"THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kirkland Winifred)

visitor's hand. Rebuke produced the virtuous response,
"I am only trying to teach Bobby to be unselfish."
The austere moral intention of my little friend was
her direct heritage from her mother Eve, whose much
maligning would be regrettable if this very maligning
were not the primary purpose of the artful allegory:
Adam and all his sons had to believe that they<2>
amounted to more than Eve, as the primary condition of
their amounting to anything. Eve, in her campaign for
Adam's education, was the first woman to perceive his
need for complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity,
she undertook to immolate her reputation for his sake.
Eve, I repeat, was the first woman to perceive Adam's
fundamental need, but she was not the last.
The romance of Adam and Eve was written by so
subtle a psychologist that I feel sure the novelist
must have been a woman. Her deathless allegory of Eden
contains the whole situation of the sexes: it shows the
superiority of woman, while seeming, for his own good,
to show the superiority of man. As it must have
required a woman to write the parable, so perhaps it
requires a woman to expound it.
I pass over the initial fact that the
representation of Eve as the last in an ascending order
of creation, plainly signifies that she is to be
considered the most nearly, if not the absolutely,
perfect, of created things. The first thing of real
importance in the narrative is the purpose of Eve's
creation, to fill a need, Adam's. "It was not good
that the man should be alone." The whole universe was
not enough for Adam without Eve. It neither<3>
satisfied nor stimulated him. He was mopish, dumpish,
unconscionably lazy. If he had been merely lonely, why
would it not have been enough to create another Adam?
Because the object was not simple addition, whereby
another Adam would merely have meant two Adams, both
mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy; the object was
multiplication by stimulation, whereby, by combining
Eve with Adam, Adam, as all subsequent history shows,
was raised to the _n_th power.
Intimately analyzed, the details of the temptation
redound entirely to Eve's credit. Woman rather than
man is selected as the one more open to argument, more
capable of initiative, the one bolder to act, as well
as braver to accept the consequences of action. The
sixth verse of the third chapter cuts away forever all
claim for masculine originality, and ascribes
initiative in the three departments of human endeavor
to woman. For no one knows how long, Adam had been
bumping into that tree without once seeing that it was: