I Must Refer To Mr. Tylor's Interesting
Remarks On The Rationale Of The Custom, For They Do Not Bear Abridgment.
Professor Max Mueller humorously suggests that "the treatment which a
husband receives among ourselves at the time of his wife's
Confinement,
not only from mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and other female relations,
but from nurses, and from every consequential maid-servant in the house,"
is but a "survival," as Mr. Tylor would call it, of the couvade; or
at least represents the same feeling which among those many uncivilised
nations thus drove the husband to his bed, and sometimes (as among the
Caribs) put him when there to systematic torture.
(Tylor Researches, 288-296; Michel, Le Pays Basque, p. 201;
Sketches of the Meau-tsze, transl. by Bridgman in J. of North China
Br. of R. As. Soc., p. 277; Hudibras, Pt. III., canto I. 707; Fabliaus
et Contes par Barbazan, ed. Meon, I. 408-409; Indian Antiq. III. 151;
Mueller's Chips, II. 227 seqq.; many other references in TYLOR, and in a
capital monograph by Dr. H.H. Ploss of Leipzig, received during revision
of this sheet: 'Das Mannerkindbett.' What a notable example of the
German power of compounding is that title!)
[This custom seems to be considered generally as a survival of the
matriarchate in a society with a patriarchal regime. We may add to the
list of authorities on this subject: E. Westermarck, Hist. of Human
Marriage, 106, seqq.; G. A. Wilken, De Couvade bij de Volken v.d.
Indischen Archipel, Bijdr. Ind. Inst., 5th ser., iv. p. 250. Dr. Ernest
Martin, late physician of the French Legation at Peking, in an article on
La Couvade en Chine (Revue Scientifique, 24th March, 1894), gave a
drawing representing the couvade from a sketch by a native artist.
In the China Review (XI. pp. 401-402), "Lao Kwang-tung" notes these
interesting facts: "The Chinese believe that certain actions performed by
the husband during the pregnancy of his wife will affect the child. If a
dish of food on the table is raised by putting another dish, or anything
else below it, it is not considered proper for a husband, who is expecting
the birth of a child, to partake of it, for fear the two dishes should
cause the child to have two tongues. It is extraordinary that the caution
thus exercised by the Chinese has not prevented many of them from being
double-tongued. This result, it is supposed, however, will only happen if
the food so raised is eaten in the house in which the future mother
happens to be. It is thought that the pasting up of the red papers
containing antithetical and felicitous sentences on them, as at New Year's
time, by a man under similar circumstances, and this whether the future
mother sees the action performed or not, will cause the child to have red
marks on the face or any part of the body. The causes producing naevi
materni have probably been the origin of such marks, rather than the idea
entertained by the Chinese that the father, having performed an action by
some occult mode, influences the child yet unborn.
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