The Man‐Made World
“O, women!” says the reader, “Of course not! Women are different.”
Yea, women are different; and men are different! Both of them, as sexes, differ from the human norm, which is social life and all social development. Society was slowly growing in all those black blind years. The arts, the sciences, the trades and crafts and professions, religion, philosophy, government, law, commerce, agriculture—all the human processes were going on as well as they were able, between wars.
The male naturally fights, and naturally crows, triumphs over his rival and takes the prize—therefore was he made male. Maleness means war.
Not only so; but being male, he cares only for male interests. Men, being the sole arbiters of what should be done and said and written, have given us not only a social growth scarred and thwarted from the beginning by continual destruction; but a history which is one unbroken record of courage and red cruelty, of triumph and black shame.
As to what went on that was of real consequence, the great slow steps of the working world, the discoveries and inventions, the real progress of humanity—that was not worth recording, from a
masculine point of view. Within this last century, “the woman‘s century,” the century of the great awakening, the rising demand for freedom, political, economic, and domestic, we are beginning to write real history, human history, and not merely masculine history.
But that great branch of literature—Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and all
down later times, shows beyond all question, the influence of our androcentric culture.
Literature is the most powerful and necessary of the arts, and fiction is its broadest form. If art “holds the mirror up to nature” this art‘s mirror is the largest of all, the most used. Since our very life depends on some communication; and our progress is in proportion to our fullness and freedom of communication; since real communication requires mutual understanding; so in the growth of the social consciousness, we note from the beginning a passionate interest in other people‘s lives.
The art which gives humanity consciousness is the most vital art.
Our greatest dramatists are lauded for their breadth of knowledge of 36
The Man‐Made World
“human nature,” their range of emotion and understanding; our greatest poets are those who most deeply and widely experience and
reveal the feelings of the human heart; and the power of fiction is that it can reach and express this great field of human life with no limits but those of the author.
When fiction began it was the legitimate child of oral tradition; a product of natural brain activity; the legend constructed instead of remembered. (This stage is with us yet as seen in the constant changes in repetition of popular jokes and stories.)
Fiction to‐day has a much wider range; yet it is still restricted, heavily and most mischievously restricted.
What is the preferred subject matter of fiction?
There are two main branches found everywhere, from the Romaunt
of the Rose to the Purplish Magazine;—the Story of Adventure, and
the Love Story.
The Story‐of‐Adventure branch is not so thick as the other by any means, but it is a sturdy bough for all that. Stevenson and Kipling have proved its immense popularity, with the whole brood of detective stories and the tales of successful rascality we call
“picaresque” Our most popular weekly shows the broad appeal of this class of fiction.
All these tales of adventure, of struggle and difficulty; of hunting and fishing and fighting; of robbing and murdering, catching and punishing, are distinctly and essentially masculine. They do not touch on human processes, social processes, but on the special field of predatory excitement so long the sole province of men.
It is to be noted here that even in the overwhelming rise of industrial interests to‐day, these, when used as the basis for a story, are forced into line with one, or both, of these two main branches of fiction;—
conflict or love. Unless the story has one of these “interests” in it, there is no story—so holds the editor; the dictum being, put plainly,
“life has no interests except conflict and love!”
It is surely something more than a coincidence that these are the two essential features of masculinity—Desire and Combat—Love and
War.