The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [68]
The stern Pilgrim Fathers of Follen’s vision founded the nation. Serious religious dissenters from Europe, these men felt no necessary disjunction between their sex and attention to spiritual life. An early diarist like Samuel Sewell worried daily about his relationship to God, never about his manliness. But the nineteenth century saw a decline in faith coincide with the remarkable success of a secular, mercantile, and entrepreneurial spirit. The story has been told many times. By the end of the century, to be “self-made” in the market, or to have successfully exploited the natural gifts of the New World, were the marks of a Big Man, while attention to inner life and the community (and to their subtle fluids—religion, art, and culture) was consigned to the female sphere. This division of commerce by gender still holds. As a character in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift remarks in regard to creative artists, “To be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing.” In a modern, capitalist nation, to labor with gifts (and to treat them as gifts, rather than exploit them) remains a mark of the female gender.
* In 1980 a New Jersey couple tried to exchange their baby for a secondhand Corvette worth $8,800. The used-car dealer (who had been tempted into the deal after the loss of his own family in a fire) later told the newspapers why he changed his mind: “My first impression was to swap the car for the kid. I knew moments later that it would be wrong—not so much wrong for me or the expense of it, but what would this baby do when he’s not a baby anymore? How could this boy cope with life knowing he was traded for a car?”
* I assume this historical asymmetry derives from the fact that while both parents contribute to conception, the mother must carry the child, give it birth, and suckle it. Even in a matriarchy her contribution is greater.
† In the modern world the rights that adults have in their children—male or female—normally pass slowly from parent to child during adolescence and become fully vested in the child when he or she is ready to leave home.
If our lives are gifts to begin with, however, in some sense they are not “ours” even when we become adults. Or perhaps they are, but only until such time as we find a way to bestow them. The belief that life is a gift carries with it the corollary feeling that the gift should not be hoarded. As we mature, and particularly as we come into the isolation of being “on our own,” we begin to feel the desire to give ourselves away—in love, in marriage, to our work, to the gods, to politics, to our children. And adolescence is marked by that restless, erotic, disturbing inquisition: Is this person, this nation, this work, worthy of the life I have to give?
* The examples of male life given as a gift are usually stories of sacrifice. It may be that so long as no gift institution recognizes the contribution to conception—and as the male body cannot in fact give birth—when male life is treated as a gift, the tendency is to give the body itself. In the chapter on the gift bond I spoke of compassionate deities who give their bodies to join man to a higher spiritual plane. These deities are generally male.
* For a case illustrating the “stability”side, see Wendy James’s article, “Sister-Exchange Marriage,”Scientific American (December 1975).
* It would have been interesting to see the results had the government instituted groomwealth or childwealth, for it is really the Uduk husband who gives children to the wife’s kin.
* Abandoning the bestowal of the bride in favor of her autonomy is one way to rearrange the pattern of this institution. Because the woman given in marriage does assume the functions of the gift, the group loses something even as the woman gains. When someone other than the couple being married is allowed to stand up at a wedding and say “I do,” then marriage is understood to be a social event; the