The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Positive Romance, by Edward Bellamy

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Title: A Positive Romance
1898

Author: Edward Bellamy

Release Date: September 21, 2007 [EBook #22708]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

A POSITIVE ROMANCE

By Edward Bellamy

1898

My friend Hammond is a bachelor, and lives in chambers in New York.
Whenever we meet on my occasional visits to the city, he insists on my
spending the night with him. On one of these occasions we had been
at the opera during the evening, and had witnessed an ovation to a
beautiful and famous singer. We had been stirred by the enthusiasm of
the audience, and on our walk home fell to discussing a theme suggested
by the scene; namely, the tendency of man to assume a worshipful
attitude towards woman, and the reason for it. Was it merely a phase of
the passional relation between the sexes, or had it some deeper and more
mysterious significance?

When I mentioned the former idea, Hammond demanded why this tendency
was not reciprocal between the sexes. As a matter of fact, while women
showed endless devotion and fondness for men, their feeling was without
the strain of adoration. Particular men's qualities of mind or heart
might excite the enthusiastic admiration of women, but such admiration
was for cause, and in no way confounded with the worshipful reverence
which it was man's instinct to extend to woman as woman, with secondary
reference to her qualities as a particular person. No fact in the
relations of men and women, he declared, was more striking than this
contrast in their mutual attitudes. It was the feminine, not the
masculine, ideal which supplied the inspiration of art and the aroma of
literature, which was found enshrined in the customs and common speech
of mankind. To this I replied that man, being the dominant sex, had
imposed his worship on the race as a conquering nation, its gods on
the conquered. He, not woman, had been the creator of the art, the
literature, and the language which were dedicated to her. Had woman been
the dominant sex, the reverse might have hap