In one version of his legend, Achilles, who had been raised as a girl, spontaneously revealed his masculine, warlike proclivities when Odysseus showed him weapons. Manhood, the story is telling us, has an infallible test or sign. One can fail a test of manhood, or pass and be admitted to the warrior clan—or become one of the lads. None of this applies to ‘womanly qualities.’ Compassion and empathy are not uniquely feminine. Portia could plead for mercy safe in her disguise.
Agnodice, the legendary first female midwife, proved to an Athenian court that she was a woman by lifting her tunic to show her private parts. Revealing what? An absence: the lack of male genitalia. Today, tests of womanhood are confined to competitive sport, where the purpose is again a negative one: to demonstrate that one is not a man.
This theme of negation, absence or privation is deeply rooted in the cultural imaginary. The first book of the bible introduces Eve to us as a creature derived from Adam to be his complement, and helpmate. ‘And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ The message is clear: Adam comes from God; Eve from Man. She partakes less than fully of the divine nature, and she already has a limited function.
We find this idea elaborated further, with splendid logical continuity, in Milton’s Paradise Lost:
To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorned.
My author and disposer, what thou bidd’st
Unargued I obey; so God ordains,
God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise.
It’s not only Eve’s beauty that is perfect, but her knowledge. Perfection implies completeness: she is complete, because her role has been rigorously defined; she knows just enough to fulfil her function of ‘helpmate’, whereas Adam shares in the limitlessness, the infinity, of the divine. Countless poems from Spenser to the Romantic Age extol female purity, which is no more than the absence of impurities. Perfection and purity unite in the trope of flawless beauty: perfect because nothing can be added; pure because nothing can be taken away. For the perfect and complete individual, her role and its corresponding duties can be fixed.
Manhood, however, must be limitless, imperfectible, and irrepressible (the legend is also telling us that Achilles simply couldn’t restrain himself) because a ‘real man’ is more manly than the common run of men. And this ‘more’ has no bounds; it’s a quality like heat, or brightness, or noise: it can always be intensified beyond itself, surpassing itself always towards an unrealisable wholeness.
We see this boundlessness in dominance contests, which are open-ended (unlike tests of manhood that have the social end of induction into a group): I can beat you into submission (what if you won’t submit?), I can hold my hand longer in the flame (how long will that be?). This kind of behaviour is readily parlayed into: I can send brigade after brigade of cavalry against your guns, wave after wave of bombers to demolish your cities. Honest, mate, I don’t know when to stop.
If there can be said to be a limit, it would lie in total annihilation (symbolic or physical) of the rival, although sometimes even this is not enough: after defeating the Carthaginians, the Romans sowed the surrounding fields of the city with salt to prevent any residual community from flourishing there.
In this issue of The Irenaut, the question of whether women have or will have a decisive irenic influence remains in the balance, despite promising indications. What does emerge again and again, however, is a vision of women curtailing, moderating, or healing the damage done by men and their violent surpassing of their imperfectible nature. Women are seen—and see themselves—as bringers of peace chiefly in that they rein in the extravagant, unruly, limitless discharges of male violence or repair the communities that violence has damaged.
And this is both heartening and depressing. Heartening, because women have been at the forefront of peace movements from World War One to the present day, and what they achieve—as some of our contributors testify—inspires us. Depressing, because it recalls the perspective illustrated by Ben Jonson’s poem ‘That Women Are But Men’s Shadows’, where women have being only to the extent that men lack it, and vice versa. In other words being a woman (or a man) is a zero sum game. What I find most troubling is that this dynamic of transgression and redress is just another iteration of women as men’s helpmates: cleaning up after them, putting back together what they have, in their reckless way, dismantled, recreating what they have destroyed.
Incompleteness is vital to human flourishing. It’s implicit in the fact that there are choices we have yet to make about what we want to be, which is freedom itself. But manifested in violent and destructive acts, it has lost touch with the irenic force, whose incompleteness arises from its ceaseless creativity. When women and men collectively and individually find in the work of survival the promise and the art of flourishing, when they work together to make flourishing universal (without which it is not true flourishing at all), we’ll see what the irenic force is capable of. Far more powerful than biological imperatives, our work is the budding tips of human phylogenesis.
Mark-Alec Mellor
