On the Womanly in the Human Race

“Über das Weibliche im Menschlichen”

Published 1883

Overview

The unfinished fragment Wagner was writing in Venice at the time of his death, intended as the conclusion to “Religion and Art.” He argues that marriage founded on love lifts humanity above the animals, that marriages of convenience help explain the decline of races, and that the ideal of monogamy raises woman above the natural law of sex.

An Unfinished Last Essay

This fragment was begun at the Palazzo Vendramin in Venice on 11 February 1883, two days before Wagner’s death. It was meant for the Bayreuther Blätter as the final part of the series on “Religion and Art,” and it breaks off after only a few pages. The notes in the margin, which sketch where the argument was heading, are Wagner’s own.

Marriage and the Fall of Races

Wagner observes that writers on the decline of the human races have given only passing attention to marriage and its effect on the qualities of a people. He recalls a remark from “Hero-dom and Christendom,” that no display of honours can hide the withered heart of someone born from a union without love. Animals, he notes, keep their breeds pure because they know no marriage for property or convenience. If marriage is what raises human beings above the animals to the height of their moral faculties, it is the abuse of marriage for other ends that has brought them below the beasts.

From Instinct to Love

He then contrasts animal and human mating. Among animals, the male protects the female only until the young can fend for themselves, and Nature cares only for the species. Humanity, he argues, separated itself from the animals by turning this instinct into passionate love for one individual. In the woman, as mother, the instinct of the species keeps more of its power, while the man’s passion becomes fidelity. “Love’s loyalty: marriage,” he writes, is where humanity’s power over Nature lies, and it is the maker of all noble races.

Monogamy and the Raising of Woman

Wagner claims that the noblest white race was monogamous when it first appeared in legend and history, and that it moved toward its downfall through polygamy with the peoples it conquered. He grants that polygamous peoples live closer to Nature and can keep their type pure, but insists that a remarkable individual can only be born under the ideal of monogamy, a force that sometimes works even in Eastern harems through love and loyalty.

It is here, he says, that woman is raised above the natural law of sex, a law to which even the wisest lawgivers thought her bound, so that the Buddha at first excluded women from sainthood. The fragment ends by calling it a beautiful feature of the legend that the Buddha was moved to admit women after all. The marginal notes point to the themes Wagner did not live to develop: the ideality of the man and the naturalness of the woman, the degeneration of the modern man, and the emancipation of woman taking place “amid ecstatic throes,” linked to love and tragedy.