Love's Coming of Age

Love's Coming of Age

By

Edward Carpenter

First published in 1906

Published by Left of Brain Books

Copyright © 2023 Left of Brain Books

ISBN 978-1-396-32621-9

eBook Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations permitted by copyright law. Left of Brain Books is a division of Left Of Brain Onboarding Pty Ltd.

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

About the Book

"This short book of essays by Edward Carpenter is a look at gender roles at the start of the 20th century, and his prescient vision of how those roles might evolve. In the past century many of his then-utopian predictions have come to pass, such as rational sexual education, greater equality for women, recognition of a spectrum of sexual identities, widespread acceptance of trial and open relationships, and the amelioration of the stifling nature of traditional marriage. Some of these predictions, inevitably, such as the use of 'Karezza' (extended coitus without ejaculation) for contraception, and a communist society leading to the liberation of women from the drudgery of housework, have fallen flat.

One becomes aware of some peculiar facts that don't usually emerge from studies of social history, e.g., women of a century ago spent a lot of time baking bread and mending clothes.

Carpenter occasionally draws on some dubious science, tainted by 19th century prudery and attitudes about women. However, for the most part, he scores some very good points which are still relevant."

(Quote from sacred-texts.com)

About the Author

Edward Carpenter (1844 - 1929)

"Edward Carpenter was an English socialist poet, anthologist, early homosexual activist, and socialist philosopher.

A leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, James Keir Hardie, J

K Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E D Morel, William Morris, E R Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner.

As a philosopher he is particularly known for his publication of Civilisation, its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilisation is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilisations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilisation successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis, Sigmund Freud, and Wilfred Trotter who all recognised that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual that can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis, and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia.

A strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a gay community near Sheffield, he had a profound influence on both D H

Lawrence and E M Forster.

He was also the first person to introduce the wearing of sandals into Britain."

(Quote from wikipedia.org)

CONTENTS

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

DEDICATION ...................................................................................... 1

THE SEX-PASSION ......................................................................... 2

MAN, THE UNGROWN ................................................................ 18

WOMAN, THE SERF .................................................................... 25

WOMAN, IN FREEDOM .............................................................. 38

MARRIAGE, A RETROSPECT ........................................................ 51

MARRIAGE, A FORECAST ............................................................ 64

THE INTERMEDIATE SEX ............................................................ 80

THE FREE SOCIETY ...................................................................... 95

REMARKS AND NOTES ....................................................................... 106

SOME REMARKS ON THE EARLY STAR AND SEX WORSHIPS ........... 107

NOTE ON THE PRIMITIVE GROUP-MARRIAGE ............................... 113

ON JEALOUSY ................................................................................ 116

ON THE FAMILY ............................................................................. 118

ON PREVENTIVE CHECKS TO POPULATION .................................... 120

DEDICATION

[The little god of Love is general represented as a child; and rightly perhaps, considering the erratic character of his ways among the human race. There are signs however of a new order in the relations of the Sexes; and the following tapers are, among other things, an attempt to indicate the inner laws which, rather than the outer, may guide Love when--some day--

he shall have come to his full estate.]

THE SEX-PASSION

THE subject of Sex is difficult to deal with. There is no doubt a natural reticence connected with it. There is also a great deal of prudery. The passion occupies, without being spoken of, a large part of human thought; and words on the subject being so few and inadequate, everything that is said is liable to be misunderstood. Violent inferences are made and equivocations surmised, from the simplest remarks; qualified admissions of liberty are interpreted into recommendations of unbridled licence; and generally the perspective of literary expression is turned upside down.

There is in fact a vast deal of fetishism in the current treatment of the question. Nor can one altogether be surprised at this when one sees how important Sex is in the scheme of things, and how deeply it has been associated since the earliest times not only with man's personal impulses but even with his religious sentiments and ceremonials.

Next to hunger it is doubtless the most primitive and imperative of our needs. But in modern civilized life Sex enters probably even more into consciousness than hunger. For the hunger-needs of the human race are in the later societies fairly well satisfied, but the sex-desires are strongly restrained, both by law and custom, from satisfaction--and so assert themselves all the more in thought.

To find the place of these desires, their utterance, their control, their personal import, their social import, is a tremendous problem to every youth and girl, man and woman.

There are a few of both sexes, doubtless, who hardly feel the passion-who have never been in love, and who experience no strong sexual appetite--but these are rare. Practically the passion is a matter of universal experience; and speaking broadly and generally we may say it is a matter on which it is quite desirable that every adult at some time or other should have actual experience. There may be exceptions; but, as said, the instinct lies so deep and is so universal, that for the understanding of life--of one's own life, of that of others, and of human nature in general--as well as for the proper development of one's own capacities, such experience is as a rule needed.

And here in passing I would say that in the social life of the future this need will surely be recognised, and that (while there will be no stigma attaching to voluntary celibacy) the state of enforced celibacy in which vast numbers of women live to-day will be looked upon as a national wrong, almost as grievous as that of prostitution--of which latter evil indeed it is in some degree the counterpart or necessary accompaniment.

Of course Nature (personifying under this term the more unconscious, even though human, instincts and forces) takes pretty good care in her own way that sex shall not be neglected.

She has her own purposes to work out, which in a sense have nothing to do with the individual-her racial purposes. But she acts in the rough, with tremendous sweep and power, and with little adjustment to or consideration for the later developed and more conscious and intelligent ideals of humanity. The youth, deeply infected with the sex-passion, suddenly finds himself in the presence of Titanic forces--the Titanic but sub-conscious forces of his own nature. In love he feels a superhuman impulse--and naturally so, for he identifies himself with cosmic energies and entities, powers that are preparing the future of

the race, and whose operations extend over vast regions of space and millennial lapses of time. He sees into the abysmal deeps of his own being, and trembles with a kind of awe at the disclosure. And what he feels concerning himself he feels similarly concerning the one who has inspired his passion. The glances of the two lovers penetrate far beyond the surface, ages down into each other, waking a myriad antenatal dreams.

For the moment he lets himself go, rejoicing in the sense of limitless power beneath him--borne onwards like a man down rapids, too intoxicated with the glory of motion to think of whither he is going; then the next moment he discovers that he is being hurried into impossible situations--situations which his own moral conscience, as well as the moral conscience of Society, embodied in law and custom, will not admit. He finds perhaps that the satisfaction of his imperious impulse is, to all appearances, inconsistent with the welfare of her he loves. His own passion arises before him as a kind of rude giant which he or the race to which he belongs may, Frankenstein-like, have created ages back, but which he now has to dominate or be dominated by; and there declares itself in him the fiercest conflict--that between his far-back Titanic instinctive and sub-conscious nature, and his later developed, more especially human and moral self.

While the glory of Sex pervades and suffuses all Nature; while the flowers are rayed and starred out towards the sun in the very ecstasy of generation; while the nostrils of the animals dilate, and their forms become instinct, under the passion, with a proud and fiery beauty; while even the human lover is transformed, and in the great splendors of the mountains and the sky perceives something to which had not the key before--

yet it is curious that just here, in Man, we find the magic wand of Nature suddenly broken, and doubt and conflict and division,

entering in, where a kind of unconscious harmony had erst prevailed.

And the reason of this is not far to seek. For in comparing, as we did a page or two back, the sex-needs and the hunger-needs of the human race we left out of account one great difference, namely, that while food (the object of hunger) has no moral rights of its own, 1 and can be appropriated without misgiving on that score, the object of sex is a person, and cannot be used for private advantage without the most dire infringement of the law of equality. The moment Man rises into any sort of consciousness of the equal rights of others with himself his love-needs open up this terrible problem. His needs are no less--

perhaps they are greater--than they were before, but they are stricken with a deadly swound at the thought that there is something even greater than them.

1 Though this is of course not true of animal food.

Heine I think says somewhere that the man who loves unsuccessfully knows himself to be a god. It is not perhaps till the great current of sexual love is checked and brought into conflict with the other parts of his being that the whole nature of the man, sexual and moral, under the tremendous stress rises into consciousness and reveals in fire its god-like quality. This is the work of the artificer who makes immortal souls-who out of the natural love evolves even a more perfect love. In tutti gli amanti, says Giordano Bruno, è questo fabro vulcano (in all lovers is this Olympian blacksmith present).

It is the subject of this conflict, or at least differentiation, between the sexual and the more purely moral and social instincts in man which interests us here. It is clear, I think, that if sex is to be treated rationally, that is, neither superstitiously on

the one hand nor licentiously on the other, we must be willing to admit that both the satisfaction of the passion and the non-satisfaction of it are desirable and beautiful. They both have their results, and man has to reap the fruits which belong to both experiences. May we not say that there is probably some sort of Transmutation of essences continually effected and effectible in the human frame? Lust and Love--the Aphrodite Pandemos and the Aphrodite Ouranios--are subtly interchange-able. Perhaps the corporeal amatory instinct and the ethereal human yearning for personal union are really and in essence one thing with diverse forms of manifestation. However that may be, it is pretty evident that there is some deep relationship between them. It is a matter of common experience that