WINTER SCHOOL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23204, 31 May 1937, Page 7

WINTER SCHOOL

£ MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY

LECTURE BY MR ALLEY

i't " __— >'■■ • Mr G. T. Alley, travelling librarian 'tot the Association for Country Education, was the speaker at Saturday morning's session of the winter school which is being conducted by ' the .W.E.A. He took as his subject "Modern Writers' Views on Marriage and •■.the Family." h Ibsen, Mr Alley said, had been the first of the modems to challenge old iideas of marriage and the family. He -'had done it in a destructive way—a ■healthy wind from the north. In " The .league of Youth" the wife, Selma, •-.whose, husband has never taken h,er Unto his confidence, refuses to take responsibility for him when he comes to "iier, after failure, as a last resort. This theme was further worked out in " The ':-Doll's House." The wife revolts being treated as a doll and leaves home. When he asks whether

!rshe will come back, she says, "If our .life will be a real wedlock," In J* Ghosts," besides the theme of hereditary disease, Ibsen tried to show that •ifrom a healthy point of view it might „be better for a marriage of misery to ,'bo broken and for genuine lovers to /live together. Ibsens treatment was -:hot adequate, but it opened the discussion.

Samuel Butler, a contemporary of vlbsen, who was one of the keenest ffininds of the nineteenth century, had

(in " The Way of All Flesh " discussed of discipline as an imposed ""force in the family. It showed the ••'father dominating ruthlessly. Shaw .Jiad. along with Butler's powerful approach, an essential sanity. In "Man \ 'and Superman" he gave the idea of !>woman as the pursuing arid conquering Seeing. Shrewd common sense was ;'::shown in " Candida," whose chief character, a sensible woman, refused to Jlfall for the poet who was in love with *£his idea of her rather than with -the woman herself. "Misalliance" and ■Jits preface presented Shaw's protest i-against the attempt to mould children mo a fixed form. •y. In a critical review of Wells, the fspeaker estimated " Marriage" as the j'best of his books dealing with the subject of marital relations. It showed a couple meeting with difficulties in their mutual reactions and struggling throughout the story to work 'towards harmony. ?' Havelock Ellis, the writer on the of sex, had made a notable putting forth the idea of i-love as an individual art. If the State .-'attempted to regulate sex relations it ~'was attempting the impossible, Ellis believed, and was also guilty of an impertinence. \ D. H. Lawrence had been one of the /first who had tried to correlate sex, ninarriage and society. The son of a /.coalminer and an educated, cultured /mother, Lawrence- had been very sensitive to the contrast, and also to the 'darkness of the underworld. Lawrence ultimately accepted the more elemental' human, and in "Sons and Lovers" had shown the son struggling to escape from the mother's control and finally winning his' way. Lawrence had anticipated Freud's ideas of the place of "sex in human life. He had taught that we must live by impulse and not by ideas and ideals. Children in school were taught, ideas that had no ■ root, no life—like the pale shoots of a potato in a dark cellar.-. True impulses could be released only by a delicate, high knowledge. Lawrence's challenge was illustrated by the lecturer with readings from "Pansies" and "The Rainbow." In "The Rainbow" he had expressed his view of physical life as not material, but a high, mystical thing. In the course of a book he had represented marriage as a becoming-one—-had written of heaven as a place where, onlv fully united men and women could be. Lawrence had barked back to the pagan and had been jn revulsion against' man-made things. But his greatness; was in taking his'.stand ahd : leaving our ■*\i'%tfW'-&mw<' scheme-bf life*•■'He had probably dottej harmpto 'those who had accepted his. every word, as truth.' ■ Marxian.writers had pleaded for the release of marriage and sex-relations from the bonds of the money appeal.