Chapter 44 of 50
Strange Profanation
MARRIAGE as a sacrament which should be based on love, looks to the conjugal act as an expression of love. And since this embrace is in the nature of the closest of intimacies, everyone understands that it demands unity of the couple. We have spoken of that before. But it is essential to be convinced of it on account of the objections that come up frequently in conversations and the arguments advanced by certain modern authors like Blum, Montherlant, or Lawrence. This last mentioned writer gives us a scene like the following:
Jack who is married to Monica by whom he has several children makes advances to Mary.
“Oh, Jack! You are married to Monica.”
“Am I? But she doesn’t belong entirely to me; she has her babies now. I shall love her again when she is free. Everything in season, even women. Now I love you after going for a long time without ever thinking of you. A man is not made for a single affair.”
“O God,” she cried. “You must be crazy. You still love Monica.”
“I shall love Monica again later. Now I love you. I don’t change, but sometimes it is the one, sometimes it is the other. Why not?”
Yes, Why not? Simply because the rule as regards marriage is not the mere caprice of man and the satisfaction of his sensual desires; because woman has a right to respect and to the pledge that has been given her; because marriage is made not for the individual but for the family, the social unit, and to carry on in such a fashion is the breakdown of the family.
But Jack—or rather Lawrence—hears nothing of all that.
“Mary, all alone, was incomplete. All women are but parts of a complete thing when they are left to themselves . . . They are but fragments . . . All women are but fragments.”
Where does such a theory originate if not in the unbounded sensuality of man? But Jack listens to nothing. What do judgments other than his own mean to him? As he said, “He hated the thought of being closed up with one woman and some youngsters in one house. No, several women, several houses, groups of youngsters; a camp not a home! Some women, not one woman. Let the world’s conventions be ignored. He was not one of those men for whom one woman was enough.”
Why doesn’t the logic of sensuality accord woman what man so brutally claims for himself? Are there two Moral Laws?
Here is another character, Helen. She is a doctor’s wife and his most devoted assistant. But she divorces him for a snob whose life is all race horses and receptions. There she is, soaked in worldliness. She gets another divorce to marry a young poet, the latest rage, and transforms herself into an intellectual . . . Marvelous richness of the feminine soul! Says your sophisticate, she is like a fountain of glistening water which catches its coloring, green, red, or blue according to the men she chooses in turn!
Are we dreaming? That’s the kind of thing we are likely to hear in certain gatherings and cocktail parties.
What a profanation of love!
Complete oblivion of the significance of the conjugal act! It is not only two distinct physical acts, but, through the medium of the body, a most ineffable exchange between two souls.