Love stories; Unmarried mothers -- Fiction; Women household employees -- Fiction
The incidents of the days that followed, relating as they did
peculiarly to Jennie, were of an order which the morality of our day
has agreed to taboo.
Certain processes of the all-mother, the great artificing wisdom of the
power that works and weaves in silence and in darkness, when viewed in
the light of the established opinion of some of the little individuals
created by it, are considered very vile. We turn our faces away from
the creation of life as if that were the last thing that man should
dare to interest himself in, openly.
It is curious that a feeling of this sort should spring up in a world
whose very essence is generative, the vast process dual, and where
wind, water, soil, and light alike minister to the fruition of that
which is all that we are. Although the whole earth, not we alone, is
moved by passions hymeneal, and everything terrestrial has come into
being by the one common road, yet there is that ridiculous tendency to
close the eyes and turn away the head as if there were something
unclean in nature itself. “Conceived in iniquity and born in sin,” is
the unnatural interpretation put upon the process by the extreme
religionist, and the world, by its silence, gives assent to a judgment
so marvelously warped.
Surely there is something radically wrong in this attitude. The
teachings of philosophy and the deductions of biology should find more
practical application in the daily reasoning of man. No process is
vile, no condition is unnatural. The accidental variation from a given
social practice does not necessarily entail sin. No poor little
earthling, caught in the enormous grip of chance, and so swerved from
the established customs of men, could possibly be guilty of that depth
of vileness which the attitude of the world would seem to predicate so
inevitably.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account