In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

MALE VS. FEMALE 307
specific situations, however, a male voice, disguised as the voice of
reason, comes through. He finds the new Soviet laws against rape excessively
harsh (Toller, 135). As a guest at a political rally of revolutionary
women, he admires above all the "natural charm" of the speakers (109).
And he observes with obvious satisfaction that a tendency toward sexual
promiscuity in the years following the October Revolution has recently
been countered by a return to more conventional forms of courtship:
"During the initial years, the reaction against the constraints of bourgeois
hypocrisy was extremely strong. People were searching for the 'full
experience of life.' They despised all tenderness as an unnecessary complication,
and romantic declarations as merely a veneer over biomechanical
processes ... But the sexes have now returned to a greater degree of
mutual respect; they treat each other with more tenderness; they are less
promiscuous. They are even writing love letters again . . . Marriages
between very young people are frequent, and the number of divorces is
decreasing" (146-147).
Gerhart Hauptmann's play Dorothea Angermann contains a heavy
dose of straightforwardly chauvinistic comments regarding women, but
they are all attributed to the least admirable male characters. When
Pastor Angermann-who continually invokes the repressive norms of
Protestant morality, though he never manages to control his own sexual
appetites-learns from his young second wife that Dorothea (her stepdaughter
and his daughter) has become pregnant, he reacts with the most
archaic claim of male authority: "I have failed to maintain domestic
discipline-not only with Dorothea, but also with you, and with all the
womenfolk" (Hauptmann, 47). The young academic Herbert Pfannschmidt
nobly insists on proposing marriage to Dorothea, but fails to
dissuade her from a union with the brutal Mario, the father of her child.
And Mario has nothing but scorn for Herbert: "I won-and I couldn't
care less about your irony. You just got to know about women" (114).
Of course, one cannot blame Hauptmann for the views of his most
objectionable protagonists. On the other hand, however, the plot proves
them right. Dorothea yields to Mario's advances, and becomes the agent
of her own destruction by staying with him-in spite of (or perhaps
because of) the humiliations he inflicts on her. The play thus seems to
suggest that women are instinctually incapable of accepting that very
equality which is owed them in the name of moral law.
In a letter to the poet Kurt Schwitters, the Bauhaus designer Marcel