Des relations qui existent entre les deux sexes chez les peuples d’espèce malaie du grand Océan. — D

CHAP. 20: > Of the relations that exist between the two sexes among the peoples of the Malay species of the great Ocean. — Of the relations between parents and their children.

Having expounded the social organization of the peoples of the Malay species in the archipelagos of the great Ocean, it will be easy to understand their morals. The women of all ranks exist, like the individuals of the inferior classes, only for the pleasures of the men of the aristocratic class. From their childhood, and before they are capable of feeling any affection, they are trained in such a way as to procure for them the only kind of enjoyments they are susceptible of feeling [572]. They can never escape the empire of force: as daughters, they belong to their fathers, who lend, give, or sell them, as they please; as wives, they belong to their husbands, who dispose of them in the same manner [573]. If they resist prostitution, it is the parents or husbands who use violence to compel them [574]. Birth, rank, and power being the only titles to esteem, chastity, decency, and modesty are not considered virtues. Thus, women born in the inferior ranks can never acquire titles to consideration; women born in the elevated ranks can never incur contempt; which is essential to the existence and duration of an aristocratic order. The great men, moreover, replace chastity with the religious ceremony of the taboo, which protects their wives from the plebeians, without protecting the daughters or wives of the latter from their own enterprises.

Women not being free, the great men ordinarily possess several; a single individual sometimes possesses up to nine. It does not appear that the number of wives the chiefs may have is limited. The men of the inferior ranks can have only one [575]. The women would not dare to permit themselves either to take their meals at the same table as their husbands, or to make use of the same foods. They eat in a separate place, and nourish themselves on the things reserved for persons of the lower classes: the most delicate meat and fish are forbidden to them [576]. They must obey their husbands in everything they order, even when they command them to give themselves over to prostitution; but the infidelities they might permit themselves without their consent would be washed away in their blood [577]. They mourn their husbands; but their husbands do not mourn them [578]. Finally, besides the humiliations to which they are subjected with regard to food and the manner of taking it, they are treated with a harshness, or rather with a brutality that seems to exclude the slightest affection: nothing is more ordinary than to see them mercilessly beaten by the men [579]. Raised solely for the grossest enjoyments they can give, they become objects of disgust as soon as age begins to fade their charms. The women who do not belong to the high classes are treated even more harshly than those of the superior ranks. It is from among the former that are taken those who are offered to the crews of European vessels [580]. The great men prostitute them in order to then seize the price of the prostitution [581].

Women treated in so brutal a manner could not long preserve their freshness. Thus, although in their early years they are tall, slender, and have grace, they lose, before the end of their springtime, says La Pérouse, that sweetness of expression, those elegant forms, whose imprint nature has not broken among these barbarous peoples, but which it seems to have left them only for an instant and with regret. [582]

However, women are less despised among these islanders, and their lot is less miserable than among the peoples of the copper-colored species of the north of America. They do not have to engage in the same labors; they are not exposed to the same dangers and the same fatigues. The elderly and children are equally less miserable: they have to fear neither abandonment, nor the rigors of the climates.

The relations that exist between parents and their children are analogous to those that exist between husbands and wives. We have seen previously that fathers treat their daughters as a commodity, that they give them, sell them, as it suits them. We have also seen that it is a duty for all the cadet sons of the aristocracy, engaged in the military association, to have all their children put to death, whatever sex they may belong to. The possessors of lands doubtless preserve most of theirs: but as, among these peoples, movable property is nil, and as real estate passes by right to the first-born, a man can do nothing for his children; they consequently owe him no gratitude. However, in all that does not touch upon the distribution of goods, paternal power has no bounds: whatever use a man may make of it, the chiefs do not attempt to limit it [583].