Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
(1) _Capture._—One of the most curious features of savage life is the
widely-prevalent custom called by M‘Lennan Exogamy, or marrying out.
This custom compels a man who wishes a wife of his own to steal or
purchase her of another tribe, private marriage within his own tribe
being considered criminal and even punishable with death. To this rule
of Exogamy Sir John Lubbock traces the origin of Monogamy. In his view
women were at first, like other kinds of property, held in common by the
tribe, any man being any woman’s husband _ad libitum_. No man could
therefore claim a woman for himself without infringing on the rights of
others. But if he stole a woman from another tribe, she became his
exclusive property, which he had a right to guard jealously, and to look
upon with the Pride of Conquest—a pride, however, quite distinct from
that which intoxicates a civilised lover when he finds, or fondly
imagines, that his goddess _has chosen him_ among all his rivals. The
primitive man’s pride is more like that of the warrior who wears a large
number of scalps in his belt; and as in his case marriage immediately
follows Capture, this feeling, moreover, belongs more properly to the
sphere of conjugal sentiment than to that of Love.
This primitive form of courtship, it is obvious, is very much ruder than
that which prevails in the animal kingdom, where the males alone
maltreat one another, while in this early human courtship the woman, if
she resists, is simply knocked on the head, and her senseless body
carried off to the captor’s tent. Diefenbach relates concerning the
Polynesians that “if a girl was courted by two suitors, each of them
grasped one arm of the beloved and pulled her toward him; the stronger
one got her, but in some cases not before her limbs had been pulled out
of joint.” And Waitz says that “the girls were commonly abducted by
force, which led frequently to most violent fights, in which the girl
herself was occasionally wounded, or even killed, to prevent her from
falling into the hands of the enemy.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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