The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

C >> Charlotte Perkins Gilman >> The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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You sit down. You wait. You are in the parlor.

What is this room? What is it for?

It is not to sleep in, the first need of the home. Not to eat in, the
second. Not to shelter young in, the third. Not to cook and wash in,
to sew and mend in, to nurse and tend in; not for any of the trades
which we still practice in the home.

It is a place for social intercourse. If the family is sufficiently
intelligent they use it for this purpose, gathering there in peace and
decorum, for rest and pleasure. Whether the family is of that order or
not, they use the parlor, if they have one, for the entertainment of
visitors. Our ancient Webster gives first: "The apartment in monastery
or nunnery where the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with
each other, or with visitors and friends from without," and second, "A
room in a house which the family usually occupy for society and
conversation; the reception room for visitors." It is, as the
derivation declares, "a talking room."

While you wait in the parlor you study it.

It is the best room. It has the best carpet, the best furniture, the
pictures and decorations considered most worthy. It is adorned as a
shrine for the service of what we feel rather than think to be a noble
purpose--to promote social intercourse.

In the interchange of thought and feeling that form so large and
essential a part of human life, these parlors are the vehicles provided.
Are they all the vehicles provided? Is it in parlors that the sea of
human thought ebbs and flows most freely? That mind meets mind, ideas
are interchanged, and the soul grows by contact with its kind? Is it in
parlors that art is talked? politics? business? affairs of state? new
lights in science? the moving thoughts of the world?

If you could hide in a thousand parlors and listen to the talk therein
what would you hear? When "she" has come down, greeted her friend with
effusion or her caller with ample cordiality, and the talk begins, the
interchange of thought, what does the parlor bring forth?

Alas and alas! It brings forth the kitchen, the nursery, and the
dressmaker's shop. It furnishes shop-talk mostly, gossip of the daily
concerns of the speakers.

Are there no men then in the parlors? Yes, frequently. The man of the
house is there with his family in the evening; other men call with their
wives; young men call on young women to court them; but in all these
cases the men, talking to the women, must needs confine the conversation
to their lines of work and thought. When men talk with men it is not in
parlors. The women may be ignorant, knowing only household affairs; or
they may be "cultivated," more highly educated than the men, talking
glibly of books they have read, lectures they have heard, plays they
have seen; while the men can talk well only of the work they have done.

When men wish to talk with men of world-business of any sort, they do
not seek the parlor. The street, the barroom, the postoffice, some
public place they want where they may meet freely on broader ground.
For the parlor is the women's meeting ground--has been for long their
only meeting ground except the church steps.

Its limits are sharp and clear. Only suitable persons may enter the
parlor; only one's acquaintances and friends. Thus the social
intercourse of women, for long years has been rigidly confined to parlor
limits; they have conversed only with their own class and kind, forever
rediscussing the same topics, the threadbare theme of their common
trade; and the men who come to their parlor, talk politely to them there
within prescribed lines.

It is interesting and pathetic to see the woman, when means allow,
enlarge the size of her parlor, the number of her guests, seeking
continually for that social intercourse for which the soul hungers, and
which the parlor so meagerly provides. As we see the fakir;

"Eating with famished patience grain by grain,
A thousand grains of millet-seed a day,"--

So the woman talks incessantly with as many as she can--neither giving
nor getting what is needed.

When we find an institution so common as the parlor, exerting a constant
influence upon us from childhood up, carrying with it a code of manners,
a system of conduct, a scheme of decoration, a steady prohibitive
pressure upon progressive thought, we shall be wise to study that
institution and in especial its effect upon the mind.

First, we may observe as in the kitchen the dominant note of
personality.

In the parlor more than elsewhere are to be found the "traces of a
woman's hand." It is her room, the Lady of the House and other Ladies
of other Houses, having each their own to exhibit, all politely praise
one another's display.

When a knowledge of art, a sense of beauty, grows in the world, and
slowly affects the decorators and furnishers, then does it through the
blandishments of the merchants filter slowly into a thousand parlors.
But as easily when there is neither art nor beauty in such furnishings,
are they foisted upon the purchasing housewife. Such as it is, provided
through the limitations of the housewife's mind and the husband's purse,
this "best room" becomes a canon of taste to the growing child.

"The parlor set" he must needs see held up as beautiful; the "reception
chairs," the carefully shadowed carpet,--these and the "best dress" to
go with them and the "company manners" added, are unescapable aesthetic
influences.

Few children like the parlor, few children are wanted or allowed in the
parlor, yet it has a steady influence as a sort of social shrine.

Most rigidly it teaches the child exclusiveness, the narrow limits of
one's "social acquaintances." As rigidly and most evilly it teaches him
falsehood. Scarcely a child but hears the mother's fretful protest
against the visitor, followed by the lightning change to cordial
greeting. The white lie, the smiling fib, the steady concealment of the
undesirable topic, the mutual steering off from all but a set allowance
of themes, the artificial dragging in of these and their insufferable
repetition--all this the silent, large-eyed child who has been allowed
to stay if quiet, hears and remembers. See the little girl's "playing
house." See the visitor arrive, the polite welcome, the inquiries after
health, the babbling discussion of babies and dress and cookery and
servants,--these they have well learned are proper subjects for parlor
talk.

The foolish and false ideas of beauty held up to them as "best," they
seek to perpetuate. The arbitrary "best dress" system, develops into a
vast convention, a wearing of apparel not for beauty, and not for use,
not for warmth, protection nor modesty (often quite the opposite of all
these), but as a conventional symbol of respectability.

So interwoven with our inner consciousness are these purely arbitrary
codes of propriety in costume, that we have such extremes as Kipling
shows us in his remote Himalayan forests,--a white man thousands of
miles from his kind, who "dressed for dinner every night to preserve his
self-respect." No doubt a perfectly sincere conviction, and one sunk
deep in the highbred British breast, but even so of a most shallow and
ephemeral nature, based on nothing whatever but a temporary caprice of
our parlor-mindedness.

Being reared in that state of mind, and half of us confined to it
professionally, we are inevitably affected thereby, and react upon
life--the real moving world-life, under its pitiful limitations.

If one's sense of beauty must be first, last and always personal, and
confined to one's parlor,--for of course we cannot dictate as to other
women's parlors,--then how is it to be expected that we should in any
way notice, feel or see the ugliness of our town or city, schoolhouse or
street-car?

See the woman who has had "an education," who has even "studied art,"
perhaps, and whose husband can pay for what she wants. Her parlor may
become a drawing-room, or two, or more, but she does not grow to care
that a public school-room is decorated in white plaster trimmed with a
broad strip of blackboard.

The bald, cruel, wearing ugliness of the most of our schools, is worthy
of penal institutions, yet we with cheerful unconcern submit growing
children to such influences without ever giving it a thought.

"My parlor" must be beautiful, but "our school" is no business of mine.
Is there any real reason, by the way, why blackboards must be black? A
deep dull red or somber green would be restful and pleasant to the eye,
and show chalk just as well. As is being now slowly discovered. There
are no blackboards in our parlors. Our children leave home to go to
school, and their mother's thoughts do not. In the small measure of
parlor decoration grows no sense of public art.

Great art must be largely conceived, largely executed. For the temple
and palace and forum rose the columns and statues of the past; for the
church and castle the "frozen music" of mediaeval architecture; for
church and palace again, the blazing outburst of pictorial art in the
great re-birth. Now the struggling artist must cater to the tastes of
parlor-bred patrons; must paint what suits the uses of that carpeted
sanctuary, portraits of young ladies most successful! Or he must do for
public buildings, if by chance he gets the opportunity, what meets the
tastes of our universal parlor-mindedness.

With this parlor-mindedness, we repudiate and condemn in painting,
literature, music, drama and the dance, whatever does not conform to the
decorum of this shrine, whatsoever is not suitable to ladylike
conversation. Be the book bad, it is unsuited to the parlor table. Be
the book good--too good, or be it great, then it is equally unsuited.
Controversy has no place in parlors, hence no controversial literature.
Pleasant if possible, or sweetly sad, and not provocative of
argument--this is the demeanor of the parlor table, and to this the
editor conforms. To the editorial dictum the "reader" must submit; to
the "readers" decisions the writer must submit; to the _menu_ furnished
by the magazines, the public must submit, and so grows up among us a
canon of literary judgment, best described as "parlor-minded." This is
by no means so damaging as kitchen-mindedness, for those who escape the
influence of the parlor are many, and those who escape the influence of
the kitchen are few; but it is quite damaging enough.

One of the main elements of beauty in our lives is the human body. Some
keep swans, some peacocks, and some deer, that they may delight their
eyes with the beauty thereof. We ourselves are more beautiful than any
beast or bird, we are the inspiration of poet, painter, and sculptor;
yet we have deliberately foregone all this constant world of beauty and
substituted for it a fluctuating nightmare.

In what sordid or discordant colors do we move about! What desolate
blurring of outline and action, by our dragging masses of cloth,
stiffened and padded like Chinese armor! What strange figures,
conventionalized as a lotus pattern, instead of the moving glory of the
human form!

Why do we do it? Having done it why do we bear it longer? Why not fill
our streets with beauty, gladden our eyes and uplift our souls with the
loveliness that is ours by nature, plus the added loveliness of the
textile art? We have pictures of our beauty, we have statues of our
beauty--why go without the real thing? Suppose our swans could show us
in paint and marble the slow white grace of their plumed sailing, but in
person paddled about in a costume of stovepipes. Suppose deer and
hound,--but wait!--this we have seen, this extreme of human folly forced
upon the helpless beast,--dogs dressed to suit the taste of their
parlor-minded owners! Not men's dogs,--women's dogs.

To cover--at any cost, with anything, that is a major ideal of the
parlor. There is an exception made, when, at any cost of health, beauty
and decency, we uncover--but this too, is to meet one of the parlor
purposes. In it and its larger spread of drawing and assembly rooms, we
provide not only for "social intercourse"--but for that necessary
meeting of men and women that shall lead to marriage.

A right and wholesome purpose, but not a right and wholesome place. Men
and women should meet and meet freely in the places where they live, but
they should not live in parlors. They should meet and know one another
in their working clothes, in the actual character and habit of their
daily lives.

Marriages may be "made in heaven," but they are mainly--shall we say
"retailed"? in parlors. What can the parlor-loved young woman know of
the parlor-bound young man? Parlor manners only are produced, parlor
topics, parlor ideas. He had better court her in the kitchen, if she is
one of the "fifteen sixteenths" of our families who keep no servants, to
know what he is going to live with. She never knows what she is going
to live with; for the nature of man is not truly exhibited either in
kitchen or parlor. A co-educational college does much, a studio or
business office or work-shop does more, to show men and women to each
other as they are. Neither does enough, for the blurring shadow of our
parlor-mindedness still lies between. It has so habituated us to the
soft wavelets and glassy shallows of polite conversation, that we refuse
to face and discuss the realities of life. With gifts of roses and
bonbons, suppers and theatres that cost more than the cows of the Kaffir
lover, and ought to make the girl feel like a Kaffir bride, the man woos
the woman. With elaborate toilettes and all the delicate trickery of
her unnatural craft, the woman woos the man. And the trail of the
parlor is over it all.

Gaily to the gate of marriage they go, and through it--and never have
they asked or answered the questions on which the whole truth of their
union depends. Our standards of decorum forbid,--parlor standards all.
We have woven and embroidered a veil over the facts of life; an
incense-clouded atmosphere blinds us; low music and murmured litanies
dull the mind, but not the senses. We drift and dream. In the girl's
mind floats a cloud of literary ideals. He is like a "Greek god," a
"Galahad," a "Knight of old." He is in some mystic way a Hero, a
Master, a Protector. She pictures herself as fulfilling exquisite
ideals of wifely devotion, "all in all" to him, and he to her.

She does not once prefigure to herself the plain common facts of the
experience that lies before her. She does not known them. In parlors
such things are not discussed,--no naked truths can be admitted there.

We live a marvellous life at home. Visibly we have the care and labor
of housekeeping, the strain and anxiety of childbearing as it is
practised, the elaborate convention of "receiving" and "entertaining."
Under these goes on life. Our bodies are tired, overtaxed, ill-fed,
grossly ill-treated. Our minds are hungry, unsatisfied, or drugged and
calm. We live, we suffer and we die,--and never once do we face the
facts. Birth and death are salient enough, one would think, but birth
and death we particularly cover and hide, concealing from our friends
with conventional phrases, lying about to our children. Over the strong
ever-lasting life-processes, we spin veil on veil; drape and smother
them till they become sufficiently remote and symbolic for the parlor to
recognize.

In older nations than ours, we can see this web of convention thickened
and hardened till life runs low within. Think what can be the state of
mind in India which allows child-marriage--the mother concurrent! Think
of the slow torture of little girls in foot-bound China, the mother
concurrent! Then turning quickly, think of our own state of mind, which
allows young girls to marry old reprobates,--the mother concurrent!

That mental attitude which maintains ancient conventions, which prefers
symbol to fact, which prescribes limits to our conversation, and draws
them narrowly down to what can be understood by anybody, and can
instruct, interest and inspire nobody, is parlor-mindedness. It does
harm enough both in its low ideals of beauty and art, manners and
morals, to its placid inmates and its complaisant visitors; it does more
harm in its fallacious shallows as a promoter of marriage; it does most
in its failure to promote the one thing it is for--social intercourse.

To meet freely; to talk, discuss, exchange and compare ideas, is a
general human need. Those who do not know they need it, need it most.

Each of us alone, taps the reservoir of world-force, in some degree, and
pours it forth in some expression. Often the intake seems to fail, the
output is unsatisfying. Then we need one another, now this one and now
that one, now several, now a crowd. In combination we receive new
power. The human soul calls for contact and exchange with its kind.
This contact should be fluent and free, spontaneous, natural; that we
may go as we are drawn to those who feed us best.

Men need men and women women; men and women need one another; it is a
general human condition. From such natural meeting arises personal
relief, rest, pleasure, stimulus, and social gain beyond counting, in
the growth of thought. The social battery is continually replenished by
contact and exchange. Some friends draw out the best that is in us,
some, though perhaps near and dear to us, do not.

No matter how "happily married," or how unhappily unmarried, we need
social interchange. To quench this thirst, to meet this need, wide as
the world and deep as life, we provide--the parlor.

Is it any wonder that our talk is mainly personality? That we love
gossip, even when it bites and sours to scandal? Is it any wonder that
women talk so much of their kitchen and nurseries, of their diseases,
and their clothes, yet learn so little about better feeding, better
dressing, better health and better child-culture? Is it any wonder that
to our parlor-mindedness the daily press descends, gives us the pap we
are used to, and then artfully peppers our pap, insinuating some sparkle
of alcohol, some solace of insidious drug, that we may "get the habit"
more firmly? Is it any wonder that we, parlor-bred and newspaper-fed,
continue to cry out fiercely against personal, primitive, parlor sins,
and remain calm and unshocked by world-sins that should rouse us to
horror, shame and action?

In these small shrines, adorned with what, in our doll-house taste, we
fondly imagine to be beautiful, we seek to keep ourselves, "unspotted
from the world," but by no saving grace of a thousand parlors, do we
succeed in keeping the world unspotted from ourselves! We make the
world. We are the world. It might be a place of noble freedom, of
ever-growing beauty, of a fluent, truthful radiant art, of broadening
education, wide peace and culture, universal wealth and progress. And
we miss even seeing this, living sedately, curtained, carpeted, well
content, in our ancestral parlor-mindedness.

NAUGHTY

The young brain was awake and hungry. It was a vigorous young brain,
well-organized; eager, receiving impressions with keen joy and storing
them rapidly away in due relation.

Such a wonder world!

Sweetness and light were the first impressions--light which made his
eyes laugh; and Sweetness Incarnate--that great soft Presence which was
Food and Warmth and Rest and Comfort and something better still; for all
of which he had no name as yet except "Ma-ma!"

He was growing, growing fast. He was satisfied with food. He was
satisfied with sleep. But his brain was not satisfied. So the brain's
first servant went forth to minister to it; small, soft, uncertain,
searching for all knowledge--the little hand.

Something to hold! Ancestral reflexes awoke as the fingers closed upon
it. Something to pull! The soft arm flexors tightened with a sense of
pleasure. Sensations came flowing to the hungry brain--welcomed
eagerly.

Then suddenly, a new sensation--Pain! He drew back his hand as a
touched anemone draws in its tentacles, scarce softer than those pink
fingers; but he did not know quite where the pain was--much less where
it came from, or what it meant.

"More!" said the hungry brain. "More!" and the little hand went out
again.

It was sharply spatted. "No, No!" said a strange voice--he had never
heard that kind of tone before. "No! No! Naughty! Don't touch!" He
lifted his face unbelievingly. Yes--it was Food and Warmth and Comfort
who was doing this to him.

The small moist mouth quivered grievingly--a cry rose in him.

"Here!" said the Presence, and gave him a rattle.

He had had that before. He knew all that it could do. He dropped it.

Over and over again, day after day, the little servant of the brain ran
forth to minister, and met sharp pain; while the dim new concept
"'Naughty'--something you want to do and mustn't"--was registered
within.

The child grew and his brain grew faster. He learned new words, an
behind the words, in the fresh untouched spaces, the swift brain placed
ideas--according to its lights. He had learned that the Presence
varied. It was not always Sweetness and Rest and Joy--sometimes it was
Discomfort--Hindrance--even Pain. He had learned to look at it with
doubt--when about to do something--to see which way it would react upon
him.

"Isn't that baby cute?" said the Presence. "He knows just as well!"

But his brain grew stronger, and his hand grew stronger, and about him
was a world of objects, rousing all manner of sensations which he fain
would learn.

"I have to watch that child every minute to keep him out of mischief!"
said the Presence.

She caught him sharply by the arm and drew him back.

"Don't touch that again! If you do I'll whip you!"

He stared at her, large-eyed, revolving the language. Language was so
interesting. "Don't" he knew well, and "touch" and "that" and "again."
"If you do" was harder. He was not at all sure about "if." And
"whip"--that was quite new. He puckered his soft mouth and made a
little whispering sound, trying to say it.

"Yes, Whip!" said the Presence. "Now you be good!" He knew "be good,"
too. It meant not doing anything. He couldn't be good very long--any
more than the Proverbial Indian.

In the course of his growing he soon learned "Whip." It was very
unpleasant. The busy brain, receiving, sorting, arranging,
re-arranging, stored up this fierce experience without delay.
"Whipping--Pain and Insult. It happens when you break anything. It is
a Consequence."

The brain was kept very busy re-arranging this Consequence. "It happens
when you spill the milk--when you soil your dress--when you tear it
(dresses must be sacred!)--when you 'meddle'--when you run away--when
you get wet--when you take sugar--when"--(this was a great discovery),
"when Mama is Angry." He was older now, and found that the Presence
varied a good deal. So the brain built up its group of ethical
impressions.

And then--one memorable day--this neat arrangement of ethics, true,
received a great shock.

There was the sugar--in easy reach--and sugar is All Good to the young
body. Remembered pleasure, strong immediate desire, the eye's guidance,
the hand's impulse--all urged to perform the natural act of eating.
Against it,--what? The blurred remembrance of promiscuous pain, only by
main force to be associated with that coveted, visible pleasure; and the
dawning power of inhibition. To check strong natural desire by no
better force than the memory of oral threat, or even of felt pain, is
not easy always for adults.

He ate the sugar, fearing yet joyous. No one else was present. No one
saw the act, nor learned it later.

He was not whipped.

Then rose the strong young brain to new occasion. It observed, deduced,
even experimented, flushed with the pleasure of normal exercise. It
established, before he was five years old, these conclusions:

"'Naughty' is a thing you're punished for doing--if you're not punished
it isn't naughty.

"Punishment is a thing that happens if you're found out--if you're not
found out you're not punished.

"Ergo--if you're not found out you're not naughty!"

And the child grew up to be a man.

WHAT DIANTHA DID

CHAPTER V.

When the fig growns on the thistle,
And the silk purse on the sow;
When one swallow brings the summer,
And blue moons on her brow--

Then we may look for strength and skill,
Experience, good health, good will,
Art and science well combined,
Honest soul and able mind,
Servants built upon this plan,
One to wait on every man,
Patiently from youth to age,--
For less than a street cleaner's wage!

When the parson's gay on Mondays,
When we meet a month of Sundays,
We may look for them and find them--
But Not Now!

When young Mrs. Weatherstone swept her trailing crepe from the
automobile to her friend's door, it was opened by a quick, soft-footed
maid with a pleasant face, who showed her into a parlor, not only cool
and flower-lit, but having that fresh smell that tells of new-washed
floors.