If the personality-imagination complex is where woman fails at the
top, then it becomes _a priori_ probable that this difference between
man and woman constitutes a remote sex characteristic. And if this
is so, then it may prove worth our while to look for a corresponding
difference on a level more directly connected with sex life. No sooner
is this done than a difference does indeed appear, and it meets
our expectations, for it lies in the direction of personality or
self-concentration as well as of imagination. Woman is never so much “a
part of” as when she loves, man never so “whole”; her self dissolves,
his crystallizes. Also, woman’s love is less imaginative than man’s:
man is more like what woman’s love makes him out to be than woman is
like what man’s love makes her out to be. Relatively speaking, his love
is romantic, hers realistic.
This difference in the diagnostic features of man’s love and woman’s
love confirms our suspicion that the discrepancy in performance, where
the personality-imagination complex is involved, constitutes a remote
sex characteristic.
We must now turn once more to woman’s achievement in the different
fields of cultural creativeness, for the variation in the degree of
excellence reached by her provides a valuable clue as to where her
strength lies. In an ascending series of woman’s achievements musical
composition is at the bottom of the list, then come sculpture and
painting, then literature (with a strange drop in dramatic writing),
then instrumental and vocal performance; acting, finally, heads the
list.
This order is most illuminating. The relative excellence of woman’s
achievement is seen to rise with the concreteness of the task and
the prominence of the technical and human elements. Creativeness is
more abstract in music than in the plastic and graphic arts, more
abstract in these than in literature; and in each case woman’s relative
achievement increases as abstractness decreases. Even the peculiar drop
in dramatic writing when compared with other forms of literature is
explicable in terms of a more abstract sort of creativeness required
by the formal elements of dramatic art. Again, the high position
in the list of musical performers and actresses, must in part be
ascribed to the importance of the technical element in these arts. The
preeminence of the musical performers is probably entirely due to this
factor, although the intrusion of the human element (performing for an
audience) may also have a share in the result.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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