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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
Supposedly, when a Stone Age man was ready to mate, he would ambush a woman from another tribe, beat her senseless with his club, and drag her back to his cave by the hair. This scenario, which might be referred to as the motif of 'wife-capture', is one that metaphorically still informs sexual politics today, and remains a characteristic of the popular cultural stereotype of the 'Cave Man'. But since there is absolutely no physical, anthropological evidence whatever to indicate that our Palaeolithic ancestors behaved thus, how did the motif arise, and how has it and related aspects of Stone Age sexual politics been negotiated in and disseminated by prehistoric science fiction?
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'I say, you fellows, have you considered if--well, if the girls will like us?' 'They'll like us all right', said Oswald grimly, as he trimmed the knob of a three-foot shillelagh. (1)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a caveman in want of a wife would creep up behind his chosen victim, stun her with a blow of his club, and drag her back to his cave by the hair. 'Courtship with a Club', a phrase borrowed from P. G. Wodehouse, neatly encapsulates this motif 's uncomfortable mixture of violence and farce. Since at least the 1920s, popular culture has exploited the comic potential in the crude mating habits imputed to our troglodytic ancestors. In the Stone Age segment of Buster Keaton's first feature film The Three Ages (1923), a parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Keaton defeats his burly male rival (Wallace Beery) and drags off his rapturous prize (Margaret Leahy) by the hair. A photograph taken at the centenary pageant of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1930 shows a caveman dragging his victim by her hair past a watching pantomime dinosaur; apparently this tableau was the first in a series describing transport through the ages. (2) For more than seventy years New Yorker cartoonists have turned out variations on the theme. In 1934 Leonard Dove's caveman pulls aside the hair obscuring the face of the unconscious woman he has just dragged into his cave and gasps, 'Cripes, it's the wife!'. In 2002 Danny Shanahan's gay caveman drags a grinning victim by his hair past a watching straight couple; the wife remarks to her disapproving husband, 'Can't you just be happy for them?'. (3)
Wife-Capture in Victorian Anthropology
The origin of Courtship with a Club can be traced to Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies (1865) by the Scottish-born lawyer John F. McLennan. To call McLennan an armchair anthropologist whose theory of wife-capture has been wholly discredited would be true, if a little unjust to a courageous and influential thinker. McLennan, accepting the novel and radical theory of the great antiquity of mankind, set himself the problem of discovering from what original ('primitive') (4) conditions Victorian courtship and marriage customs might have evolved. McLennan shared with Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and many other contemporary evolutionists the belief that the history of all peoples ('races') was 'the history of a progress from the savage state'. (5) To McLennan, progressionism seemed logically to imply that, if civilized sexual relations were typified by monogamous marriage, then the most primitive people ('savages') must have lived in a state that was the polar opposite of middle-class matrimony, namely, one of total promiscuity. Thanks to the influence of Charles Lyell, whose uniformitarian geology had first opened up the vistas of deep time, Victorian evolutionists tended to think in gradualist terms. They assumed that the period between promiscuity and monogamy would have seen slowly elaborating systems of polyandry or polygamy, as the most primitive human social group (the 'horde') evolved towards its culmination in the modern nation state. (6)
McLennan, like many of his ideologically liberal contemporaries, was a universalist who believed that racial differences were less significant than the qualities shared by all members of the human species. While he accepted that in his own time 'a really primitive people in fact exists nowhere', (7) nevertheless the study of 'modern savages', that is, those unfortunate living races whose progress had been retarded by adverse circumstances, could offer insights into how civilized people had formerly behaved. Moreover, in an anticipation of the theory of survivals elaborated in E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), (8) McLennan argued that traces of actual savage practices were still evident in symbolic form in his own society. With circular logic, he then noted that these symbolic traces, viewed as figuratively 'fossilized' behaviour, were strong evidence of the existence of the ancestral practices.
Of prehistoric society, McLennan noted that 'before the invention of the arts, and the formation of provident habits, the struggle for existence must often have become very serious'. Indeed, McLennan, child of the Pax Britannica, by progressionist logic concluded that the savage horde must have lived in a state of perpetual war with its neighbours. In this context, savages would have viewed sons as additions to the horde's martial strength in the perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes; daughters, by contrast, represented only weakness and dependency. Consequently, in a Hobbesian state of nature, female infanticide was universally practised, prehistoric savages supposedly lacking any ability to foresee one serious consequence of this habit: a scarcity of women to ensure the horde's reproductive survival. This scarcity in turn increased the dangers to the horde associated with inbreeding, against which 'the primitive instinct of the race' recoiled. At the same time, the progressive tendency of all races ensured that all societies moved (albeit at different speeds) from a matrilineal kinship system that recognized only the mother-child bond, to the patriarchal system in which a wife is her husband's monopolized property. (This latter system, the mid-Victorian sexual-political status quo, was held by progressionist anthropologists to be the rock upon which civilization was founded.) The solution to the threat of social retrogression posed by incest was a system of 'exogamy'--a term invented by McLennan--according to which men were constrained to seek wives from outside their own horde. (9) As hordes lived in a state of war with their neighbours, peaceable matrimonial arrangements were out of the question: exogamy necessitated wife-capture.
In the nineteenth century it was an ethnological truism that among the 'lowest' of modern savages (that is, those most unlike Victorian gentlemen in behaviour) were the Australian Aborigines. (10) By the logic deriving from the assumption that the Victorians were the most advanced race, the Aborigines were considered likely to resemble the Victorians' prehistoric ancestors in behaviour. Citing an 1805 account, McLennan notes that among Aborigines, 'when a man sees a woman whom he likes, he tells her to follow him, and when she refuses, he forces her to accompany him by blows, ending by knocking her down and carrying her off '. McLennan later quotes a more recent ethnological report: if a young Australian warrior can find 'no eligible damsel' in his own tribe, then he hovers round the encampment of some other blacks until he gets an opportunity of seizing one of their leubras [women] [...]. His mode of paying his addresses is simple and efficacious. With a blow of his nulla-nulla (war-club), he stuns the object of his 'affections', and drags her insensible body away to some retired spot, whence, as soon as she recovers her senses, he brings her home to his own gunyah [shelter].
A subsequent passage, describing how pairs of Aborigine warriors would sometimes creep into a camp where their victim was sleeping, suggests a source for the 'hair' element of the modern Courtship with a Club motif:
one of the intruders stretches out his spear, and inserts its barbed point amongst her thick flowing locks; turning the spear slowly round, some of her hair speedily becomes entangled with it; then, with a sudden jerk, she is aroused from her slumber, and as her eyes open, she feels the sharp point of another weapon pressed against her throat. (11)
Certainly, this scenario is vivid and dramatic: a naked warrior stalking his unwitting victim, a violent attack, a sudden brutal abduction from home and family to the shelter of a stranger. But equally vivid and dramatic, or more so, is the passage by J. G. Frazer in the opening pages of The Golden Bough depicting the murderer-priest of Nemi prowling the sacred Arician grove. (12) Why has Frazer's tableau, highly influential on the cultural production of the modernist period, not given...
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