And since she was subjugated as Mother, she will, as Mother first, be cherished and respected. Of the two ancient faces of maternity, modern man recognizes only the benevolent one. Limited in time and space, possessing only one body and one finite life, man is but one individual in the middle of a foreign Nature and History. Limited like him, similarly inhabited by the spirit, woman belongs to Nature, she is traversed by the infinite current of Life, she thus appears as the mediator between the individual and the cosmos. When the mother image became reassuring and holy, it is understandable that the man turned to her with love. Lost in nature, he seeks escape, but separated from her, he aspires to return to her. Solidly settled in the family and society, in accord with laws and customs, the mother is the very incarnation of the Good: the nature in which she participates becomes Good; she is no longer the spirit’s enemy; and though she remains mysterious, it is a smiling mystery, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonnas. Man does not wish to be woman, but he longs to wrap himself in everything that is, including this woman he is not: in worshipping his mother, he tries to appropriate her riches so foreign to him. To recognize himself as his mother’s son, he recognizes the mother in him, integrating femininity insofar as it is a connection to the earth, to life, and to the past. In Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily, that is what the hero goes to find from his mother: his native land, its scents and its fruits, his childhood, his ancestors’ past, traditions, and the roots from which his individual existence separated him. It is this very rootedness that exalts man’s pride in going beyond; he likes to admire himself breaking away from his mother’s arms to leave for adventure, the future, and war; this departure would be less moving if there were no one to try to hold him back: it would look like an accident, not a hard-won victory. And he also likes to know that these arms are ready to welcome him back. After the tension of action, the hero likes to taste the restfulness of immanence again, by his mother’s side: she is refuge, slumber; by her hand’s caress he sinks into the bosom of nature, lets himself be lulled by the vast flow of life as peacefully as in the womb or in the tomb. And if tradition has him die calling on his mother, it is because under the maternal gaze death itself, like birth, is tamed, symmetrical with birth, indissolubly linked with his whole carnal life. The mother remains connected to death as in ancient Parcae mythology; it is she who buries the dead, who mourns. But her role is precisely to integrate death with life, with society, with the good. And so the cult of “heroic mothers” is systematically encouraged: if society persuades mothers to surrender their sons to death, then it thinks it can claim the right to assassinate them. Because of the mother’s hold on her sons, it is useful for society to make her part of it: this is why the mother is showered with signs of respect, why she is endowed with all virtues, why a religion is created around her from which it is forbidden to stray under severe risk of sacrilege and blasphemy; she is made the guardian of morality; servant of man, servant of the powers that be, she fondly guides her children along fixed paths. The more resolutely optimistic the collectivity and the more docilely it accepts this loving authority, the more transfigured the mother will be. The American “Mom” has become the idol described by Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers, because the official American ideology is the most stubbornly optimistic. To glorify the mother is to accept birth, life, and death in both their animal and their social forms and to proclaim the harmony of nature and society. Auguste Comte makes the woman the divinity of future Humanity because he dreams of achieving this synthesis. But this is also why all rebels assail the figure of the mother; in holding her up to ridicule, they reject the given claims supposedly imposed on them through the female guardian of morals and laws.20
The aura of respect around the Mother and the taboos that surround her repress the hostile disgust that mingles spontaneously with the carnal tenderness she inspires. However, lurking below the surface, the latent horror of motherhood survives. In particular, it is interesting that in France since the Middle Ages, a secondary myth has been forged, freely expressing this repugnance: that of the Mother-in-Law. From fabliau to vaudeville, there are no taboos on man’s ridicule of motherhood in general through his wife’s mother. He hates the idea that the woman he loves was conceived: the mother-in-law is the clear image of the decrepitude that she doomed her daughter to by giving her life, and her obesity and her wrinkles forecast the obesity and wrinkles that the future so sadly prefigures for the young bride; at her mother’s side she is no longer an individual but an example of a species; she is no longer the desired prey or the cherished companion, because her individual existence dissolves into universality. Her individuality is mockingly contested by generalities, her spirit’s autonomy by her being rooted in the past and in the flesh: this is the derision man objectifies as a grotesque character; but through the rancor of his laughter, he knows that the fate of his wife is the same for all human beings; it is his own. In every country, legends and tales have also personified the cruel side of motherhood in the stepmother. She is the cruel mother who tries to kill Snow White. The ancient Kali with the necklace of severed heads lives on in the mean stepmother—Mme Fichini whipping Sophie throughout Mme de Ségur’s books.
Yet behind the sainted Mother crowds the coterie of white witches who provide man with herbal juices and stars’ rays: grandmothers, old women with kind eyes, good-hearted servants, sisters of charity, nurses with magical hands, the sort of mistress Verlaine dreamed of:
Sweet, pensive and dark and surprised at nothing
And who will at times kiss you on the forehead like a child.
They are ascribed the pure mystery of knotted vines, of freshwater; they dress and heal wounds; their wisdom is life’s silent wisdom, they understand without words. In their presence man forgets his pride; he understands the sweetness of yielding and becoming a child, because between him and her there is no struggle for prestige: he could not resent the inhuman virtues of nature; and in their devotion, the wise initiates who care for him recognize they are his servants; he submits to their benevolent powers because he knows that while submitting to them, he remains their master. Sisters, childhood girlfriends, pure young girls, and all future mothers belong to this blessed troupe. And the wife herself, when her erotic magic fades, is regarded by many men less as a lover than as the mother of their children. Once the mother is sanctified and servile, she can safely be with a woman friend, she being also sanctified and submissive. To redeem the mother is to redeem the flesh, and thus carnal union and the wife.
Deprived of her magic weapons by nuptial rites, economically and socially dependent on her husband, the “good wife” is man’s most precious treasure. She belongs to him so profoundly that she shares the same nature with him: “Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia”; she has his name and his gods, and she is his responsibility: he calls her his other half. He takes pride in his wife as in his home, his land, his flocks, and his wealth, and sometimes even more; through her he displays his power to the rest of the world: she is his yardstick and his earthly share. For Orientals, a wife should be fat: everyone sees that she is well fed and brings respect to her master.21 A Muslim is all the more respected if he possesses a large number of flourishing wives. In bourgeois society, one of woman’s assigned roles is to represent: her beauty, her charm, her intelligence, and her elegance are outward signs of her husband’s fortune, as is the body of his car. If he is rich, he covers her with furs and jewels. If he is poorer, he boasts of her moral qualities and her housekeeping talents; most deprived, he feels he owns something earthly if he has a wife to serve him; the hero of The Taming of the Shrew summons all his neighbors to show them his authority in taming his wife. A sort of King Candaules resides in all men: he exhibits his wife because he believes she displays his own worth.
But woman does more than flatter man’s social vanity; she allows him a more intimate pride; he delights in his domination over her; superimposed on the naturalistic images of the plowshare cutting furrows are more spiritual symbols concerning t
he wife as a person; the husband “forms” his wife not only erotically but also spiritually and intellectually; he educates her, impresses her, puts his imprint on her. One of the daydreams he enjoys is the impregnation of things by his will, shaping their form, penetrating their substance: the woman is par excellence the “clay in his hands” that passively lets itself be worked and shaped, resistant while yielding, permitting masculine activity to go on. A too-plastic material wears out by its softness; what is precious in woman is that something in her always escapes all embraces; so man is master of a reality that is all the more worthy of being mastered as it surpasses him. She awakens in him a being heretofore ignored whom he recognizes with pride as himself; in their safe marital orgies he discovers the splendor of his animality: he is the Male; and woman, correlatively, the female, but this word sometimes takes on the most flattering implications: the female who broods, who nurses, who licks her young, who defends them, and who risks her life to save them is an example for humans; with emotion, man demands this patience and devotion from his companion; again it is Nature, but imbued with all of the virtues useful to society, family, and the head of the family, virtues he knows how to keep locked in his home. A common desire of children and men is to uncover the secret hidden inside things; but in this, the matter can be deceptive: a doll ripped apart with her stomach outside has no more interiority; the interior of living things is more impenetrable; the female womb is the symbol of immanence, of depth; it delivers its secrets in part as when, for example, pleasure shows on a woman’s face, but it also holds them in; man catches life’s obscure palpitations in his house without the mystery being destroyed by possession. In the human world, woman transposes the female animal’s functions: she maintains life, she reigns over the zones of immanence; she transports the warmth and the intimacy of the womb into the home; she watches over and enlivens the dwelling where the past is kept, where the future is presaged; she engenders the future generation, and she nourishes the children already born; thanks to her, the existence that man expends throughout the world by his work and his activity is re-centered by delving into her immanence: when he comes home at night, he is anchored to the earth; the wife assures the days’ continuity; whatever risks he faces in the outside world, she guarantees the stability of his meals and sleep; she repairs whatever has been damaged or worn out by activity: she prepares the tired worker’s food, she cares for him if he is ill, she mends and washes. And within the conjugal universe that she sets up and perpetuates, she brings in the whole vast world: she lights the fires, puts flowers in vases, and domesticates the emanations of sun, water, and earth. A bourgeois writer cited by Bebel summarizes this ideal in all seriousness as follows: “Man wants not only someone whose heart beats for him, but whose hand wipes his brow, who radiates peace, order, and tranquillity, a silent control over himself and those things he finds when he comes home every day; he wants someone who can spread over everything the indescribable perfume of woman who is the vivifying warmth of home life.”
It is clear how spiritualized the figure of woman became with the birth of Christianity; the beauty, warmth, and intimacy that man wishes to grasp through her are no longer tangible qualities; instead of being the summation of the pleasurable quality of things, she becomes their soul; deeper than carnal mystery, her heart holds a secret and pure presence that reflects truth in the world. She is the soul of the house, the family, and the home, as well as larger groups: the town, province, or nation. Jung observes that cities have always been compared to the Mother because they hold their citizens in their bosoms: this is why Cybele was depicted crowned with towers; for the same reason the term “mother country” is used and not only because of the nourishing soil; rather, a more subtle reality found its symbol in the woman. In the Old Testament and in the Apocalypse, Jerusalem and Babylon are not only mothers: they are also wives. There are virgin cities and prostitute cities such as Babel and Tyre. France too has been called “the eldest daughter” of the Church; France and Italy are Latin sisters. Woman’s function is not specified, but femininity is, in statues that represent France, Rome, and Germany and those on the Place de la Concorde that evoke Strasbourg and Lyon. This assimilation is not only allegoric: it is affectively practiced by many men.22 Many a traveler would ask woman for the key to the countries he visits: when he holds an Italian or Spanish woman in his arms, he feels he possesses the fragrant essence of Italy or Spain. “When I come to a new city, the first thing I do is to visit a brothel,” said a journalist. If a cinnamon hot chocolate can make Gide discover the whole of Spain, all the more reason kisses from exotic lips will bring to a lover a country with its flora and fauna, its traditions, and its culture. Woman is the summation neither of its political institutions nor of its economic resources; but she is the incarnation of carnal flesh and mystical mana. From Lamartine’s Graziella to Loti’s novels and Morand’s short stories, the foreigner is seen as trying to appropriate the soul of a region through women. Mignon, Sylvie, Mireille, Colomba, and Carmen uncover the most intimate truth about Italy, Valois, Provence, Corsica, or Andalusia. When the Alsatian Frederique falls in love with Goethe, the Germans take it as a symbol of Germany’s annexation; likewise, when Colette Baudoche refuses to marry a German, Barrès sees it as Alsace refusing Germany. He personifies Aigues-Mortes and a whole refined and frivolous civilization in the sole person of Berenice; she represents the sensibility of the writer himself. Man recognizes his own mysterious double in her, she who is the soul of nature, cities, and the universe; man’s soul is Psyche, a woman.
Psyche has feminine traits in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume”:
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul …
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her …
And I said—“What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
And Mallarmé, at the theater, in a dialogue with “a soul, or else our idea” (that is, divinity present in man’s spirit) called it “a most exquisite abnormal lady [sic].”23
Thing of harmony, ME, a dream,
Firm, flexible feminine, whose silences lead
To pure acts!…
Thing of mystery, ME.*
Such is Valéry’s way of hailing her. The Christian world substituted less carnal presences for nymphs and fairies; but homes, landscapes, cities, and individuals themselves are still haunted by an impalpable femininity.
This truth buried in the night of things also shines in the heavens; perfect immanence, the Soul is at the same time the transcendent, the Idea. Not only cities and nations but also entities and abstract institutions are cloaked in feminine traits: the Church, the Synagogue, the Republic, and Humanity are women, as well as Peace, War, Liberty, the Revolution, Victory. Man feminizes the ideal that he posits before him as the essential Other, because woman is the tangible figure of alterity; this is why almost all the allegories in language and in iconography are women.24 Soul and Idea, woman is also the mediator between them: she is the Grace that leads the Christian to God, she is Beatrice guiding Dante to the beyond, Laura beckoning Petrarch to the highest peaks of poetry. She appears in all doctrines assimilating Nature to Spirit as Harmony, Reason, and Truth. Gnostic sects made Wisdom a woman, Sophia; they attributed the world’s redemption to her, and even its creation. So woman is no longer flesh, she is glorious body; rather than trying to possess her, men venerate her for her untouched splendor; the pale dead of Edgar Allan Poe are as fluid as water, wind, or memory; for courtly love, for les précieux, and in all of the gallant tradition, woman is no longer an animal creature but rather an ethereal being, a breath, a radiance. Thus it is that the feminine Night’s opacity is converted into transparence, and obscurity into purity, as in Novalis’s texts:
Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became
a cloud of dust—and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved.
Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night?… Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother … More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us.
The downward attraction exercised by woman is inverted; she beckons man no longer earthward, but toward heaven.
The Eternal Feminine
Leads us upward,
proclaimed Goethe at the end of Faust, Part Two.
As the Virgin Mary is the most perfected image, the most widely venerated image of the regenerated woman devoted to the Good, it is interesting to see how she appears through literature and iconography. Here are passages from medieval litanies showing how fervent Christians addressed her:
Most high Virgin, thou art the fertile Dew, the Fountain of Joy, the Channel of mercy, the Well of living waters that cools our passions.
Thou art the Breast from which God nurses orphans.
Thou art the Marrow, the Inside, the Core of all good.
Thou art the guileless Woman whose love never changes.
Thou art the Probatic Pool, the Remedy of lepers, the subtle Physician whose like is found neither in Salerno nor in Montpellier.
Thou art the Lady of healing hands, whose fingers so beautiful, so white, so long, restore noses and mouths, give new eyes and ears. Thou calmest passions, givest life to the paralyzed, givest strength to the weak, risest the dead.