Of Ether and Colloidal Gold - Esoterica - Michigan State University

“Qui se resemble s’assemble” (birds of a feather flock together). 39
“A white goose” (une oie blanche) was a synonym for an innocent
young girl, while “an unaccompanied goose” signified a prostitute.
Not a whole lot distinguishes the two, and that indeed gives us a
hint as to the real feelings many men had about women. And here
we come to the dark underbelly of the ideology of “The Angel in
the House.” Although lip service was given to women as paragons
of virtue, they were more often despised for their moral weakness
and sexual rapacity.
The image of the pure, asexual angel in the house, who
closed her eyes, lay back, and thought of God and country when
called upon to fulfill her reproductive duty, appears in stark
contrast to the images of deranged, dangerous, and predatory
women who populate the landscape of nineteenth-century art and
inhabited the subterranean regions of many a male subconscious. It
is as if women were divided into two distinct categories: the good,
nurturing, gentle, passive, sexless, selfless wife and mother and the
evil, violent, hysterical, egomaniacal woman who literally drain
men of their vital seminal juices through their excessive sexual
demands. (One must remember here that a common euphemism for
sexual intercourse during the nineteenth century was “to spend.”
Women, as we shall see, were the ultimate consumers—not just
of goods, but of men.) But I would go farther and suggest that the
dichotomy between the good wife and rapacious, evil temptress
was superficial, that for a great number of men the idealization
of women was a cover, a ploy, a prophylactic so to speak, to hide
their real belief that women were the implacable enemy inhibiting
male transcendence. For it was precisely because of their natures
and because they followed their natures that women dragged men
down. In his book on evolution, Joseph LeConte argued that man’s
role in life is to transcend nature:
[man] is possessed of two natures—a lower in common with animals,
and a higher, peculiar to himself. The whole mission and life-work
of man is the progressive and finally the complete dominance, both in
the individual and in the race, of the higher over the lower. The whole
meaning of sin is the humiliating bondage of the higher over the lover.
32