian girl whom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song ”so despairing that it seemed to well out from a broken heart.” A half-breed friend, who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion by informing him that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as she had nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl over her brother's grave. The brother had been dead five years!
The whole question of aboriginal mourning is patly summed up in a witty remark made by James Adair more than a century ago (1775). He has seen Choctaw mourners, he declares (187), ”pour out tears like fountains of water; but after thus tiring themselves they might with perfect propriety have asked themselves, '_ And who is dead?_'”
THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING
Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related by McLean (I., 254-55): A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The other females ”evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down their cheeks, and beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s;” yet as soon as the rites were ended, these women ”were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had returned from a wedding.” The widow alone remained, being ”obliged by custom” to mourn day and night.
”The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the wretched creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was thrust forward by her husband's relatives at the point of their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself almost scorched to death. Her relatives were present merely to preserve her life; when no longer able to stand they dragged her away, and this intervention often led to b.l.o.o.d.y quarrels.”
Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simply a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the Lithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.[126]
Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the men to compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widely accepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when he declared regarding the Wends that
”they _preserve their conjugal love_ with such ardent zeal that the wife refuses to survive her husband; and _she_ is especially admired among women who takes her own life in order to be burnt on the same pile with her master.”
This view is the fourth of the mistakes I have undertaken to demolish in this chapter.
In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that a warrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; for which reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons are placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to be useful to him in his new existence. His princ.i.p.al servant and provider of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is expected to follow him.
<script>