2 FRIEDA VON RICHTHOFEN LAWRENCE: FRIEDA DELIVERED? - 625 - Chapter 7 Historical Note: Frieda and the Matriots In turning from Catherine Hogarth Dickens to Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence we have to change our historical perspective. Catherine's life we could consider under the perspective of magnanimous individualism, for Frieda's life this is not enough. Catherine can be called, without detracting from her stature, an ordinary woman. Her sincerity, her willingness to fill her place in the system and her inability to cope with its double think are part of the ordinary woman's life experience. Frieda was an extraordinary woman who belongs to the history of women's rebellion against the system. This does not mean that her life does not also belong to the history of magnanimous individualism. It does, though on the face of it Frieda rejected magnanimous assumptions She rejected them, however only in the form of what I have called the division-of-labour society. She saw, rightly, that this was an ethos that traps women in situations where their magnanimity is turned against them, and she decided from an early age that she would be undomesticated. She flaunted idleness, and though in fact she learnt a lot about housework from Lawrence and had to do more than her share because of his illness, she was always careful to be unobtrusive about it. This was not how she wanted to make her mark. Her idea of life well spent was a creative co-operation with Lawrence resulting in work that would change society. In this - 626 - she belongs without doubt to the history of magnanimous individualism. But her contribution, her 'magnanimous gift' so to say, was her socially critical attitude, down to the freely chosen, ideological gesture of idleness. In this she belongs to a narrower, more sharply defined sector of women's history. Frieda can be characterised by a woman's anti- tradition that I call matriotic because it is especially hostile to the patriotic virtues and precepts. Industry is a patriotic virtue in women as well as chastity. Matriotic assumptions, the formation of matriotic groups, may be as old a tradition as urban society, but in the way of many anti-traditions it is badly documented. We can follow it back clearly to the 18th Century, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. As an anti- tradition it is shaped by the contingencies of its immediate historical context. There are, however, values which remain stable over time and which allow us to see a continuity. In all these features it belongs to the general history of European culture. But because of the contingent nature there are necessarily national differences in its expression. The stable values too have for obvious cultural-historical reasons different overtones in different countries. As an anti-tradition matriotism 1s always concerned with freedo~ Frieda belongs to German matriotlsm, which is characterised by a revolutionary attitude to the body, to female sexuality and to freedom in sexual - 627 - relat ions. Its political outlook is anti-national, anti-military and strongly international. It overlaps with socialism, especially the utopian socialism I have discussed in Part I. It shares with Marxism that concern with individualism, with a society that promotes the unfolding of indidivual capacities and of human wholeness, which is so often forgotten in socialist practice. It is different from socialism in that it 1s historically dominated by women and that its political aim is the sexual revolution. In our context of 'Lives of Wives' my description of it may appear as something of an excursus. It is, however, relevant if Frieda is to be anythying more than Lawrence's wife. It is also necessary as background, especially to Mr Noon which I discuss in the last chapter. ,....0.. The English primer of mat riit ism, accessible to us all is Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. 1 Three Guineas is narrowly and realistically based on the position of 'the daughters of professional men' in the 1930s. It has no utopian aspect and Woolf 1s not interested in the social and political concerns we shall meet in looking at German mat riot ism. There is no consciousness of a woman's anti-tradition stretching behind: the positive, matriotism, is here a negative, Woolf's 'society of outsiders' . Her framework is spare and puritan: vzomen who want to belong to this society have to take a vow of poverty and chastity (by which she means intellectual chast ity>. But Three Guineas is unsurpassed in its - 628 - analysis of why women cannot be patriots. The virtue of the Roman matron is demolished, the feeling for la patria, la patrie, the fatherland, the motherland (which is the land of the mothers of the fathers, the sons, the heroes) - so carefully implanted 1n the young g1rl - 1s shown to be absurd. Woolf wants a freedom for women which she calls' freedom from unreal loyalt1es' (1977: 90) . Her imaginary daughter of a professional man, always referred to as the outs1der, speaks to herself and her brother as follows: 'What does "our country" mean to me an outsider?' To decide this she will analyse the meaning of patriotism in her own case. She will inform herself of the'position of her sex and her class in the past. She will inform herself of the amount of land, wealth, property in the possession of her own sex and class in thQ present - how much of "England" in fact belongs to her. ~he will inform herself of the legal protection which the law has given her in the past and now gives her .... '''Our country", she will say, 'throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave: it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. "Our country" still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. "Our count ry" denies me the means of protecting myself (and] forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me.... Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or "our country", let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are f1ghting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share: to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts.... For, the outsider will say, 'in fact as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. ' (1977: 125) Woolf adds some rules of conduct, all of them negative: - 629 - She will bind herself to take no share in patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praisej to make no part of any claque or audience that encourages warj to absent herself from all military displays ... and all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose 'our' civilization or 'our' dominion upon other people. <1977: 125) These have been meanwhile turned into the positive rules of a duty to demonstrate against armament and warmongering. The issue of patriotism is, however, far from resol ved. Feminists have not yet effectively sabotaged a war effort. It is well known that in the period leading up to the Great War feminism turned patriotic and conservative in all European countries, and it is not unknown today that feminists 'assent to national self-praise'. There have been, historically, great isolated gestures: for instance that of the first German feminist movement, which dissolved itself in 1933 rather than accept Nazi patronage.2 But by and large feminism cannot be equated with matriotism. As there have been patriotic elements in feminism historically, so there are certain conservative and patriotic elements in feminism today. The roll call of feminist forebears includes, indifferently, great women who have helped men establish a state of affairs that is essentially against women's interest and great women who have fought againat such a state of affairs. Woolf's internationalism - 'as a woman my country is the whole world' - characterises matriotism for a good - 630 - reason she does not touch on: the link b~tween patriotism and misogyny. The 'Futurist Manifesto' of Marinetti, the Italian futurist Lawrence was interested in, is instructive in this context:- We are out to glorify war: The only health-giver of the world! Militarism! Patriotism! The Destructive Arm of the Anarchist! Ideas that Kill! Contempt for women!3 Marinetti published this in 1909, the period when Weininger's Sex and Character began to percolate among I would like to contrast it with another, much earlier manifesto which could be called, roughly speaking, matriotic. It was published by the early German feminist Luise Otto in her Frauen-Zeitung <'newspaper for women') in the 1840s. Luise Otto illustrates the area where a revolutionary or reformist patriotism overlaps with matriotism. She was active in the 1848 liberal revolution, a patriotic movement that fostered her feminism (When we come to Bettine von Arnim we shall meet again with the phenomenon of a complex, enlightened and critical patriotism intertwined with mat riot ism). I call the women of this country to the realm of freedom We demand our share (a) The right to develop the human in us in free unfolding of all our powers (b) the right of being responsible and independent citizens in the state - 631 - For our part we promise (c) we want to devote our powers to the cause of liberating the worldt first by making known wherever we can the great ideas of the futuret freedom and humanity. which at bottom mean the same thing •... (d) that we will not struggle separatelYt each for herself but rather each for all (e) that above all we will concern ourselves with those who are forgotten because of povertYt misery and ignorance and live and die in neglect.- We have heret coming togethert the ideas of freedomt of internationalism ('the cause of liberating the world') andt in embryonic formt of a woman's sexual self- determination as the right to own her body ('free unfolding of all our powers').