Emancipation, Rationality and Instinctivity in Literature
In 1892 the novel 'Beyond The City' by Arthur Conan Doyle was published. The text can be downloaded at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/356
In this novel, Doyle clearly attempts mockery upon the emancipation of women. As far as the topic of his irony is the adopting of bad habits, which are detrimental to men and women, but in those days were still only the habit of men, he made a point.
But he also stated attitudes, opinions and values of his female protagonist, which are absolutely logical, rational and sound, and which are not in the least ironical to any person, who evaluates them on the basis of the axiom, that every individual is entitled to personal wellbeing and has no obligation to make sacrifices in favour of the survival of the species.
On first sight, this is very puzzling. The creator of a the prototypical logical thinker, Sherlock Holmes, makes the most logical statements in favour of the equality of women, and in spite of this, he does not mean it but ridicules it.
But there is an explanation: While Doyle is capable of advanced logical reasoning, this is not a decisive part of his personality, but just a tool, while his instinctivity is stronger. By instinct Doyle, as many other men, was a slave to the urge for procreation, his own 5 offspring are a strong indication for assuming this.
As it is easy to see, the less a woman was emancipated in accordance with what he wrote in 'Beyond The City' as the basic concepts of emancipation, the more a woman had not alternative but bear and raise the children and serve the man's urge to procreate. An emancipated woman has alternatives allowing her to refuse procreation. A woman with an alternative serves less the purpose of giving progeny to a man.
Therefore, while Doyle is mentally capable for perfectly sound reasoning in favour of the equality and emancipation of women, his own mind is blocked against his own logical reasoning. His instincts dominate his mind and we have the paradoxical mockery of his own logic.
The novel 'Beyond The City' is just an extreme example. I have read some more novels of Doyle and of other authors of the same epoque. There is a general male hypocrisy prevailing. Women were generally considered so extremely delicate, that the slightest business problems, family worries and other troubles outside their home sphere were always kept away from them. They were treated as if women were not capable to bear and to cope with any problem, as if they would just faint and break down at the least unpleasantness.
Yet the same men did not hesitate one moment to demand of women the most painful and dangerous experience, which men are spared by the clemency of nature, the horror of having a parasite growing inside their belly and finally getting rid of it in an most atrocious act, called birth.
Were the consideration of men for the delicacy of women in the least sincere, they would never inflict this upon a woman. They tried to spare women anything except this horror, as if sparing them any other troubles aimed at nothing else except to keep them fit and resilient for this one ultimate horror, which they considered women's justification of existence.
It reminds me of how sometimes convicted prisoners are carefully cured medically with the only goal of keeping them alive for the scaffold.
After having written so far, I did some googling, hoping to find any review or comment about the topic of mocked emancipation in this book, but I have found nothing. I am astonished that there seems nobody else ever having bothered to disagree with the attitude of Doyle towards emancipation.
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I used to run a little msn-group, that was deleted, when Microsoft discontinued the groups. It was called the Nonconformists' and Freethinkers' Haven.
I will add some texts to this blog, that I had written for that group. This is the first of them.
