Marriage and Morals/Chapter II

Marriage customs have always been a blend of three factors, which may be loosely called instinctive, economic, and religious respectively. I do not mean that these can be sharply distinguished, any more than they can in other spheres. The fact that shops are closed on Sundays has a religious origin, but is now an economic fact, and so it is with many laws and customs in relation to sex. A useful custom which has a religious origin will often survive on account of its utility after the religious basis has been undermined. The distinction between what is religious and what is instinctive is also a difficult one to make. Religions which have any very strong hold over men’s actions have generally some instinctive basis. They are distinguished, however, by the importance of tradition and by the fact that, among the various kinds of actions which are instinctively possible, they give a preference to certain kinds; for example, love and jealousy ​are both instinctive emotions, but religion has decreed that jealousy is a virtuous emotion to which the community ought to lend support, while love is at best excusable.

The instinctive element in sex relations is much less than is usually supposed. It is not my purpose in this book to go into anthropology except in so far as may be necessary to illustrate present-day problems, but there is one respect in which that science is very necessary for our purposes, and that is, to show how many practices, which we should have thought contrary to instinct, can continue for long periods without causing any great or obvious conflict with instinct. It has, for example, been a common practice, not only with savages but with some comparatively civilized races, for virgins to be officially (and sometimes publicly) deflowered by priests. In Christian countries men have held that defloration should be the prerogative of the bridegroom, and most Christians, at any rate until recent times, would have regarded their repugnance to the custom of religious defloration as an instinctive one. The practice of lending one’s wife to a guest as an act of hospitality is also one which to the modern European seems instinc​tively repugnant, and yet it has been very widespread. Polyandry is another custom which an unread white man would suppose contrary to human nature. Infanticide might seem still more so; yet the facts show that it is resorted to with great readiness wherever it seems economically advantageous. The fact is that, where human beings are concerned, instinct is extraordinarily vague and easily turned aside from its natural course. This is the case equally among savages and among civilized communities. The word “instinct,” in fact, is hardly the proper one to apply to anything so far from rigid as human behaviour in sexual matters. The only act in this whole realm which can be called instinctive in the strict psychological sense is the act of sucking in infancy. I do not know how it may be with savages, but civilized people have to learn to perform the sexual act.^[1] It is not uncommon for doctors to be asked by married couples of some years’ standing for advice as to how to get children, and to find on examination that the couples have not known how to perform intercourse. The sexual act is not, therefore, ​in the strictest sense, instinctive, although, of course, there is a natural trend towards it and a desire not easily to be satisfied without it. Indeed, where human beings are concerned we do not have the precise behaviour-patterns which are to be found among other animals, and instinct in that sense is replaced by something rather different. What we have with human beings is first of all a dissatisfaction leading to activities of a more or less random and imperfect sort, but arriving gradually, more or less by accident, at an activity which gives satisfaction and which is therefore repeated. What is instinctive is thus not so much the finished activity as the impulse to learn it, and often the activity which would give satisfaction is by no means definitely predetermined, though, as a rule, the biologically most advantageous activity will give the most complete satisfaction, provided it is learnt before contrary habits have been acquired.

Seeing that all civilized modern societies are based upon the patriarchal family, and that the whole conception of female virtue has been built up in order to make the patriarchal family possible, it is important to enquire what natural impulses have gone to produce the sen​timent of paternity. This question is by no means so easy as unreflective persons might suppose. The feeling of a mother towards her child is one which it is not at all difficult to understand, since there is a close physical tie, at any rate up to the moment of weaning. But the relation of father to child, in that part of it which depends upon physiological parenthood, is indirect, hypothetical and inferential; it is bound up with beliefs as to the virtue of the wife, and belongs accordingly to a region too intellectual to be regarded as properly instinctive. Or at least it would seem so if one supposed that the sentiment of paternity must be directed essentially towards a man’s own children. This, however, is by no means necessarily the case. The Melanesians do not know that people have fathers, yet among them fathers are at least as fond of their children as they are where they know them to be their children. A flood of light has been thrown upon the psychology of paternity by Malinowski’s books on the Trobriand Islanders. Three books especially—“Sex and Repression in Savage Society,” “The Father in Primitive Psychology” and “The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia”—are quite indis​pensable to any understanding of the complex sentiment which we call that of paternity. There are, in fact, two entirely distinct reasons which may lead a man to be interested in a child; he may be interested in the child because he believes it to be his child, or again he may be interested in it because he knows it to be his wife’s child. The second of these motives alone operates where the part of the father in generation is not known.

The fact that among the Trobriand Islanders people are not known to have fathers has been established by Malinowski beyond question. He observed, for example, that when a man has been away on a voyage for a year or more and finds on his return that his wife has a newborn child, he is delighted, and quite unable to understand the hints of Europeans, suggesting doubts as to his wife’s virtue. What is perhaps still more convincing, he found that a man who possessed a superior breed of pigs would castrate all the males and be unable to understand that this involved a deterioration of the breed. It is thought that spirits bring children and insert them into their mothers. It is recognized that virgins cannot conceive, but this is supposed to be because the hymen presents a phys​ical barrier to the activities of the spirits. Unmarried men and girls live a life of complete free love, but, for some unknown reason, unmarried girls very seldom conceive. Oddly enough, it is considered disgraceful when they do so, in spite of the fact that, according to native philosophy, nothing they have done is responsible for their becoming pregnant. Sooner or later a girl grows tired of variety and marries. She goes to live in her husband’s village, but she and her children are still reckoned as belonging to the village from which she has come. Her husband is not regarded as having any blood relationship to the children, and descent is traced solely through the female line. The kind of authority over children which is elsewhere exercised by fathers is, among the Trobriand Islanders, vested in the maternal uncle. Here, however, a very curious complication comes in. The brother and sister taboo is exceedingly severe, so that after they are grown up brother and sister can never talk together on any subject connected with sex however remotely. Consequently, although the maternal uncle has authority over the children, he seldom sees them except when they are away from their mother and from home. This ​admirable system secures for the children a measure of affection without discipline which is unknown elsewhere. Their father plays with them and is nice to them but has not the right to order them about, whereas their maternal uncle, who has the right to order them about, has not the right to be on the spot.

Strangely enough, in spite of the belief that there is no blood tie between the child and its mother’s husband, it is supposed that children resemble their mother’s husbands rather than their mothers or their brothers and sisters. Indeed it is very bad manners to suggest a resemblance between a brother and sister, or between a child and its mother, and even the most obvious resemblances are fiercely denied. Malinowski is of opinion that the affection of fathers for their children is stimulated by this belief in a resemblance to the father rather than to the mother. He found the relation of father and son a more harmonious and affectionate one than it often is among civilized people, and, as might have been expected, he found no trace of the Oedipus complex.

Malinowski found it quite impossible, in spite of his best argumentative efforts, to persuade his friends on the islands that there is ​such a thing as paternity. They regarded this as a silly story invented by the missionaries. Christianity is a patriarchal religion, and cannot be made emotionally or intellectually intelligible to people who do not recognize fatherhood. Instead of “God the Father” it would be necessary to speak of “God the Maternal Uncle,” but this does not give quite the right shade of meaning, since fatherhood implies both power and love, whereas in Melanesia the maternal uncle has the power and the father has the love. The idea that men are God’s children is one which cannot be conveyed to the Trobriand Islanders, since they do not think that anybody is the child of any male. Consequently, missionaries are compelled to tackle first the facts of physiology before they can go on to preach their religion. One gathers from Malinowski that they have had no success in this initial task, and have, therefore, been quite unable to proceed to the teaching of the gospel.

Malinowski maintains, and in this I think he must be right, that if a man remains with his wife during pregnancy and child-birth he has an instinctive tendency to be fond of the child when it is born, and that this is the basis of the paternal sentiment. “Human paternity,” he ​says, “which appears at first as almost completely lacking in biological foundation, can be shown to be deeply rooted in natural endowment and organic need.” He thinks, however, that if a man is absent from his wife during pregnancy he will not instinctively feel affection for the child at first, although if custom and tribal ethics lead him to associate with the mother and child, affection will develop as it would have done if he had been with the mother throughout. In all the important human relations socially desirable acts, towards which there is an instinct not strong enough to be always compelling, are enforced by social ethics, and so it is among these savages. Custom enjoins that the mother’s husband shall care for the children and protect them while they are young, and this custom is not difficult to enforce, since it is as a rule in line with instinct.

The instinct to which Malinowski appeals to explain the attitude of a father towards his children among the Melanesians is, I think, somewhat more general than it appears in his pages. There is, I think, in either a man or a woman a tendency to feel affection for any child whom he or she has to tend. Even if noth​ing but custom and convention, or wages, have in the first instance caused an adult to have the care of a child, the mere fact of having that care will, in the majority of cases, cause affection to grow up. No doubt this feeling is reinforced where the child is the child of a woman who is loved. It is, therefore, intelligible that these savages show considerable devotion to their wives’ children, and it may be taken as certain that this is a large element in the affection which civilized men give to their children. Malinowski maintains—and it is difficult to see how his opinion can be controverted—that all mankind must have passed through the stage in which the Trobriand Islanders are now, since there must have been a period when paternity was nowhere recognized. Animal families, where they include a father, must have a like basis, since they cannot have any other. It is only among human beings, after the fact of fatherhood has become known, that the sentiment of paternity can assume the form with which we are familiar.