An orgy of agony

Henry Handel Richardson
and Otto Weininger1

He is always guest in her house. Always hers, always guest.

—Bianco Luno*

My grievance is that in their eyes I count for nothing…

—Clarice Lispector2

The allusions to Otto Weininger in Henry Handel (Ethel Florence Lindesay) Richardson’s 1908 novel Maurice Guest3 have been documented and accompanied with predictable surmises about Weininger’s contribution to the mix of plot, theme and characters. Weininger supplies a Viennese background and a few lines of anti-Semitism for an unsavory character (Krafft), a title for a musical piece (the symphonic poem called Ãœber die letzten Dinge—On Last Things4) by the jerk Schilsky… and as good a foil as we are going to find for the cause of women.

But the reaction Weininger’s work demanded and sometimes got from his female near-contemporaries was more serious and nuanced than this list might suggest.5 In line with our view that Weininger was a formidable catalyst to the feminist project and not another among the legion of insecure woman haters of his time (or ours), we want to suggest a different way of reading Richardson’s novel. We want to tell a somewhat fanciful story about what might have passed through the mind of the author in writing Maurice Guest. There is room to think our theme did pass at least through her pen. Circumstances swirling about the author and novel offer occasion for our speculative interpretation. Whatever may have been the case with the author Ethel Florence Richardson, the exercise, we hope, will point up something of greater depth and resonance on matters of love and morality across sex lines—something perhaps surpassing the actual views of Richardson or Weininger or their contemporaries—or even the lot of them put together. We think this important because commentary in our time on these matters has barely progressed.

I. Richardson and Weininger

Before we leap off the deep end, first, a few facts. The Australian born, later British resident, Richardson was educated partly on the European continent, especially in Germany. She read Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Ibsen among others. Her admiration for Russian and French realism was overt. She enjoyed quoting Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. She translated several volumes from German, including Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne (only the German version had yet made it out of the original Danish), which she found especially captivating. She married a Scottish professor of German literature. When it came time to write her first novel, Maurice Guest, little wonder it struck many as un-English, exuding an intellectual sensibility less insular than was common in English writing of the time, more psychologically and philosophically attuned.6 Her background in the literary culture of the Continent and her music studies in Leipzig primed Richardson for her first novel which she set in the conservatory student scene.

Henry Handel Richardson, portrait by Rupert Bunny
The yellow scarf, portrait of Henry Handel Richardson [192-?], Rupert Bunny, 1864-1947. National Library of Australia.

Begun ten years earlier, Maurice Guest was finally ready for the publisher to consider in 1907, the year after the first anonymous English translation of Weininger’s sensational book Sex and Character7 was published by Heinemann—it so happens, her publisher, too—and also the very year Weininger’s posthumous second book Ãœber die letzten Dinge was published in German.8 Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter first appeared in Vienna in May of 1903. His suicide in Beethoven’s apartment, which became an international sensation shortly before his book did (some say as a consequence), happened in early October of the same year. Richardson did not require the English translation, Sex and Character. She might have accessed and read the original German. And the posthumous book, Ãœber die letzten Dinge, was not to be rendered into English in her life time.9

Her exposure to Sex and Character, ahead of many of her readers, was highly probable. At least in German it would have been available to her for some years toward the end of her work on Guest, and the “beastly”10 English version as well after 1906. Her Germanic interests, affiliations and fluency combined with the immense popularity of Sex and Character in literary and intellectual circles—which took off with Weininger’s suicide six months after its publication and extended for decades after, spanning several languages—pretty much assure us she had some chance to read his book. It was the talk in cafés around the world. The reference to Ãœber die letzten Dinge occurs in the last few pages of the novel, consonant with the fact that these pages were sketched after the appearance in German (hence, unavailable to most of her readers) of Weininger’s book of the same title in 1907. And as commentators have noted, there are passages in Guest highly suggestive of Weininger in other ways.11

II. Varieties of Feminine Disparagement

But complicating the suggestion that Weininger, in particular, was the main allusion in the openly misogynist rants in Maurice Guest was the fact of the prevailing attitude to women in the German intellectual climate leftover from the days of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, some of which appears to suffuse Weininger’s theory.

Later we will suggest that Richardson had in mind as principle target a less forthright and seldom recognized form of feminine disparagement, an external view of which may have escaped especially her English-speaking readers.12 First, a few words about Weininger’s immediate predecessors in this field.

Schopenhauer’s relation to his mother was strained. Johanna, unlike him, was commercially successful as a writer and never missed a chance to remind her son of it.13 He also suffered a share of romantic disappointments that no doubt figured into his philosophy of women. But his appears to have been a classic sour grapes story.14 And like many such stories can turn on a dime. To his credit, he mellowed somewhat in his later years, perhaps flattered by the attention his work had finally garnered among a younger generation of readers, including many young women. Eventually, he seems to have concluded that the failings he correctly saw in the lot of contemporary women were largely the fault of obstacles set in their path both by nature and society and not through inherent feminine inferiority.15 The late change of heart opened up new ways of seeing the differences. Under the right, but rare, conditions feminine cultural creativity might indeed match and even surpass the masculine. And this might happen in part because of those very obstacles or her nature-given containment—a containment that may offer a perspective on the human condition inaccessible to a man, a perspective whose absence often cripples his own material effort—or ends up highlighting his very different heterocosmic ambitions. But with these last thoughts we are probably going beyond Schopenhauer’s and into Weiningerian terrain. More on that shortly.

Nietzsche famously sniped at women. The infamous whip quip16 is repeated by Krafft in Guest to Maurice’s astonishment. But Nietzsche was hardly nice to British philosophers, or Greek or French or German ones for that matter. In fact, most of his writings were attacks on one dogma or self-assured perception or another. Nietzsche, as moralist, was not in the main in the business of saying nice things about anybody. As for supermen, if they were common—if you could find one in broad daylight with a lantern—that alone would have merited their being taken down a notch. Women with pretensions, incipient feminisms, bent on re-creating already sorry male paradigms, then, were par for the course.17 And, it should be needless to say, many feminisms have since taken a page from Nietzsche—especially his “immoralism” and transvaluations, finding at least as much useful there for their cause as others may have found, for instance, in John Stuart Mill’s work. Clearly, Nietzsche is redeemable in the eyes of many women, and not just because he attacked some of the same things that bothered them, or that he had a sense of humor, but because the very need to joke about it implies that he felt the force of women and truth, something even Krafft in the novel concedes.

These German thinkers did not really have a philosophy about women as much as a reaction to them, wittier than most. But perhaps their susceptibility to women precluded the proper distance for the beginnings of an understanding. Weininger’s views on women, as we shall see, were not the same as those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Though even the views of the latter two were not—and perhaps could not—be understood in the facile way they often still are today.

The Englishmen in Maurice Guest seem at times to embody the more “enlightened” views of Mill as expressed in The Subjection of Women. In the novel, whatever moved their more gentlemanly treatment of women, Maurice and Dove showed themselves no less benighted than their crasser German-speaking cousins in their understanding of them—all the while thinking otherwise.

A critical reading of Mill’s plea for the equal consideration of women suggests this putative enemy of paternalism was afflicted with a severe blind spot. The conception of liberty he kindly sought to share with women was off the mark: it reeked of a masculine need to swing weight about for its own sake (but responsibly, of course) and at the expense of other perhaps more foundational values. This is not to say that freedom is not a value to women, but the feminine conception of it is a world apart from his. One gets a whiff of this reading Harriet Taylor Mill’s writing on the same subject. She indulges Mill his fantasy about freedom while gently steering the discussion in a direction not entirely compatible with his. In an introduction, Mill confuses the matter by chivalrously wanting to give Harriet more credit than she deserves for stimulating his thoughts on the matter. Whatever she did for his thinking, it was not quite the same as hers. The sexual nuance in their writing on this subject is revealing.

We imagine further that Richardson, given her background, was aware at some level of these competing masculine “philosophies” of women and sought in part to illustrate a puzzle about them. In short, there do not appear to be any non-pathetic male instantiations of theory in the story. Leaving out, for the nonce, the case of Weininger, the views of women in play here suffer equally from the fatal presumption that women and men are to be judged according to the same moral standard. On the one hand are the German revelers in unkind truths about women; on the other, the English knights who think, by opening doors for them—doors chosen for them by men—women will eventually measure up and all will be well. The novel both laughs at, and a little with, the revelers, but is largely a slap in the face of the imposition of masculine moralism of whatever stripe. It is a celebration of the amoral.18

III. Weininger and Moral Intrigue

In contrast to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who more or less acknowledged the incommensurability of women and men but failed to get to the heart of the matter, as well as Mill, who confessed he could not perceive a morally significant difference between women and men and consequently saw no “problem” that could not be surmounted by their equal valuation and treatment, Weininger faced the “woman problem” squarely. And, for the effort, got himself a name as a truly world-class misogynist.19 Placed beside Weininger, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche seem dilettantes and Mill naïve. But there is no indication that Weininger, unlike Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had a local vendetta against women—even a temporary or ironic one. He may have been homosexual but in his writing he comes across as uncompromisingly asexual.20 The only hint of a botched encounter with a woman is the one related by his sister Rosa who, thinking her brother too bookish for his own health, set up an intimate tête-à-tête for him and her best friend Martha. After an hour, Martha left the room complaining she had just visited with Jesus Christ.21 His judgments of contemporary women were harsh but not vindictive—that is, when he wasn’t repeating old saws in the service of making his point: that on some level in an untidy way everyone already perceives the incommensurability between women and men. It gets expressed in pat dismissals of the other sex’s significance, which Weininger only needed to repeat to conjure up the “woman problem.” (He was writing for and expected to be read by men, so it is the world as seen by them that he sought to properly characterize—and, in the end, pillory.) But Weininger was not content to conjure up the problem. He wanted an understanding of it, or failing fully that, a way to preclude it, since the moral implications of the problem galled him to a degree that seems to escape his friends and enemies alike. In his writing, it is plain his real target was the hypocritical criminality of men, the only moral agents. That is ever his point.

The point is truly subversive at a substantive level but forgotten amid the sensational—we must admit—sometimes tactless way he presents it. We must remember he was not yet twenty-three when Geschlecht und Charakter was written22 and, despite his widely recognized precocity—remarked even by those who did not agree with or fully understand him, most notably, Freud (with whom Weininger consulted), he seemed monumentally dense in over-estimating the critical acumen of the average—even educated—reader. What his father said23 aside, he was probably a virgin—in more ways than one. Fast and loose ways of handling truth escaped him. Insecurity is rampant around such aspersions as Weininger dropped: with men when the cultural concessions they have forced are called into question, with women when their sense of self-respect is threatened. Weininger’s readers have usually expected ready answers on the “woman problem” served, pre-digested, when more often the makings await in the kitchen unprepared and uncooked. The formidable all-too-human was and is still arrayed against what Weininger was really saying. It wasn’t that he didn’t say what he meant. It is that what he meant would sound even more incredible than he ever imagined.24

Weininger repeated a lot of misogynist saws: the longer the hair the smaller the brain; the most talented of women could not approach the geniushood of the sorriest male pretender; women were moral nothings, could not recognize that a = a, the basic law of identity, etc. Soulless, mindless, and without morals, consumed with matchmaking, sensuality and reproduction and all that leads up to these ends together sum up her character and reason for being. Her reproductive organs possess her, while men possess theirs. And so on. We may be excused for thinking this the most frank and sustained attack ever mounted against all that is feminine were it not for the fact that Weininger also signalled he was up to something very different. We suggest he was reminding us of the obvious in preparation for a Kierkegaardian tour de force: cosy up to your enemy so you can better position yourself to stab him in the back.

What doesn’t come through perhaps so plainly, though it is implied in every line of his book, was that all the apparent “deficiencies” of women can only be logically described as such—as problematic, as undesirable, as immoral—from within a conceptual scheme external to her—external to the feminine principle as it manifests itself in the world. From within its own sphere of normativity, largely unexplored,25 there can be no such judgment. Conventional moral judgment—the infusion of value into the world—happens exclusively from the masculine perspective. (And there is no uncontrived sex-blind perspective on this matter.) All else is natural, of this world, cosmic, void of imposed value. All else knows and obeys its own causal laws. All else wears its value and significance on its face. It is indeed his heterocosmic insertion of value into the world that characterizes the masculine contribution. For this reason, his playing field is bounded by morality. Hers is not. He has to answer to a higher authority. She does not. He typically comes up short before that authority. Hence, the immensity of male criminality. The murderousness of his nature. The crying need he has to make and be bounded by rules. The miserable failure he is at living within them. His only saving grace is that he can be inspired by the transcendent, to risk all for a heterocosmic vision. The courage required to contend with this state of affairs is what Weininger means by “genius.” Needless to say, it is the scarcest thing in the world. The scarcity is evident in the history of Weininger’s reception. Yet genius is—and nothing else—what a man must aspire to and realize—or quit the scene. He is an utter waste otherwise. Weininger’s ethics are skyscraping and offer no quarter for what sometimes passes for human decency. In the eyes of many, of course, the “moral hypertropism”26 is indictment enough. The kid is sick. But if they are so insecure in their own sense of purpose that they dismiss Weininger too quickly on this account they are likely to miss something of great value.

So described, the concept of genius and what moral duty entails loses its sheen for women. Maybe women are not missing out on much not having what Weininger says they don’t. Maybe they can’t fully grasp the impulse to such risk, to such a dogged denial of earth and flesh. The futility of the project and the hypocrisy of typical male pretensions to it are so immense. Not a few women, who have actually bothered to read Weininger, have at least dimly perceived this to some degree or other. It is possible to read Weininger, not be happy with his message, and yet acknowledge its correctness. Germaine Greer, in the chapter she devoted to Weininger in The Female Eunuch, and Weininger, it seems, both observed the same distinction between women and men when they agreed that women were egoless. And Greer, of course, could not resist the motherly impulse to call Weininger a “mere boy.”27

IV. Weininger and Maurice Guest

Louise, the character in Maurice Guest with which the author most intimately identifies and to whom she dedicates her book, is the perfectly drawn Weiningerian woman. She may be the quintessence of “nothing” on Weininger’s heterocosmic scale of perduring value, but she is the most materially real woman in the novel. She is the mirror to the moral pettiness of her human environment. She is the center of gravity around which everyone else circles in proprietary orbits. The women chatter and plot around her. The path of nearly every male in the book is perturbed. Maurice’s most fatefully, a moth to her flame.

There is room to think that Richardson found her novel a fitting complement to Weininger’s vision of women. Even if she could not have begun the novel with him in mind (he had not yet published his book), by its end she must have felt how right her book was placed beside Weininger’s. (There is the unmistakeable bow to Weininger’s posthumous work in the final pages.) Thoughtful women at the time who read Weininger must have recognized that he was wrong in what he said about women only if the view taken was cosmic, only if he suggested that in this world women were nothing, materially insignificant, and valueless. And that is usually what men took him to mean in cafés around the world as witnessed by Ford Madox Ford, Elias Canetti, E. M. Cioran and many others.28 But Weininger made it amply clear that was not his view. Quite the opposite. In this world, women—like flora and fauna, like forces of nature, like the whole phenomenal universe in its eternal passing and becoming—governed, as often as not, obliviously.29 The male drive to create cultural infrastructure, an imposition on the natural world, was at best his attempt to match what nature gave woman—gave her with a different set of strings attached. If at times what he does seems magnificent, wresting from intransigent substance sublime and beautiful form, deliberately or incidentally demeaning her contribution by the way, his vocation is in the end of dubious moral merit because of the attendant and humanly problematic increase in self-awareness and self-distancing and the consequent amplification of responsibility that comes with the territory. His industry can never match her ontology. He must know this, there must be a will to know this, on pain of losing himself, and this knowledge is morality as it must appear to him. He is—or ought to be—guided by stars because, unlike her, the cells of his body do not have the last word. And because so often this is not how it works in practice, the typical man is manifestly not a genius, rather an object of pity, if not disgust. And, given his disruptive tendencies, there is no comfortable middle ground for him, his typical moral state is all but criminal. The typical man is what he is because he has not the courage to be a genius, or failing that, an outright criminal. The typical man lives in a moral fog as long as he is not aware of this and must take responsibility for spreading a comforting distortion all about him. By contrast, the henidical fog of the pure woman is of a different and amoral order…30 Notice on whom the harshness falls. Even more than his women readers, the male ones have had cause to—and did—diminish, deride, ignore, or pathologize Weininger’s message.31

Case in point: Maurice vacillates between pathos and tragedy throughout the novel. His own fog teases him occassionally with lifting but he never succeeds in attaining the full awareness necessary to redeem himself. He is caught in a horribly simplistic morality: Mill’s one-size-fits-all treatment of decency across sex lines. That Louise would have none of this must have made her feel perverse and almost evil to him—almost, if that concept could wrap around her maddening feminine essence. But it does not. And this galls him to his grave.

A purer criminal is the awe-inspiring Krafft. The spectral figure of Avery Hill ends her life in the icy river with less ado than Maurice does his, the latter staring at the sky between swaying limbs. Avery’s tragedy is haunting and mute. She may have been the most gifted musician of the bunch and the one we know least about. Little was said about her perhaps because so little needed to be said. Even as she quietly adores him, Avery never presumes to make moral claims on Krafft as Maurice does so shamelessly on Louise.

The Doves of this world are pathetic. The innocuous Madeleine, “the brave, strong motherly woman,”32 would have adopted Maurice if he had let her. These bystanders to moral tragedy are clueless. Unfortunately, they are the fill of the world.

The novel is dedicated to Louise. Her world has an integrity of its own in a way no one else’s does. It transcends any theories of propriety or prudence—or heterocosmic transcendence for that matter. To see this requires stepping away from the moral monism of Mill that seems to grip the English males in the book. Nor is this to justify the Schilskys and Kraffts as somehow winners and truth-tellers, respectively, in this drama. The point is that justification itself is out of place altogether at the interface of sexual relations. All the male characters can be condemned equally from within the moral imperative, the will to value, that Weininger felt must stand in judgment over their performance. But from the view of the purely feminine, there is less to condemn than to pity.

There are forms of consideration that are the more pernicious for all their vaunted sympathy. Madeleine in the novel, for one, finds some pride in the fact that England was not so benighted on the subject of women. The first wave of feminism had come to England and France ahead of the German-speaking world. The views of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Weininger on women seem conflated in the Viennese rants of Krafft. The English males, Maurice and Dove in particular, in the novel appear liberated and prim in their broad-mindedness. They might easily have toted Mill’s The Subjection of Women, so gentlemanly and chivalrous, it seems, is their attentiveness to the ladies—to Ephie, Madeleine, and Johanna.

Rhapsody, 1954 Charles Vidor film
Maurice Guest was the basis for the 1954 film Rhapsody, directed by Jewish Hungarian immigrant Charles (Károly) Vidor and with Elizabeth Taylor as Louise. The story bears only a passing resemblance to Richardson’s novel. Many names were changed. Most interestingly, Heinz Krafft, the “Weiningerian” character in the novel, became Otto Krafft in the movie. See a trailer and a clip.

Again, we are obliged to leave out Louise because in regard to her not even the intentions—let alone attentions—of these men seem kind. Louise is so unadulteratedly woman that when she is faced with pat English notions of consideration and respect for women, born of the sort of shallow empiricism Weininger took pains to distance himself from, something quite perverse happens. The mutual incomprehension grows thick as the mud in which Maurice comes to wallow in his penultimate scene and is the key to the tragic denouement.33

In the epilogue to Maurice Guest, Louise gets her man, Schilsky. Maurice long dead, Schilsky, the jerk, is gotten—or God help Louise. The fact that the jerk in the end gets the girl drives home the point. The scene on the steps brutally mocks everything that Maurice imagined might be possible. Earlier, in a lucid moment, Maurice had struggled to see how it was going to end.34

V Ãœber die letzten Dinge

Richardson was not simple in her sympathy for women’s causes. Neither were, for that matter, her younger contemporaries Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.35 Critical discussion still too often ignores the full articulation of what these women wanted to see. The slogan “equality between women and men,” even with all the qualifications it has accrued, does not begin to do the subject justice. These writers were keenly aware that before we may fathom the real nature of injustice to women the radical differences between women and men had to be faced squarely.36 And no one had done better than Otto Weininger to bring the painful depth of those differences to the surface. His precocious youth and early death made it both possible and probable that his work would be essentially high-jacked by the free-floating opportunism on all sides of “the woman problem.” The set-up was perfect for high intellectual drama and he would not live to set his record straight.

Weininger ends Sex and Character with a startling call for the emancipation of women and, moreover, he claims to have made a contribution to that cause. The claim is usually overlooked, or—given the more superficially sensational aspects of the book—chalked up to confusion or derangement—or, rather inconsistently, sarcasm. The nature of emancipation for Weininger, to be sure, is not one women generally recognize. It was to give up what they were in return for the misery of being like what men should be like. We are not suggesting that the great women writers of his time fully comprehended this. But a henidical understanding of it, we think, infuses their best work. They—Richardson, we want to believe, among them—took him more seriously than is the custom today.

—Iaia Gombrowicz
Department of Comparative Anxiety and the History of Despair
University of Tierra del Fuego
April 2010

 

Notes

1. The title of this piece owes something to Carmen Callil’s review of Maurice Guest “Agony by Agony,” which appeared on p. 17 of the Guardian review section on Saturday 23 August 2008.

2. Selected Crônicas, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (New Directions, 1992), p. 84.

3. The 1908 Heineman edition of Maurice Guest is available online from the University of Adelaide. The 1998 Academy version, edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele and published by the University of Queensland Press, restores a few passages unrelated to our discussion.

4. Steven Burns, A Translation of Weininger’s Über die letzten Dinge (1904/1907)/On Last Things (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).

In the closing paragraphs of Guest there are these lines: “Schilsky was now Konzertmeister in a large South German town; but it was rather as a composer that his name had begun to burn on people’s tongues. His new symphonic poem, Ãœber die letzten Dinge, had drawn down on his head that mixture of extravagant laudation and abusive derision which constitutes fame.” More than merely the title conjures up Weininger, “extravagant laudation and abusive derision” exactly characterizes what Sex and Character brought on Otto’s posthumous head.

5. Elsewhere we discuss Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Rosa Mayreder, Dora Marsden, Vita Sackville-West, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and their various reactions to Weininger.

6. Maurice Guest is both autobiographical and a thinly veiled novel of ideas in the tradition of philosophical naturalism. Its characters are impelled by elemental forces that leave cultural artefacts such as moral convention flailing in the wind. Richardson is less widely read today, at least outside of Australia, than the work of many of her realist peers, a group that would include D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Henry James. But for this novel and her short novel, The Getting of Wisdom, the neglect may be justified. However, there is a sureness in her gift for sketching, full-blooded, especially female characters that is missing from most of her contemporaries. We make no final judgment regarding her relative merits as a writer except to say, at least in these works, she can hold her own. Our principle concern here is with the special contribution she makes to the ideas of this essay.

Philosophy and psychology at the time of the novel, still conflated even as academic disciplines, were about to be distilled and separated. In realist fiction, they might appear as more or less news or comment. Their sublimation in Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein were still in the offing. The grasping theories discussed openly by the previous generation would gain traction as theme and style for the latter, the first generation of modernist writers. Weininger’s presence is detectable in nearly all of the second group of these writers, but, whereas Richardson was compelled to have Weininger’s views mounted in rants or soliloquies, he became an enthymeme underpinning, for example, Stein’s creations.

It is worth noting that Weininger showed himself an astute literary critic in his short study of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and prescient in his deep appreciation Knut Hamsun, among the very first modernist writers. (The Ibsen essay can be found in Burns’ translation of Ãœber die letzten Dinge and David Abrahamsen discusses Hamsun in his biography of Weininger, The Mind and Death of a Genius.) His penetration to the heart of literature and the respect, sometimes grudging, this earned him among writers of both sexes, accounts for his world-wide cultural influence—more so, we argue, than the notoriety of his death or the scandal of his themes.

Lastly, there are hints of rebellion in the face of the truth contained in Weininger’s inexorable feminine “cookie cutter” theory in Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom, which H. G. Wells and Germaine Greer have considered Richardson’s masterpiece. Written as she was finishing the “gloomy” and laden Guest, the little autobiographical experiment, a girl’s coming of age story in a spare modernist vein, with its ideas neatly submerged, Richardson herself deprecated. But many see in the work greater authenticity and integrity than in the somewhat overwritten 19th century Guest. The latter, a little slow getting started perhaps, remains nevertheless a fine example of late realism because of its courage in plumbing the depths of the chasm dividing masculine and feminine conceptions of each other in love. Yet, even with regard to the quieter Wisdom, we might tell a story related to the one we are telling here about Richardson and Weininger, but we leave that for another occasion.

7. For nearly a century the badly translated Heinemann edition of Sex and Character was the only exposure most of the English-speaking world had to Otto Weininger. In 2005, a new translation by Ladislaus Löb was published by Indiana University Press which restored Weininger’s extensive documentation as well as previously deleted or garbled passages.

8. Michael Ackland, Henry Handel Richardson: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 189. Ackland indicates Maurice Guest was in its finishing stages when Weininger’s Ãœber die letzten Dinge was published in Vienna (1907).

9. Not until Steven Burns’ 2001 translation.

10. As described by Ludwig Wittgenstein in a letter to G. E. Moore. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, edited by G. H. von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 159.

11. While Sex and Character was an international sensation, Weininger’s posthumous collections of aphorisms, fragmentary essays, and marginalia, Ãœber die letzten Dinge, was considerably more obscure. The latter book’s excursions outside the German-speaking world were fewer and far between. The fact that Richardson uses the phrase as a title further suggests that she had more than a casual acquaintance with Weininger’s work.

12. Mistrust, born of stupidity and cowardice, probably better characterizes the male attitude in question than misogyny. Actual hatred is unusual, and tied up with peculiar experiences, not the commonplace ones that account for the prevalence of the phenomena of feminine disparagement. The same, of course, goes for other xenophobias, including racism and anti-Semitism. Bianco Luno writes, “But there is a special dimension to the depth of mistrust and systematic miscommunication across sex lines that neither history nor superficial physical or cultural difference can explain. Sexism, of the sort that isn’t stupidity or cowardice, is classically tragic and not like those other marginalizations. It is rooted in something the best intentions cannot shake, something not likely to change except in evolutionary time. It is the sort of thing for which moral harassment is perfectly suited. Morality, unlike positivism—scientistic or political, will never claim its work done until the species of consciousness to which it is native becomes extinct or transforms itself into something unrecognizable.”

13. Safranski, Rüdiger, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. by Ewald Osers (Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 169.

14. Quite literally involving grapes: “In the year 1831, Schopenhauer fell in love with a girl named Flora Weiss. At a boat party in Germany he made his advance by offering her a bunch of grapes. Flora’s diary records this event as follows ’I didn’t want the grapes because old Schopenhauer had touched them, so I let them slide, quite gently into the water.’ Apparently, she was underwhelmed.” Quoted from Alexander S. Rosenthal short address on philosophers and marriage in The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, Volume 11, 2002.

15. Safranski, p. 384.

16. Maurice Guest, part i, chapter xii. In Nietzsche, it appears at the end of chapter 18 of Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!” (Thomas Common translation, 1891).

17. Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche did his legacy no favors. Her consortion with anti-Semites caused Friedrich great distress. See his letter to her from Nice in December of 1887. He must have hollowed out extra room in his grave rolling over when Hitler attended his sister’s funeral.

18. Not immoralism: conventional immoralism is as much a masculine parameter as moralism. Weininger, sharpening a point made by Kant, insisted on the adiaphorous nature of the feminine. The avowal of amoralism as a feminine parameter, begun in writers such as Richardson, became progressively more robust in the modernist generations that followed, attaining sublime depths in Clarice Lispector, for instance.

We use the word “amoral” where others might see a different morality. That is, were they not conditioned to shy away from the suggestion that there might indeed be such things as her and his moralities. The long struggle for equal this and equal that has made the concession difficult to swallow, but the idea of distinct species of normative rules and conceptions corresponding to sex is, in fact, a better way to describe the situation. There is a growing body of work in ethical theory by women that is homing in gingerly on the concession. (We can’t help but notice, for example, that the task of defending the moral justifiability of suspect emotions and attitudes such as contempt seems to have fallen to women. On the moral uses of contempt, see Michelle Mason, “Contempt as a Moral Attitude,” Ethics 113 (January 2003): 234”“272. The suspicion, largely by men, seems motivated by the too easy slip toward abuse, again, as perceived by them. This particular liability we take to be endemic to maleness.) It may be that in the fullness of time it will be largely men, already too invested in a rigid univocal notion of equality, who will be the last holdouts: not that we can entirely blame them. Just when they were beginning to see women as moral agents to tell them that it is not morality as they conceive it but one different, and unbelievably alien to them, that is in play may be asking too much too soon. Except that there are very serious consequences for moral institutions. Certain underpinnings of whole political and legal systems might be scrapped. (See Agacinski.)

But in the present discussion “amoral” may be historically more apposite because it reflects in anyone who thinks seriously about women and men a stage in the dawning recognition of radical difference. To their credit, our German-speaking “misogynists”—Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weininger, et. al.—at least saw this far. Weininger, especially, we regard as on the cusp of mapping out the coast lines of a new moral world. There is also much in the historical record to suggest that these thinkers were hardly originators of the notion of the moral otherness of women. Rather, the relatively recent grip of the idea that there is nothing essentially different in the way women value their lived worlds from how men do theirs and the consequent loss of curiosity is the aberration requiring explanation.

Luno writes, “It might be argued that we needed to go through a phase of naive, Millian, sexual egalitarianism to get to the point where sexual difference might be appreciated for what it is and not as excuse for oppression and marginalization… Perhaps a belief in Santa Claus is a developmental requirement for believing in God or the principle of the uniformity of nature.”

19. And, linking women and Jews, as a self-hating anti-Semite. Of the three, Weininger was the only Jew. The nature of his “anti-Semitism”—as that of Gertrude Stein, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, et al.—is necessarily different from the non-Semite variety and its dynamic requires separate discussion which we offer elsewhere. A lot has been made of the connection of Weininger’s perceived selbsthaas as a Jew and his views of women. Those topics could stand a little separation as well.

20. The facile assumption that because strong heterosexual tendencies are not expressed one must therefore be homosexual or bisexual is often made by Weininger’s commentators. The possibility of none of the above is apparently too rarefied for the common imagination. The known facts are promiscuous in seeming to lend themselves to the conclusions that Weininger was a frustrated heterosexual, a jealous homosexual, or some bisexual combination of the two—which is to say: we don’t know. Fortunately, it is irrelevant. What is clear is his philosophy about it: physical sexual expression is incompatible with the lucidity required by morality. Aversion to that principle, we believe, is behind much of the deeper resistance to his message.

21. David Abrahamsen, The Mind and Death of a Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p 124.

22. And writing on a subject a few reach senility before grasping some truth about—and most never.

23. After his son’s suicide and probably in reaction to insinuations that his son had been homosexual, Leopold said of Otto that he was sexually acquainted with women but only a “very few.” But accounts from Otto’s friends would seem to suggest otherwise: that is, his understanding of women was not based on any intimate sexual experience. See Abrahamsen op. cit., p. 84.

24. But Weininger did try to anticipate the misunderstanding his work would be heir to. He addresses it directly in the preface to Sex and Character, clearly laying the burden of his message on men.

25. For her for lack of needing to be at that time. And by him because it was not in his interest.

26. As Abrahamsen, op. cit., Weininger’s biographer, put it. Abrahamsen, a Freudian criminal psychiatrist, specialized in writing psychobiographies of notorious figures, including, besides Weininger and various serial killers, Richard M. Nixon.

27. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 119.

28. Certainly, some must have relished the ambiguity: enjoyed the chance to snipe at women while sensing the self-lacerating heroics or quixoticism in Weininger. Others, less easy with irony or the possibility of subversion as philosophical stratagem, were compelled to pathologize. Freud was the first in a long line of these readers.

29. Few, it seems, grasped the seriousness of Weininger’s ontological dualism and its Kantian heritage. The positivistic age perhaps precluded it. Received in an environment of increasing material monism, Weininger’s work becomes absurd, this despite the fact that his assumptions were plain to see. It has been said that no book of serious philosophy ever suffered such meteoric success as Weininger’s. Some thirty editions and a half dozen languages later, the book “will not go away” as perhaps some have wished. (See note 31 below.) Whatever “success” the book has had, the philosophy in it still beggars understanding at the hands of both academic and lay readers.

30. Weininger invented the term “henid” for unconceptualized, still fluid, intuitive proto-thought which, while tending to serve women well enough, was impediment, if not anathema, to masculine heterocosmic ambition with its stiffer requirements of lucidity and responsibility. Clarity of thought and motivation is essential to his task. Logic and ethics are one, he intoned, inspiring Wittgenstein’s later expansion to “ethics and aesthetics are one.”

31. This hints at the richness of Weininger’s work: its availability at different and sometimes opposed levels: from solace for the insecure (for certain “misogynists”), to fodder for aspersion (in the view of certain feminists), to—most importantly and least recognize—pointing the way to a radical revision of the metaphysics of human experience starting at its core: morality—or what Kant said was “the highest.” If we accept Weininger’s premise that human experience in its entirety is filtered through sex—not in the quasi-prurient Freudian sense, but ontologically: in the sense that the feminine and masculine together exhaust the distinct ways of conscious being in the world, how can it not be that everything claiming “humanity” (or an ostensibly generic or “sex-blind” status) should be affected? If there is a way to transcend this condition or predicament and if there is (as many, Weininger included, believe there to be) a moral imperative to effect the transcendence, we are very far from realizing it as long as we ignore the looming bifurcation. Classic masculine reactions to Weininger have tended to ignore the imperative. Feminists have tended to ignore the bifurcation. Each sex expresses its proprietary vulnerability. Weininger is the perfect mirror to all this. This is why his book “will not die.” (Daniel Steuer in the introduction to the 2005 Löb translation raises the question as to Sex and Character’s persistence despite wide critical declaim.)

32. Ackland, op. cit., p. 190 cites an undated note by Richardson about her female characters:

The sexual woman = Louise
The instinctive = Madeleine. No, the brave, strong motherly woman.
Now I ought to do the intellectual.

Ackland goes on in a footnote to suggest that Johanna Cayhill might have been the “intellectual.” But Johanna would have been a rather ineffectual example. She comes across as more than a little pathetic. So, unless Richardson was mocking the idea of an “intellectual woman,” we suggest that the author herself best instantiates that type: a thinking woman concerned to draw a truer, more vibrant picture of the feminine predicament than any single one of her characters could believably depict. She was a sharp observer and creator of such types. But as Acklund points out, Richardson defends her characters, such as Ephie, from quick dismissal as mere types. They are not put up for the delectation of facile critics or comfort of lazy readers. Each of her women has an integrity worthy of defence and as a novelist, this was her responsibility and more to the point, a worthy one. Too often political and social motives dismiss as “stereotypical” recognizable human tropes by decking them out in straw without actually contending with their quota of truth. It is, of course, a perennial challenge for the realist writer: how to make complex ideas or people accessible without degrading them in the process of portrayal.

Dealings in types—characters, tropes, weighted orientations and perspectives—was a treacherous path that Weininger, as a philosopher (and first rate literary critic as shown in his discussion of Ibsen in Ãœber die letzten Dinge) proposing to deal with natural kinds of human beings, also tread and his reputation paid a serious price for his daring.

33. It comes to a head on p. 511 (Heinemann edition): Louise: “Shame! You only mean the need for concealment. Before you had got me there was no talk of shame.” Maurice: “Do you know what you’re saying?” Louise knew very clearly what she was saying. It is Maurice whose mental fog is culpable. Weininger wrote that women “thought” in something he called henids. These are feeling infused intuitions that resist logical parsing. Their conceptual unclarity is intrinsic and hence resistant to the rigors of logic. But it is this very aspect that excuses them from the rigors of morality which Weininger literally equated with logic. As such—as henids—they are not in the purview of moral valuation. It is a male imperative to give them form and clarity and thus make moral coin of them. The mistake that too many of his readers make is to think that putatively “sex-neutral” normative attributions or valuations can be applied to the feminine mind state. There may be an aptness or fruitfulness that may be predicated of a henidical cognition and—for the needs of living, as opposed to thinking—that may be adequate, but not the rightness or wrongness that so binds masculine thinking. When men rest too content with henids, character suffers necessarily in a way it does not with women. Their marching orders are different. Had Adam not been around to inform her otherwise, Eve’s apple might have tasted better.

34. There is this moving passage:

She [Louise] fell asleep early; for, no matter what happened, how uneventful or how tragically exciting her day was, her faculty for sleep remained unchanged. It was a brilliant night; in the sky was a great, round, yellow moon, and the room was lit up by it. The blind of the window facing the bed had not been lowered; and a square patch of light fell across the bed. He [Maurice] turned and looked at her, lying in it. Her face was towards him; one arm was flung up above her head; the hand lay with the palm exposed. Something in the look of the face, blanched by the unreal light, made him recall the first time he had seen it, and the impression it had then left on his mind. While she played [piano] in Schwarz’s room, she had turned and looked at him, and it had seemed to him then, that some occult force had gone out from the face, and struck home in him. And it had never lessened. Strange, that so small a thing, hardly bigger than one’s two closed fists, should be able to exert such an influence over one! For this face it was—the pale oval, in the dark setting, the exotic colouring, the heavy-lidded eyes—which held him; it was this face which drew him surely back with a vital nostalgia—a homesickness for the sight of her and the touch of her—if he were too long absent. It had not been any coincidence of temperament or sympathies—by rights, all the rights of their different natures, they had not belonged together—any more than it had been a mere blind uprush of sensual desire. And just as his feelings for her had had nothing to do with reason, or with the practical conduct of his life so they had outlasted tenderness, faithfulness, respect. What ever it was that held him, it lay deeper than these conventional ideas of virtue. The power her face had over him was undiminished, though he now found it neither beautiful nor good; though he knew the true meaning of each deeply graven line.—This then was love—this morbid possession by a woman’s face.

He laid his arm across his tired eyes, and, without waiting to consider the question he had propounded, commenced to follow out a new train of thought. No doubt, for each individual, there existed in one other mortal some physical detail which he or she could find only in this particular person. It might be the veriest trifle. Some found it, it seemed, in the colour of an eye; some in the modulations of a voice, the curve of a lip, the shape of a hand, the lines of a body in motion. Whatever it chanced to be, it was, in most cases, an insignificant characteristic, which, for others, simply did not exist, but which, to the one affected by it, made instant appeal, and just to that corner of the soul which had hitherto suffered aimlessly for the want of it—a suffering which nothing but this intonation, this particular smile, could allay. He himself had long since learnt what it was, about her face, that made a like appeal to him. It was her eyes. Not their size, or their dark brilliancy, but the manner of their setting: the spacious lid that fell from the high, wavy eyebrow, first sloping deeply inwards, then curving out again, over the eyeball; this, and the clean sweep of the broad, white lid, which, when lowered, gave the face an infantine look—a look of marble. He knew it was this; for, on the strength of a mere hinted resemblance, he had been unable to take his eyes off the face of another woman; the likeness in this detail had met his gaze with a kind of shock. But what a meaningless thing was life, when the way a lid drooped, or an eyebrow grew on a forehead, could make such havoc of your nerves! And more especially when, in the brain or soul that lay behind, no spiritual trait answered to the physical.—Well, that was for others to puzzle over, not for him. The strong man tore himself away while there was still time, or saved himself in an engrossing pursuit. He, having had neither strength nor saving occupation, had bartered all he had, and knowingly, for the beauty of this face. And as long as it existed for him, his home was beside it. [Maurice Guest, Part III, Chapter XII. Compare Weininger on such traits in Sex and Character, Part I, Chapter III.]

Either Richardson was consciously alluding to Weininger’s notion of the fatality of attraction to the point of morbidity—or, perhaps, more revealingly, unconsciously, as no doubt countless others have. Weininger is scarcely original. But in philosophy that is a dubious virtue (Bertrand Russell once quipped that originality in philosophy is a sign of error). Again, it is not what Weininger said that had the impact it did (and does), it is that he dared to say it at all—when scarcely no one else did does.

Richardson quotes Petrarch’s Sonnets to Laura in the epigraph:

S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?
Ma s’egli è amor, perdio, che cosa et quale?

What do I feel if this is not love?
But if it is love, God, what thing is this?

35. And, at least with regard to Weininger, we could add Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Dora Marsden, Hulda Garborg, Rosa Mayreder, and Vita Sackville-West to the list of women who were intrigued and disturbed enough to react to him but not wholly in the dismissive, pathologizing way that has become the norm since. The negative reaction of these women was less to Weininger than to Weininger’s reception among literate and not-so-literate male readers who they feared, and rightly so, would take heart in the authority that Weininger’s text appeared to lend male rearguard resistance to the first wave of feminism. We won’t go so far as to say that any of these women quite believed, as we are inclined to think, that Weininger was working undercover for them. That insight would require both a deeper grounding in the sources of Weininger’s inspiration and an analysis of reactions to him that only the history since was likely to offer. But a hint of it sometimes sparkles in serious literature by women.

36. What it would take to prevent war and the difference sex makes is the subject of Woolf’s Three Guineas.