In the matters of being fed, clothed, and housed few men and women
feel the hindrance of society. Indeed it is for those purposes that
they are gathered together. Being so, it is then that their fear and
shyness and timidity make them disguise their real natures and suppress
their other desires and aspirations. It is in the matter of love that
men and women feel society's oppression, submit to it and; set up their
subjection as the rule which must be obeyed. Very rarely is it obeyed
except by a few virtuous women who go through life coldly and
destructively, driving the men with whom they come in contact into the
arms of their more generous sisters. Women have fewer defences against
the tyranny of society, which makes all but a very few either
prostitutes or prigs, exploiting their womanhood in emotional and
physical excitement, their motherhood to defend themselves and their
self-respect from the consequences of that indulgence. Men are of
harder stuff. Some of them can escape into the intellectual life; many
preserve only their practical cunning and, for the rest, are insensible
and stupid and fill their lives with small pleasures and trifling
discontents, and feed their conceit with success or failure as they
happen.
In Vladimir Sanine, Artzibashef has imagined, postulated, a man who has
escaped the tyranny of society, is content to take his living where he
finds it, and determined to accept whatever life has to offer of joy or
sorrow. Returning to his home, he observes and amuses himself with all
that is going on in the little provincial garrison town, where men and
women--except his mother, who is frozen to the point of living
altogether by formula--are tormented by the exasperation of unsatisfied
desires. He sees Novikoff absurdly and hopelessly in love with his
sister, Lida; he sees Lida caught up in an intrigue with an expert
soldier love-maker, and bound, both by her own weakness and by her
dependence upon society for any opinion of her own actions, to continue
in that hateful excitement; he sees men and women all round him letting
their love and their desire trickle through their fingers; he sees
Semenoff die, and death also in that atmosphere is blurred and
meaningless. Men and women plunge into horrible relationships and
constantly excuse themselves. They seek to propitiate society by
labouring to give permanence to fleeting pleasures, the accidents of
passion and propinquity. Love is rare; physical necessity is common to
all men and women; it is absurd to expect the growth of the one and the
satisfaction of the other often to coincide. Nature is apparently
indifferent and does not demand love of human beings but only mutual
attraction, and of that are most children born. They grow up to dwell
in the heated confusion which passes for life. Of that mutual
attraction and in that heated confusion two children are born in this
book, Lida's and Sarudine's, Sanine's and Karsavina's. Lida yields to
Society's view of such affairs and is near broken by it; Sanine
sustains Karsavina and brings her to the idea, cherished by Thomas
Hardy among others, as a way out of confusion, of a woman's right to
have a child without suffering from impertinent curiosity as to who the
father may be if he be such that she thinks herself better rid of him.
This does not necessarily mean that women would at once become as loose
and casual as men. On the contrary, it would probably make many of them
realize their responsibility and fewer of them would capture men as
Arabella captured Jude the Obscure. In any case there is no excuse for
the cruelty which regards a child born out of wedlock as nothing but
evidence of wickedness. A child born in wedlock may be as lustfully and
lovelessly begotten. Marriage does not necessarily provide relief from
physical necessity and often aggravates it; and when a child, as often
happens, is nothing to its father and mother but a sordid tie, a
constant reminder of a connexion which both would be happier to forget,
then, for its sake, they are better separate.