NOVEMBER 24 - 27 SOME THOUGHTS; MODERNISM, FREE LOVE, AND GENDER

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

SOME THOUGHTS: Modernism, Free Love, and Gender

November 24-27, 2019

ABOVE – Mabel Dodge. Photo Source.

BELOW – Neith Boyce in 1900. Photo Source.

SOME THOUGHTS

Modernism, Free Love and Gender

Sorry this post has taken so long, but it has taken me more time than expected to get through many sources – and still, this is only a gloss on a complicated topic. I’ve been trying to decide how much detail to go into as I work my way through Kent’s life up to his return to Alaska in 1935. Initially, I had planned a quick transition. There’s much to be told about his art and his rise to fame. I’ve found quite interesting Kathleen’s letters from France to Rockwell and Rockwell’s letters to both his wife and Frances Lee, the woman he will marry after his divorce becomes final in 1926. I don’t think these letters have been covered in detail by other writers and I want to give readers at least a taste of their marriage situation as it ends. I’ll cover some of those in the next entry.

         Then there’s the whole context of free-love, marriage and gender relations

 during this period. I provided as one source -- American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century by Chrsitine Stansell (2000). That book delves into those issues. Why am I going down this rabbit hole? I frequently hear from scholars that Rockwell Kent was like other artists and intellectuals of the period – everyone was sleeping around. That’s true as far as it goes, but the subject is more complex. Recently I rediscovered a book in my collection that I had read years ago -- 1915 The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, edited by Adele Heller & Lois Rudnick (1991). All the essays are worth reading, but three in particular are quite relevant to the sexual revolution of the period: “The New Woman” by Lois Rudnick; “The New Woman as Cultural Symbol and Social Reality: Six Women Writers’ Perspectives” by Elizabeth Ammons -- and especially “The New Woman and the New Sexuality: Conflict and Contradiction in the Writings and Lives of Mabel Dodge and Neith Boyce” by Ellen Kay Trimberger. I will give a brief summary of this last essay. I don’t intend to go into much detail regarding the characters in this story – so I’ll provide links for those you who want to learn about about Mabel Dodge, Neith Boyce, John (Jack) Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, and some others mentioned in the text.

ABOVE -- Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan (1879-1962) – wearing a turban in a yoga pose circa 1915. She married several times and has been described as a woman of profound contradictions. She was generous. She was petty. Domineering and endearing… salon hostess, art patroness, writer and self-appointed savior of humanity. Photo Source.

BELOW -- Neith Boyce (1872-1951), married to Hutchins Hapgood, was a novelist, journalist and theatre artist associated with the Provincetown Players along with Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, George Cram (Jig) Cook, and others. She and Hapgood connected with many intellectuals and artists of the period, including Mable Dodge, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe and Gertrude Stein. Wikipedia Photo.

BELOW -- Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944) as a Harvard student. Photo Source.

Hapgood was a journalist, author and an avid anarchist who worked at the New York Commercial Advertiser with Lincoln Steffens. Neith Boyce was Steffens assistant. Hapgood is known for his articles about union and labor movements, anarchism, free love, the bohemian life, and immigrant culture. According to Wikipedia, Hapgood and Boyce had what was outwardly claimed to be a “modern marriage” in which both partners were equal, and neither was bound by sexual fidelity.  However, behind closed doors, Boyce was solely responsible for the children, while Hapgood enjoyed numerous affairs. Hapgood’s jealousy prevented Boyce from enjoying the sexual freedom that he enjoyed for himself. Her one exception to this restrictive marriage was Hapgood’s support of her writing, and Boyce’s ability to use her writing as a means to voice her own discontent and frustration. Hapgood sounds similar to Rockwell Kent in this regard.

BELOW -- John Silas (Jack) Reed (1887-1920) – was an American writer – journalist and poet – remembered today for his first-hand account of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as told in his book, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919).

SEXUALITY AND MODERNISM

Conflict and Contradiction

Free love is a nice idea. It does away with mothers-in-laws. It does away with ALL kinds of law. For instance, like this: I have a wife – I love her. You come along and YOU love her – while I’m in the cellar sifting ashes. When I come up for air we both struggle for her – love against love. And while we’re struggling she elopes with a sleigh driver. That’s free love. Or maybe it ain’t a wife at all. Maybe it’s only a lady friend.

         Satire on the Bolshiviks and free love by Neal R. O’Hara in the January 22, 1920 New York Evening World. See further down for the complete article.

Ellen Kay Trimberger’s essay  -- “The New Woman and the New Sexuality: Conflict and Contradiction in the Writings and Lives of Mabel Dodge and Neith Boyce” – in 1915 The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, edited by Adele Heller & Lois Rudnick (1991) – discusses gender issues in connection with Dodge’s and Boyce’s correspondence.

Although against the institution of marriage, Mabel Dodge and Niece Boyce did make that commitment. Trimberger writes: Mabel and Neith’s struggles to find a satisfying combination of sexuality and intimacy must be seen within the context of the radical subculture of Greenwich Village. Villagers’ ideas about sex and love drew on the nineteenth-century free-love tradition in the United States, the work of early twentieth-century European sexologists, and feminism. Trimberger goes back to 1820 with Scotland-born Frances (Fanny) Wright (1795-1852). This social reformer, freethinker, abolitionist and feminist became an American citizen in 1815. Trimberger also writes about the influence of 18th century libertarianism and 19th century utopian socialism. The theory was that free love referred not to promiscuity – or sex with multiple partners – but to the belief that love, rather than marriage, should be precondition for sexual relations. Women forced into arranged, loveless marriages was the same as legalized prostitution, feminists said Despite this opposition to marriage, Trimberger writes, many free lovers had long monogamous relationships, and others practiced what has come to be called “serial monogamy,” leaving one long-term partner only because of a greater love for another. Free love and sex, despite marriage, involved a spiritual component. Gender relations and sex among the avant garde was indebted to this historical view while at the same time taking ideas from the writings of English doctor, Havelock Ellis; his friend, Edward Carpenter; and Swedish feminist Ellen Key.

Trimberger sums up some of their ideas: Havelock Ellis wrote: “Woman breeds and tends; man provides; it remains so even where the spheres tend to overlap.” Ellis, Carpenter, and Key all supported women’s rights, but they criticized those feminists who emphasized women’s need or desire to work outside the home. Carpenter stereotyped such women as without strong sexual or maternal instincts; as “mannish” in temperament and “brain-cultured.” He also promoted the notion of the Ur-Mother, a blend of Freud and archetype theory. Mabel Dodge assimilated these ideas, Trimberger writes, and adds, Traditionally, an Ur-Mother generated babies and inspirited male creativity and genius. Carpenter envisioned the New Woman as nurturing not children, but her mate. After his excursions and wanderings, a man would return to a woman “to restore his balance, to find his center of life, and to draw stores of energy and inspiration for fresh conquests of the outer world.” Of Ellen Key, Trimberger writes that she believed it was impossible to for a woman to work outside the home and be a mother. A woman with children would need at least ten years free of any continuous outside work. Motherhood, she wrote, was a more important means of exercising creativity than writing a novel or producing a work of art. Ellis too saw women’s creativity centered in their procreative abilities: Women’s brains, are in a certain sense, in their wombs,” he said.

BELOW --    May 6, 1923 New York Daily News.

Some of this comes close to describing Rockwell and Kathleen Kent’s relationship. Kathleen wants a faithful husband. Rockwell balances on that thin line between the Victorian and the modern world. He wants a woman from the old world who will give him – a home base and a family as well as the energy and worship necessary for his creativity. He wants an Ur-Mother. The women often do not support a free-love arrangement, though some come to either accept or tolerate it because they love their mate and/or for the sake of the children.

Trimberger writes: These notions of the maternal were often seductive for women. “Mothering” not just children, but men as well, seemed a reliable source of power for a woman who felt less rewarded for her intellectual and artistic work than did the men who were her peers. But maternal caring for a man with the creative, intellectual, or political skills that the woman sought for herself could easily undermine her own sense of entitlement to, and achievement of, such capacities. Kathleen mothered both her children and her husband. And Rockwell sought that mothering -- it’s clear from the letters. As time goes on, however, Kathleen begins to realize how her own creative life has been sapped – especially her musical talents. By 1920, busy with five children including a newborn – she wants more involvement in Rockwell’s creative life. She wants to watch him paint – and play a creative role in advancing his career as she had done in the past – especially while he was in Alaska.

Mabel Dodge mothered Reed, eight years younger than her. She was angry when he dedicated a book to his mother because she had been playing that role. When Reed broke off with another woman and returned to Dodge, she wrote: He was like a little boy come home to his mother after an escapade, disarmingly anxious to tell her all about it. Here he was home again, the hunter home from the hills. Like a mother, she nursed Reed when he was sick – he was vulnerable and infantile -- but she didn’t really want to be an Ur-Mother. So I had Reed, I thought, for my own, she wrote, but that was a pleasure soon over. No sooner do we get them where we think we want them, then we find we do not want them so. A man completely at a disadvantage, disempowered, and delivered up to us, we find to be no man at all. Is it possible, then, that one is more satisfied with the struggle than with the surrender.

BELOW – Mabel Dodge Luhan’s obituary in the August 16, 1962 in the Taos (New Mexico) News.

Other men tried to seduce Dodge but she resisted, feeling their sexual interests indicated they didn’t take her seriously – and, she learned of the power she could wield over men by withholding sex. When she became involved with Jack Reed, she lost herself in that relationship. Trimberger writes: Becoming Reed’s lover meant throwing away all her own energy and autonomy so that she couldn’t bear to have him interested in anything else. Dodge wrote: I hated to see him interested in Things I wasn’t…Each day as soon as he was gone out of the house I felt deserted and miserable and as though I had lost him forever.

ABOVE – Neith Boyce’s obituary in the December 3, 1951 Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Mass.).

BELOW – A commentary on Neice Boyce in the December 16, 1951 Boston Globe.

In Kent’s Alaska letters he often refers to Kathleen as “Mother” or “Little Mother,” which has led to some confusion in the Archives of American Art files where I have found a few letters misplaced. He is occasionally sick while on Fox Island, and it’s clear he misses Kathleen’s mothering, and sometimes asks for it. Kent had an ambivalent relationship with his actual mother, and seems at times overly anxious to please her and receive her affirmation and praise. He writes to her often while on Fox Island. Carl Zigrosser, Rockwell’s close friend, wrote in a 1975 memoir that Kent’’s mother, Sara, was one of the few people that would stand up to him. When his second wife, Frances, told her she was seeking a divorce, Sara replied that it was about time.

Hutchins Hapgood -- Neith Boyce’s lover and later husband -- expressed the need for mothering. She responded -- often referring to him in letters as “dear infant,” and to be a “good child” or a “good little boy.” Boyce worked with Eugene O’Neal and the Provincetown Players. Hers was the first play they produced – called Constancy. According to Trimberger, the play centers on a meeting between ex-lovers, Moira and Rex, loosely based upon Mabel Dodge and John (Jack) Reed. The play’s focus on the issue of fidelity and infidelity was also a central conflict in Neith’s marriage. Moria rejects the relationship with Rex because she lost herself in it, sacrificing all of her own interests and her friends. Such a price for a constant relationship is no longer acceptable to her. But she also rejects Rex’s idea of fidelity – to love a hundred other women and at intervals come back to her. As usual in Neith’s fiction there is no resolution to the conflict. Neith has a vision of a relationship where the man would be faithful and the woman would retain a separate self and identity, but there is no sense here that she believes this is attainable.

ABOVE – Hutchen Hapgood’s obituary in the November 19, 1944 Boston Globe.

BELOW – John (Jack) Reed’s obituary in the October 19, 1920 New York Herald.

Dodge’s relationship with Maurice Sterne is also interesting. He was a painter. She tried to take control and transform him into a sculptor but, Trimberger writes, once they were lovers, she felt power shift from her to him.  A story Dodge wrote for The Masses recognized the emptiness and destructiveness of a woman who lives only through a creative man; she comes to hate him because of the dependency and her own lack of creativity. It’s clear from Rockwell Kent’s letters to Kathleen (especially from Alaska) that he expects her to implant her life into his, become part of a larger whole – is to support Rockwell’s life’s experiences and its products -- his art. In letters after Rockwell’s return from Alaska, we see Kathleen’s realization that intimacy is gone from their marriage. She feels no part of the Rockwell’s life.

The idea of sexualized intimacy – lovers sharing interests in the arts, literature and politics – began to replace the notion of spiritualized sexuality. Men wanted a “girl” they could both “kiss and talk to,” Trimberger writes, and they wanted it to be the same “girl.” The couple needed open and deep communication. We see this emerge within the Rockwell-Kathleen Alaska correspondence. Mable Dodge had more of a spiritual sense of sexuality than did Neith Boyce. Dodge wrote: It is not enough to have the most perfect physical combination unless there is an emotional consolation at the base of it. Hearts must open and speak to each other else there is only a deepening sadness and a sense of waste with every outpouring of love.” Kathleen Kent would have written those words. Havelock Ellis wrote that while women had an equal claim to a satisfying sex life, female sexuality was passive and had to be aroused by a man.

 Mabel Dodge recognized and regretted her sexual reticence and expected Boyce to be more insistent. The Rockwell and Kathleen correspondence during his time in Alaska is not sexually explicit as compared with Hapgood’s and Boyce’s correspondence, or Emma Godman’s with Ben Reitman --  but at least one of Rockwell’s letters is pretty clear that his attraction to Hildegarde and other women is at least in part because his wife is too unforthcoming, shy and reticent about passionate sex.

BELOW – A satire on the Bolsheviks and free love from the January 22, 1920 Evening World (New York).

Stansell in the American Moderns chapter titled “Talking about Sex,” quotes one of Hapgood’s letters to Boyce – Tell me you love me and also tell me about the flirtations you are having. Have you been unfaithful? Have you sinned? Did you like it…Do you like me better than ever?...Come and hug me and confess all…I am full of lust and love and desire to talk and hear you talk. Some couples were much more explicit and circulated their letters among other like-minded couples. Stansell writes that Reitman, who wrote to Goldman about his sex life with a prostitute, gave Hapgood the letters…which Hapgood then sent to Boyce. He then shared the letters with Ruby Darrow, a woman embittered by Clarence Darrow’s years-long affair with Mary Parton (Sara Bard Field’s sister and a San Francisco labor radical), and contrasted Mrs. Darrow’s monogamous martyrdom with Neice Boyce’s pleasing willingness to venture outside marriage. “You say you are sensitive to the other men. I think that this is true, and I am very glad of it. You would not be the interesting woman you are, if you were not.”

The Rockwell-Kathleen letters come nowhere near any of this. Kent does seem to enjoy telling Kathleen of his amorous exploits in earlier letters but the language and descriptions are not sexual. Their correspondence is prudish compared to Emma Goldman’s letters to Ben Reitman, which Stansell calls The Raunchiest performance of free-talk love…Her wild language often outstripped free-love elocution  to reach for a pitch of erotic abandon. “{I} would devour you, yes, like a wounded animal.” The two wrote to each other in code, naughty allusions echoing pornographic euphemisms: her “t-b” (“treasure-box”) long for his “Willy”; he wanted to put his face between her “joy mountains,” Mt. Blanc” and “Mt. Jura.” There are some coded references in the Alaska letters, but I haven’t been able to figure them out.

  

Trimberger quotes a 1913 a revealing letter Mable Dodge writes to Neith Boyce. To my mind it is quite enlightening within the context of this discussion and the life of Rockwell and Kathleen Kent.

What is this deep down necessity in women that makes them – drives them – for their own peace to ask of men that they shall be what is called “faithful” – and which, without it, tortures love? Why does it make women suffer and writhe all through?...Women have always asked men to be faithful – will men change and become so if women won’t take less? Or are women to get over asking it?...Yet have I the right to ask him {Jack Reed} at his age to forgo any part of experience?

 And what right have I to ask him to control an impulse that he doesn’t believe in controlling?...To him the sexual gesture has no importance but infringing upon his right to act freely has the first importance…I know all women go thru’ this – but must they go on going thru’ it? Are we supposed to “make” men do things? Are men to change? Is monogamy better than polygamy? Is it worse unhappiness to stay than to go? What do you think?...What is freedom anyway.

All this is not to promote or defend Rockwell Kent's behavior. It's an attempt to place him into a larger historical and cultural context.

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