This savage severity fades as superstitions diminish and fear dissipates. But in the countryside, godless and homeless bohemian women are still regarded with suspicion. The woman who freely exercises her charms—adventuress, vamp, femme fatale—remains a disquieting type. In Hollywood films the Circe image survives as the bad woman. Women were burned as witches simply because they were beautiful. And in the prudish intimidation of provincial virtues, the old specter of dissolute women is perpetuated.
These very dangers make woman captivating game for an adventurous man. Disregarding his rights as a husband, refusing to uphold society’s laws, he will try to conquer her in single combat. He tries to annex the woman, including her resistance; he pursues in her the same freedom through which she escapes him. In vain. Freedom cannot be carved up: the free woman will often be free at the expense of man. Sleeping Beauty might wake up with displeasure, she might not recognize her Prince Charming in the one who awakens her, she might not smile. This is precisely the case of Citizen Kane, whose protégée is seen to be oppressed and whose generosity is revealed to be a will for power and tyranny; the hero’s wife listens to his exploits indifferently, the Muse yawns, listening to the verses of the poet who dreams of her. Out of boredom, the Amazon can refuse combat; and she can also emerge victorious. Roman women of the decadence, and many American women today, impose their whims or their law on men. Where is Cinderella? The man wanted to give, and here is the woman taking. No longer a game, it is a question of self-defense. From the moment the woman is free, her only destiny is one she freely creates for herself. So the relation between the two sexes is a relation of struggle. Having become a peer to man, she seems as formidable as when she faced him as foreign Nature. The female nurturer, devoted and patient, turns into an avid and devouring beast. The bad woman also sets her roots in the earth, in Life; but the earth is a grave, and life a bitter combat: so the myth of the industrious honeybee or mother hen is replaced by the devouring insect, the praying mantis, the spider; the woman is no longer the one who nurses her young but the one who eats the male; the egg is no longer the storehouse of abundance but a trap of inert matter drowning the mutilated spermatozoid; the womb, that warm, peaceful, and safe haven, becomes the rank octopus, the carnivorous plant, abyss of convulsive darkness; within it lives a serpent that insatiably swallows the male’s strength. Such a dialectic turns the erotic object into female black magic, turns the female servant into a traitor, Cinderella into a witch, and changes all women into the enemy: here is the ransom man pays for having posited himself in bad faith as the sole essential.
But this enemy face is not woman’s definitive form either. Instead, Manichaeism is introduced within the feminine kind. Pythagoras linked the good principle to man and the bad principle to woman; men have tried to overcome the bad by annexing woman; they have been partially successful; but just as Christianity, by introducing the ideas of redemption and salvation, gave its full sense to the word “damnation,” the bad woman stands out in opposition to the sanctified woman. In the course of this querelle des femmes, which has endured from the Middle Ages to our times, some men only want to see the blessed woman they dream of, while others want the cursed woman who belies their dreams. But in fact, if man can find everything in woman, it is because she has both faces. In a carnal and living way, she represents all the values and anti-values that give life meaning. Here, clear-cut, we have the good and the Bad, in opposition to each other in the guise of devoted Mother and perfidious Lover; in the Old English ballad “Lord Randal,” a young knight dies in his mother’s arms, poisoned by his mistress. Richepin’s La glu (The Leech) takes up the same theme, but with more pathos and bad taste. Angelic Michaela is contrasted with dark Carmen. The mother, the faithful fiancée, and the patient wife provide healing to the wounds inflicted on men’s hearts by vamps and witches. Between these clearly fixed poles a multitude of ambiguous figures were yet to be defined, the pitiful, the detestable, sinners, victims, coquettes, the weak, the angelic, the devilish. A multitude of behaviors and feelings thereby solicit man and enrich him.
The very complexity of woman enchants him: here is a wonderful servant who can excite him at little expense. Is she angel or devil? Uncertainty makes her a sphinx. One of the most famous brothels of Paris was placed under its aegis. In the grand epoch of Femininity, in the time of corsets, of Paul Bourget, of Henry Bataille, and of the French cancan, the sphinx theme is all the rage in comedies, poems, and songs: “Who are you, where do you come from, strange sphinx?” And dreams and queries about the feminine mystery continue still. To preserve this mystery, men have long implored women not to give up their long dresses, petticoats, veils, long gloves, and high boots: whatever accentuates difference in the Other makes them more desirable, since it is the Other as such that man wants to possess. In his letters, Alain-Fournier reproaches English women for their boyish handshake: French women’s modest reserve flusters him. Woman must remain secret, unknown, to be adored as a faraway princess; Fournier seems not to have been terribly deferential to the women who entered his life, but it is in a woman, whose main virtue was to seem inaccessible, that he incarnates all the wonder of childhood, of youth, the nostalgia for a lost paradise. In Yvonne de Galais he traced a white and gold image. But men cherish even feminine defects if they create mystery. “A woman must have her caprices,” said a man authoritatively to a reasonable woman. Caprices are unpredictable; they lend woman the grace of undulating water; lying embellishes her with glittering reflections; coquetry, even perversity, is her intoxicating perfume. Deceitful, evasive, misunderstood, duplicitous, it is thus that she best lends herself to men’s contradictory desires; she is Maya of the innumerable metamorphoses. It is a commonplace to represent the Sphinx as a young woman: virginity is one of the secrets that men—and all the more so if they are libertines—find the most disconcerting; a young girl’s purity gives hope for all kinds of license, and no one knows what perversities are concealed beneath her innocence; still close to animal and plant, already compliant with social rites, she is neither child nor adult; her timid femininity does not inspire fear, but mild unrest. It is understandable that she is one of the privileged figures of the feminine mystery. But as the “real young lady” fades, worshipping her has become a bit outdated. On the other hand, the prostitute’s character that Gantillon, in his triumphantly successful play, gave to Maya still has a great deal of prestige. She is one of the most flexible of feminine types, one that best allows the great game of vices and virtues. For the timorous puritan, she embodies evil, shame, disease, and damnation; she inspires horror and disgust; she belongs to no man, but gives herself to all of them and lives on the trade; therein she regains the fearsome independence of lewd primitive Goddess Mothers, and she embodies the Femininity that masculine society has not sanctified, that remains rife with malevolent powers; in the sexual act, the male cannot imagine that he possesses her, he is only given over to demons of the flesh, a humiliation, a stain particularly felt by Anglo-Saxons in whose eyes the flesh is more or less reviled. On the other hand, a man who is not frightened by the flesh will love the prostitute’s generous and rudimentary affirmation; in her he will see exalted femininity that no morality has diminished; he will find in her body again those magic virtues that in the past made the woman kin to the stars and the sea: a Henry Miller, sleeping with a prostitute, feels he has dived into the very depths of life, death, the cosmos; he meets God in the moist shadows of the receptive vagina. Because she is on the margins of a hypocritically moral world, a sort of pariah, the “lost girl” can be regarded as the challenger of all official virtues; her indignity relates her to authentic saints; for the oppressed shall be exalted; Christ looked upon Mary Magdalene with favor; sin opens the gates of heaven more easily than hypocritical virtue. Thus Raskolnikov sacrificed, at Sonya’s feet, the arrogant masculine pride that led him to crime; murder exacerbated this will for separation that is in all men: resigned, abandoned by all, a humble prostitute is best suited to recei
ve his vow of abdication.31 The words “lost girl” awaken disturbing echoes; many men dream of losing themselves: it is not so easy, one does not easily attain Evil in a positive form; and even the demoniac is frightened by excessive crimes; the woman enables the celebration of the black masses, where Satan is evoked without exactly being invited; she is on the margin of the masculine world: acts that concern her are really without consequence; yet she is a human being, and through her, dark revolts against human laws can be carried out. From Musset to Georges Bataille, visiting “girls” was hideous and fascinating debauchery. Sade and Sacher-Masoch satisfied their haunting desires; their disciples, and most men who had to satisfy their “vices,” commonly turned to prostitutes. Of all women, they were the ones who were the most subjected to the male, and yet the ones who best escaped him; this is what makes them likely to take on numerous meanings. There is, however, no feminine figure—virgin, mother, wife, sister, servant, lover, fierce virtue, smiling odalisque—capable of encapsulating the inconstant yearnings of men.
It is for psychology—specifically psychoanalysis—to discover why an individual is drawn more particularly to one aspect or another of the multi-faceted Myth and why he incarnates it in any one particular form. But this myth is involved in all complexes, obsessions, and psychoses. In particular, many neuroses are rooted in the vertigo of prohibition: and this vertigo can only emerge if taboos have previously been established; external social pressure is not enough to explain its presence; in fact, social prohibitions are not simply conventions; they have—among other significations—an ontological meaning that each individual experiences in his own way. For example, it is interesting to examine the Oedipus complex; it is too often considered as being produced by a struggle between instinctive tendencies and social directives; but it is first of all an interior conflict within the subject himself. The infant’s attachment to the mother’s breast is first an attachment to Life in its immediate form, in its generality and its immanence; the rejection of weaning is the rejection of the abandonment to which the individual is condemned once he is separated from the Whole; from then on, and as he becomes more individualized and separated, the taste he retains for the mother’s flesh now torn from his own can be termed “sexual”; his sensuality is thus mediated, it has become transcendence to ward a foreign object. But the sooner and more decidedly the child assumes itself as subject, the more the carnal bond that challenges his autonomy will become problematic for him. So he shuns his mother’s caresses; his mother’s authority, the rights she has over him, even her very presence, inspire a kind of shame in him. Particularly he finds it embarrassing and obscene to be aware of her as flesh, and he avoids thinking of her body; in the horror that he feels toward his father or a second husband or a lover, there is less jealousy than scandal; to be reminded that his mother is a carnal being is to be reminded of his own birth, an event he repudiates with all his force; or at least he wishes to give it the majesty of a great cosmic phenomenon; he thinks that Nature, which invests all individuals but belongs to none, should be contained in his mother; he hates her to become prey, not—as it is often presumed—because he wants to possess her himself, but because he wants her to exist above all possession: she must not have the ordinary features of wife or mistress. When in adolescence, however, his sexuality becomes virile, his mother’s body begins to disturb him; but it is because he grasps femininity in general in her; and often the desire aroused by the sight of her thigh or her breast disappears as soon as the young boy realizes that this flesh is maternal flesh. There are many cases of perversion, since adolescence, being the age of confusion, is the age of perversion where disgust leads to sacrilege, where temptation is born from the forbidden. But it must not be thought that the son naively wishes to sleep with his mother and that exterior prohibitions interfere and oppress him; on the contrary, desire is born because this prohibition is constituted within the heart of the individual himself. This censure is the most normal, the most general reaction. But there again, it does not arise from social regulation masking instinctive desires. Rather, respect is the sublimation of an original disgust; the young man refuses to regard his mother as carnal; he transfigures her, he associates her with one of the pure images of the sacred woman society offers. This is how he helps strengthen the image of the ideal Mother who will save the next generation. But this image has such force only because it emanates from an individual dialectic. And since every woman is inhabited by the general essence of Woman, thus Mother, it is certain that the attitude to the Mother will have repercussions in his relations with wife and mistress; but less simply than is often imagined. The adolescent who has concretely and sensually desired his mother may have desired woman in general in her: and the fervor of his temperament will be appeased with any woman, no matter who; he is not doomed to incestuous nostalgia.32 On the other hand, a young man who has had a tender but platonic respect for his mother may in every case wish for woman to be part of maternal purity.