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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

i

CHAP. L.

CUSTOM OF TIIE " COUVADE"

93

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they do not bear abridgment. Professor Max Müller 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, éd. Méon, I. 408-409 ; Indian Antiq. III. 151; Müller's Chips, II. 227 se9q. ; many other references in TYLOR, and in a capital monograph by Dr. H. H. Ploss of Leipzig, received during revision of this sheet : ` Das Illännerkindbett.' 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 régime. We may add to the list of authorities on this subject : E. tVestermarck, Hist. of Human Marriage, io6, 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 Scientque, 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. A case is said to have occurred in which ill effects were obviated, or rather obliterated, by the red papers being torn down, after the birth of the infant, and soaked in water, when as the red disappeared from the paper, so the child's face assumed a natural hue. Lord Avebury also speaks of la couvade as existing among the Chinese of West Yun-Nan. (Origin of Civilisation and Primitive Condition of Alan, p. i8)."

Dr. J. A. II. Murray, editor of the New E1rslish Dictionary, wrote, in The Academy, of 29th October, 1892, a letter with the heading of Couvade, The Genesis of an Anthropological Term, which elicited an answer from Dr. E. B. Tylor (Academy, 5th November) : " Wanting a general term for such customs," writes Dr. Tylor,

and finding statements in books that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times,

in the south of France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching (couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since become established in English." The discussion was carried on in The Academy, 12th and 19th November, loth and 17th December ; Mr. A. L. Mayhew wrote (12th

November) : " There is no doubt whatever that Dr. Tylor and Professor Max Müller (in a review of Dr. Tylor's book) share the glory of having given a new technical sense to an old provincial French word, and of seeing it accepted in France, and safely enshrined in the great Dictionary of Littré."