by Lewis Hyde
With this distinction in mind we may return to the problem of the woman given in marriage, beginning, as I say, at the beginning. Not only do most cultures classify human life as a gift, but they take in particular the life of a newborn child to be a gift that has been bestowed upon its parents. (Bestowed by whom? By the gods, by the earth, by the spirits of the recently dead, by the tree near the water hole which is known to make women pregnant—however the local story has it.) The recipients of this gift are its custodians so long as the child is dependent upon them, and they may, under special circumstances, exercise their right of bestowal. The child whose body organs are given away when it dies is one instance, albeit an unusual one; the young woman whose father gives her in marriage is a second. A third example again distinguishes the right of sale from the right of bestowal: our laws prohibit parents from selling their children, but they grant them the right to give a child up for adoption. There are special restrictions and guidelines under which a child is given away, of course, but they only serve to emphasize once again our feeling that if a child’s life must be transferred from one family to another, it must be a gift.* There are many cultures in which all children are given away in the normal course of events, being raised by the family of a paternal aunt, for example, and not by their biological parents. In these cases a child is just one of many gifts that pass among kin.
At this point, if we are to make our way back to the woman given in marriage, we shall have to distinguish male life from female life, for even though both are taken to be a bestowal at birth, their paths invariably diverge, particularly in groups that figure descent through only one sex. In Africa they say, “Bridewealth is childwealth,” an aphorism that we may take as another response to the question, If the life of a child is a gift, who is the donor?—the answer in this case being that the mother’s clan has given the child to the father’s clan. In other words, the gifts given in marriage are not a return gift for the bride so much as for her eventual children. In patrilineal groups in particular (the primary case in Africa), a woman’s clan, when she marries, must give up its interest in her offspring and so receives the “childwealth” in return. The children then belong to their father’s clan (as, in a sense, they do in our own society, where they carry the father’s name). Looked at structurally, in a patrilineal group, males do not become gifts when they grow up because they do not circulate: a young man stays in his group when he marries, and so does his virility, his potential offspring. But a young woman moves when she marries, and the gifts given for her stand witness to the fact that both she and the rights of her fertility (rights in gentricem) have passed to her husband’s clan.
Again, if we look only at the structure of things, we could say that in a matrilineal group a husband (and his virility) is bestowed upon his wife’s lineage. Her family group receives his contribution to the creation of the children. No gift institution has arisen to recognize this, however (although matrilineal groups do treat bridewealth differently, a point to which I shall return). As far as I know, there are no groups in which the men are given in marriage.* As the anthropologist Jack Goody puts it, “The mirror opposite of bridewealth would be groomwealth; and of bride-service, groom-service. But there is little to put in these two boxes by way of actual cases, except perhaps the payments of ‘borrowed man’ of the Menangkabau of Sumatra.” But if a borrowed man is all we have, and only one at that, we may as well say that men are not given in marriage.
What does happen to male children, then? If the life of a child is a gift, does the right of bestowal in that gift pass automatically to a boy as he becomes a man? Can he just take the car keys and go as soon as he gets his license?†
There is one general situation in which male children are given as gifts, or used to be. Our earlier discussion of the “rites of the first fruits” indicated that in the Old Testament all natural increase—the harvest, the calves, the lambs, and so forth—is treated as a gift from God, and its first fruits are consequently sacrificed as a return gift. Exodus records Yahweh’s clear statement as to the gender of these fruits: “All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of cow and sheep.” The males are the gift from the Lord to the people, and the people pass the first one back.
The exchange was not always confined to animals, apparently. There is some indication that in antiquity the first male child was also sacrificed to the Lord. The Old Testament implies the rite by making the exception: “All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem.” Thus it was permitted to substitute certain ritually pure animals for the male child. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a drama of such a substitution. The New Testament repeats the motif: the Lord gives His son and the life of that firstborn is sacrificed as a gift to reconnect man and God (the story being told in the Old Testament terms: “the blood of the lamb.”)*
In Polynesian mythology we find men, gifts, and sacrifice brought together in a manner similar to that of the Old Testament. Polynesian tribal chiefs were equated with gods, and as such they received two gifts from their people: women in marriage and men as sacrifices. The people of Fiji saw the two as equivalent gifts, the woman who is “brought raw” to be married and the “cooked man” who is sacrificed to the god-king. In the mythology at least, “cooked men” were literally eaten. A Hawaiian myth in which a man manages to redeem his life with a substitute gift indicates that had he not done so he would have been killed and baked in an earth oven. Male life is an edible good to the gods, and among the polite greetings that a Fijian commoner can offer to his ruling chief is “Eat me”! In Polynesia the continued fertility of the land was taken to be a consequence of the women and men given to the god-king. Like the God of Abraham, the Polynesian gods remained the faithful genitors of the land so long as the gift of their increase was recognized by return gifts.
In aboriginal times, therefore—including those aborigines we take to be our own ancestors—male life was sometimes treated as a gift, and parents, kings, and gods were recognized as having the right of bestowal in that gift. The modern parallel may be what Wilfred Owen called “the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. For when the state replaces the god-king, male life is no longer baked in earth ovens, it is sent to the trenches. And while no gift ceremony accompanies enlistment (no sergeant says, “Who giveth this man?”), in our popular mythology it is the mother (or the wife if the man is married) who gives a man to the army. When a man actually dies fighting for the state, the newspapers all say the mother “gave her son,” and she is the one who receives the flag of her country handed across the coffin.
In each of these cases the boy or man who is given as a gift assumes standard functions of the gift: in the aboriginal examples, male life bestowed upon the Lord or god-king renewed the bond between that deity and the group, and ensured the continued fertility of flock and field. And although the modern state began to lose its appeal as an object of sacrifice after the First World War, we still recognize that the power of a collectively held belief can be increased by the man who gives his life in its name.
The woman who is given in marriage similarly takes on typical functions of the gift. She, too, establishes a bond (between clans or families), and as part of an ongoing system of kinship, she, like any gift, becomes an agent of the community’s cohesion and stability. In fact, the institution of the woman given in marriage makes for a rather striking example of what I earlier called “the old lovers’ quarrel between liberty and community.” For the fact is that marriages established through massive gift exchanges are more stable and enduring than those that are not; but by the same token, the partners (both men and women, but women in particular when they are the gifts) have significantly less freedom. Where there is no gift exchange, on the other hand, marriages are less durable, the partners more independent. So the choice: where the desideratum is community we find some people trapped in bad marriages; where it is individual choice we find some people growing ol
d in isolation.
The Uduk, the tribal group I introduced in chapter 1, make a fine example of the side of this dichotomy in which marriage is not a constraining institution.* The Uduk are matrilineal; neither in structure nor in ceremony is an Uduk bride (or her fertility) given in marriage. In fact, there are essentially no marriage gifts, and according to Wendy James, the anthropologist who has done the most work with the Uduk, marriage itself “is only meaningful as a sexual relationship, publicly acknowledged and accompanied by a few well-defined but short-term obligations.”
Uduk women are very independent; they readily quit an unsatisfying union. Marriages typically last only three or four years. Not being the property of the men, not even gift property, Uduk women are self-possessed, literally and figuratively. “In myth, anecdote and popular expectation,” James tells us, “women often take the initiative in sex and marriage … They may often ‘dominate’ their husbands…” In the course of her research, James discovered some manuscript notes on the Uduk which contained a telling comment: “Wife beating is far less common than it is among the [other local tribes] … Only among the Uduk is husband beating by the wife no cause for astonishment.” If an Uduk woman suspects that her husband has a lover, she “will take her special fighting stick (a six-foot bamboo pole) and challenge the other woman to a duel.”
The Uduk are citizens of Ethiopia, and in 1963 the Ethiopian government added an interesting twist to this story. No social scientist pining for the controls of the physics laboratory could have asked for a better case study. Noting that Uduk marriages were unstable, the government decided to introduce a system of bridewealth payments. Bridewealth stabilizes marriages, they reasoned; why not simply graft it onto the Uduk kinship system? In consultation with tribal elders, the government decided upon a cash sum to be given by a man to his wife’s kin at the time of their marriage.
Problems sprang up immediately. As we saw when I first introduced the Uduk, any property transferred from one clan to another among these people must be treated as a gift. All transactions between clans are therefore accompanied by the need to clarify their nature and to make sure that the received wealth is consumed as a gift, not converted into capital. But bridewealth confounded the Uduk, and for the obvious reason: their brides are not in fact given. Therefore, the conundrum: if the bridewealth was a gift, then it was one that had not been reciprocated—and yet the name itself implied that it had. And if it was not a gift, then the bride had apparently been purchased, an even more onerous interpretation.
Some of the Uduk treated the bridewealth as a gift, inventing newfangled gift institutions to deal with the moral complexities that it raised. But most settled on the other side, deciding that bridewealth was really cash purchase, and refusing to pay it. They spoke of it in the language of the marketplace, says James, using “the ordinary word for buying and selling, an action which has no moral content and which only takes place between unrelated people.” Bridewealth payments did nothing to change the underlying structure of Uduk kinship and by that structure women are not gifts.*
When asked why they refused to pay bridewealth, the standard cry became, “Are we to sell our girl as if she were a goat or something?”
If we take property to be a right of action and therefore an expression of the human will, then whenever a woman is treated as property, even if she is a gift, we know that she is not strictly her own person: her will is somewhere subject to someone else’s. I suspect we may make a general point here: in societies that confer some degree of power upon women—matrilineal groups like the Uduk being a primary, but not exclusive, example—women will tend not to be given in marriage or, if they are, the return gifts will tend to be tokens and not substantial wealth. The amount of self-will recognized for women is inversely proportional to the size of the return gift. Furthermore, in societies that confer property rights on women—where women may inherit and bequeath, where they may buy and sell, where they carry a dowry into marriage which is theirs alone to dispose of—any wealth exchanged for a woman at marriage will tend to be seen as an immoral purchase, not as a gift. The Uduk interpretation of bridewealth is one example; another may be found in India, where women have always had property rights (not equivalent to those of men, perhaps, but certainly those I have just outlined, the dowry in particular). In India the ancient Code of Manu says what the Uduk say: “No father … may take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter; for a man who, through avarice, takes a gratuity, is a seller of his offspring.”
Even in those societies where a child’s life is considered to be a gift bestowed upon its parents, it does not follow that the parents retain the right of bestowal in that life after the child matures. In societies that confer power upon women as well as men, the right of bestowal passes automatically to a woman as she becomes an adult, whereupon she, like her brothers, is free to bestow her own life where she chooses.* She may even carry a six-foot bamboo fighting stick if she wants. If, on the other hand, a woman does not receive the right of bestowal in herself, then she can never become an actor in her own right, and never an autonomous individual. This last is what is onerous to us in the idea that a woman may be given in marriage— not, I think, that people are sometimes treated as gifts, not even that there is such a thing as “the right of bestowal in persons,” but that that right passes to the son when he comes of age, but not to the daughter. For where men alone may give and receive, and where women alone are the gifts, men will be active and women passive, men self-possessed and women dependent, men worldly and women domestic, and so on, through all the clichés of gender in a patriarchy.
II • Big Men and Little Women
In a recent edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, which I shall be treating as a sort of textbook of domestic ethnography, we find that in a modern, capitalist nation the father still gives away the bride. Before he does so, if he knows his etiquette, he will have played out that famous man-to-man scene in which the groom asks him for, and he agrees to deliver, his daughter’s “hand.” No parallel customs exist for the bride: no one gives the groom to her; she receives no hand from her future mother-in-law.
In the society that Miss Post describes, not only is the bride given in marriage, but she is also the recipient of the marriage gifts. Miss Post is quite clear: “You seldom send a present to the bridegroom. Even if you are an old friend of his and have never met the bride, your present is sent to her … Rather often friends of the bridegroom do pick out things suitable for him, such as a decanter or a rather masculine-looking desk set, which are sent to her but are obviously intended for his use.” Finally, the bride not only receives the gifts but it is she, not her husband, who writes the thank-you notes.
The curious asymmetry of this institution suggests that while a man and a woman may be marrying each other, the woman alone is marrying a network of kin. If she receives the gifts and expresses the gratitude, then she is the one who is woven into the social fabric established by the commerce of marriage gifts. In a final note of advice, Miss Post tells her readers that once the wedding is over, the bride “must try to understand and accept the attitude of her future family (whatever it may be), and she must not stand inflexibly upon what she unwittingly considers to be her own family’s rights. The objective that she should keep in mind is the happiness of the relationship between her future in-laws and herself.” Again, no such suggestion appears for the groom.
A woman given in marriage in a modern, capitalist nation is not only a gift, then, she is actually expected to think and act in the spirit of the gift, to become the incarnation and voice of the hau. By attending to relationship and muting her individualism, she is supposed to become the active link that will unify the two families. The groom is asked to do none of this labor. In this particular ceremony, at least, to deal with gifts—to receive them, to express the gratitude, to intuit and act upon their spirit—is a mark of the female gender.
By “gender” I mean to indicate the cultural distinctions between male and fem
ale—not the physical signs of sex but that whole complex of activities, postures, speech patterns, attitudes, affects, acquisitions, and styles by virtue of which a woman becomes feminine (a man “effeminate”) and a man masculine (a woman “mannish”). Any system of gender will be connected to actual sexuality, of course, but that is only one of its possible connections. It may also support and affirm the local creation myth, perpetuate the exploitation of one sex by another, organize aggression and warfare, ensure the distribution of food from clan to clan—it may, in other words, serve any number of ends unrelated to actual sexuality.
Many writers have addressed themselves to divisions of labor based upon gender; I want to speak here of a similar “division of commerce,” one in which a “man” trades in one manner and a “woman” in another. I have opened with a description of the Protestant wedding not to raise again the issue of the woman given in marriage, but to show that—at least in the world that Emily Post describes for us—gift exchange is a “female” commerce and gifts a “female” property. There is no actual prohibition on the groom’s involving himself with the wedding gifts, of course; he may write thank-you notes if he wants to. But that activity will not make him masculine. Only the bride is able to affirm her gender, her social sexuality, by concerning herself with gift exchange.*
In recent years as women have justly demanded an opportunity to become actors on a par with their brothers in the marketplace, a new genre of newspaper article has appeared on the women’s pages to articulate the silent assumptions of “male” commerce, assumptions that women will need to know about if they are to survive in a world where the spirit of the gift may be missing. As gifts are agents of relationship, so brides become relations, literally, by the form of commerce assigned to them; but in the market, in a male commerce, relationship is a secondary concern. Thus a woman executive offers a typical word of advice to the women who read the “style” pages of the New York Times: “Women on the way up should avoid associating with ‘unsuccessful turkeys,’ even if they happen to be friends. Leaving your friends behind isn’t disloyalty. You are going to be judged by the company you keep. Seek out the people who can help you. Men have known this for years, and we are playing in their arena.”