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marriage. The old man dismisses her reformer’s zeal: "'You should not talk like that, madam... animals are cattle, but human beings have a law given them. ’” 25 He does not mean just religious law, or the law of tradition, or the law of the state: he means the way patriarchy really works in its most orthodox mode. Men must make women afraid and compliant, including through beatings; women must be housebound and servile. The men, then, can attend orgies or engage in any other sexual activity. The old man is articulating the law of male domination, with special emphasis on its traditional sexual double standard. The sexual double standard repudiates the modern assertions of the woman that women have a right to love actively and passionately in marriage, a human right; and also a human right to be loved. Obedience, not love, is the proper basis of marriage for a woman, according to the old man; and masculinity is measured by how well a man controls his wife in the house and his horse in the field. The woman argues for a passion that is mutual.
    Then the killer/husband intervenes with hostile, mocking questions to the woman: what is this love? what is true love? what sanctifies marriage? how long does true love last? He sarcastically confronts the sexual innocence behind her modern pose. ‘“Every man, ’” he tells her, “‘experiences what you call love for every pretty woman.’” 26 He ridicules her belief that a husband and a wife can share a sensibility, principles, values:
“Spiritual affinity! Identity of ideals!... But in that case why go to bed together? (Excuse my coarseness! ) Or do people go to bed together because of the identity of their ideals? ” he said, bursting into a nervous laugh. 27
    People marry, he says, for “‘nothing but copulation! ’” 28 Then, he thinks that he is recognized; a notorious man who killed his wife, has been on trial, has been acquitted. The woman and others move to a different car. The narrator, until now an unobtrusive “I, ” stays on; and the killer/husband tells how and why he killed his wife. He is cynical, bitter, overwrought, unbalanced, extreme in his ideas; yet analytical, with a shrewd intelligence. He may be unhinged or not. Was he, when he killed his wife? Is he, because he killed his wife? His ideas are lucid, with no sense of proportion. His antagonism to sexual intercourse is absolute. His social critique repudiates all the sexual commonplaces, the rites and rituals of socially normal sexuality, including the allowed sexual indulgences of unmarried men and the allowed adulteries of married men. His critique is not of superficial conventions or deeper hypocrisies. It is a radical critique of the elements of social life that maintain intercourse as a right, as a duty, or as pleasure, no matter what the cost of intercourse as such, no matter to whom. The violence in his marriage—the violence of feeling and the final act of killing—had for him an internal logic and inevitability, because intercourse distorts and ultimately destroys any potential human equality between men and women by turning women into objects and men into exploiters. He is a political dissident with a social analysis, not a personal psychology. He is tormented by the depravity of the sex act; butdepravityhas a political meaning rooted in a comprehension, almost unique in male literature, of the fundamental simplicity and destructiveness of sexual exploitation:
“the enslavement of woman lies simply in the fact that people desire, and think it good, to avail themselves of her as a tool of enjoyment. Well, and they liberate woman, give her all sorts of rights equal to man, but continue to regard her as an instrument of enjoyment, and so educate her in childhood and afterwards by public opinion. And there she is, still the same humiliated and depraved slave, and the man still a depraved slave-owner.
“They emancipate women in universities and in law courts, but continue to regard