'A Little Widow is a Dangerous Thing'1

'Ne pleure pas, le noir te va si bien', sings a young widow in a French chanson, as she takes comfort from the attractive reflection in her mirror. A glance over her shoulder will convince us of the reality of the attraction in this particular case, and quotations could be cited from the literature of every land to prove that the attractive 'lustige Witwe' is a generally recognized type—but they are probably superfluous. Let the sceptical read Boccaccio.

One might be tempted to explain her charm as due to the way in which her situation appeals to one's sympathy and pity, and the explanation would certainly be, to a limited extent, correct, but there are doubtless further psychological factors at work which we can now investigate. (We note in passing that the French widow stresses the importance of her black clothes.) Her need for comfort, too, reminds us that widowhood is not without its disadvantages. The community at large is severe. It discourages her from remarrying, and encourages her to devote her life to the education of her children and to good works. Her magic too, is not altogether reliable. 'The magic of experience' has its counterpart in the 'fear of comparisons' amongst the rationalizations of the opposite sex.

Strangely enough, if we turn from our culture and our time to more primitive cultures, we find that the widows' magic becomes, as it were, blacker and blacker. A death in a native village will often affect the social life of the inhabitants for several years. Custom may impose a severe discipline on all the inhabitants after a death, but usually only those, who were either related to the dead or had come into physical contact with the corpse, are concerned. The widow is naturally the chief sufferer. In many cases the restrictions imposed on her differ only in degree from those imposed on the others. In British Guiana, for instance, the mourners paint their bodies a different colour, the area painted varying with the nearness of the rel