However, her uncertainty also stems from this lack of control; she dreams she is infinite; she is nevertheless alienated in the character she offers for the admiration of others; it depends on these foreign consciousnesses: this double she identifies with herself but to whose presence she passively submits is dangerous for her. This explains why she is touchy and vain. The slightest criticism or gibe destabilizes her. Her worth does not derive from her own effort but from a fickle approbation. This is not defined by individual activities but by general reputation; it seems to be quantitatively measurable; the price of merchandise decreases when it becomes too common: thus the girl is only rare, exceptional, remarkable, or extraordinary if no other one is. Her female companions are rivals or enemies; she tries to denigrate, to deny them; she is jealous and hostile.
It is clear that all the faults for which the adolescent girl is reproached merely express her situation. It is a painful condition to know one is passive and dependent at the age of hope and ambition, at the age when the will to live and to take a place in the world intensifies; woman learns at this conquering age that no conquest is allowed her, that she must disavow herself, that her future depends on men’s good offices. New social and sexual aspirations are awakened, but they are condemned to remain unsatisfied; all her vital or spiritual impulses are immediately barred. It is understandable that she should have trouble establishing her balance. Her erratic mood, her tears, and her nervous crises are less the result of a physiological fragility than the sign of her deep maladjustment.
However, this situation that the girl flees by a thousand inauthentic paths is also one that she sometimes assumes authentically. Her shortcomings make her irritating: but her unique virtues sometimes make her astonishing. Both have the same origin. From her rejection of the world, from her unsettled waiting, and from her nothingness, she can create a springboard for herself and emerge then in her solitude and her freedom.
The girl is secretive, tormented, in the throes of difficult conflicts. This complexity enriches her; her interior life develops more deeply than her brothers’; she is more attentive to her heart’s desires that thus become more subtle, more varied; she has more psychological sense than boys turned toward external goals. She is able to give weight to these revolts that oppose her to the world. She avoids the traps of seriousness and conformism. The concerted lies of her circle meet with her irony and clearsightedness. She tests her situation’s ambiguity on a daily basis: beyond sterile protest, she can have the courage to throw into question established optimism, preconceived values, and hypocritical and reassuring morality. Such is Maggie, the moving example given in The Mill on the Floss, in which George Eliot embodied the doubts and courageous rebellions of her youth against Victorian England; the heroes—particularly Tom, Maggie’s brother—stubbornly affirm conventional wisdom, immobilizing morality in formal rules: Maggie tries to reintroduce a breath of life, she overturns them, she goes to the limits of her solitude and emerges as a pure freedom beyond the fossilized male universe.
The adolescent girl barely finds anything but a negative use of this freedom. But her openness can engender a precious faculty of receptivity; she will prove to be devoted, attentive, understanding, and loving. Rosamond Lehmann’s heroines are marked by this docile generosity. In Invitation to the Waltz, Olivia, still shy and gauche, and barely interested in her appearance, is seen scrutinizing this world she will enter tomorrow with excited curiosity. She listens with all her heart to her succession of dancers, she endeavors to answer them according to their wishes, she is their echo, she vibrates, she accepts everything that is offered. Judy, the heroine of Dusty Answer, has the same endearing quality. She has not relinquished childhood joys; she likes to bathe naked at night in the park river; she loves nature, books, beauty, and life; she does not cultivate a narcissistic cult; without lies, without egotism, she does not look for an exaltation of self through men: her love is a gift. She bestows it on any being who seduces her, man or woman, Jennifer or Roddy. She gives herself without losing herself: she leads an independent student life; she has her own world, her own projects. But what distinguishes her from a boy is her attitude of expectation, her tender docility. In a subtle way, she is, in spite of everything, destined to the Other: the Other has a marvelous dimension in her eyes to the point that she is in love with all the young men of the neighboring family, their house, their sister, and their universe, all at the same time; it is not as a friend, it is as Other that Jennifer fascinates her. And she charms Roddy and his cousins by her capacity to yield to them, to shape herself to their desires; she is patience, sweetness, acceptance, and silent suffering.
Different but also captivating in the way she welcomes into her heart those she cherishes, Tessa, in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, is simultaneously spontaneous, wild, and giving. She refuses to abdicate anything of herself: finery, makeup, disguises, hypocrisy, acquired charms, caution, and female submission are repugnant to her; she desires to be loved but not behind a mask; she yields to Lewis’s moods, but without servility; she understands him, she vibrates in unison with him; but if they ever argue, Lewis knows that caresses will not subdue her: while authoritarian and vain Florence lets herself be conquered by kisses, Tessa succeeds in the extraordinary accomplishment of remaining free in her love, allowing her to love without either hostility or pride. Her nature has all the lures of artifice; to please, she never degrades herself, never lowers herself or locks herself in as object. Surrounded by artists who have committed their whole existence to musical creation, she does not feel this devouring demon within her; she wholly endeavors to love, understand, and help them: she does it effortlessly, out of a tender and spontaneous generosity, which is why she remains perfectly autonomous even in the instances in which she forgets herself in favor of others. Thanks to this pure authenticity, she is spared the conflicts of adolescence; she can suffer from the world’s harshness, she is not divided within herself; she is harmonious both as a carefree child and as a very wise woman. The sensitive and generous girl, receptive and ardent, is very ready to become a great lover.
When not encountering love, she may encounter poetry. Because she does not act, she watches, she feels, she records; she responds deeply to a color or a smile; because her destiny is scattered outside her, in cities already built, on mature men’s faces, she touches and tastes both passionately and more gratuitously than the young man. As she is poorly integrated into the human universe, and has trouble adapting to it, she is, like the child, able to see it; instead of being interested only in her grasp of things, she focuses on their meaning; she perceives particular profiles, unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a creative urge, and all too often she lacks the techniques that would allow her to express herself; but in conversations, letters, literary essays, and rough drafts, she does show an original sensibility. The girl throws herself passionately into things, because she is not yet mutilated in her transcendence; and the fact that she does not accomplish anything, that she is nothing, will make her drive even more fervent: empty and unlimited, what she will seek to reach from within her nothingness is All. That is why she will devote a special love to Nature: more than the adolescent boy, she worships it. Untamed and inhuman, Nature encompasses most obviously the totality of what is. The adolescent girl has not yet annexed any part of the universe: thanks to this impoverishment, the whole universe is her kingdom; when she takes possession of it, she also proudly takes possession of herself. Colette often recounted these youthful orgies:
For even then I so loved the dawn that my mother granted it to me as a reward. She used to agree to wake me at half-past three and off I would go, an empty basket on each arm, towards the kitchen-gardens that sheltered in the narrow bend of the river, in search of strawberries, black-currants, and hairy gooseberries.
At half-past three everything slumbered still in a primal blue, blurred and dewy, and as I went down the sandy road the mist, grounded by its own weight, bathed first my legs, then my well-bu
ilt little body, reaching at last to my mouth and ears, and finally to that most sensitive part of all, my nostrils … It was on that road and at that hour that I first became aware of my own self, experienced an inexpressible state of grace, and felt one with the first breath of air that stirred, the first bird, and the sun so newly born that it still looked not quite round … I came back when the bell rang for the first Mass. But not before I had eaten my fill, not before I had described a great circle in the woods, like a dog out hunting on its own, and tasted the water of the two hidden springs which I worshipped.15
Mary Webb describes in The House in Dormer Forest the intense joys a girl can know in communion with a familiar landscape:
When the atmosphere of the house became too thunderous and Amber’s nerves were strained to breaking-point, she crept away to the upper woods … It seemed to her that while Dormer lived by law, the forest lived by impulse. Through a gradual awakening to natural beauty, she reached a perception of beauty peculiar to herself. She began to perceive analogies. Nature became for her, not a fortuitous assemblage of pretty things, but a harmony, a poem solemn and austere … Beauty breathed there, light shone there that was not of the flower or the star. A tremor, mysterious and thrilling, seemed to run with the light … through the whispering forest … So her going out into the green world had in it something of a religious rite … On a still morning … she went up to the Birds’ Orchard. She often did this before the day of petty irritation began … she found some comfort in the inconsequence of the bird people … she came at last to the upper wood, and was instantly at grips with beauty. There was for her literally something of wrestling, of the mood which says: “I will not let thee go until thou bless me”… Leaning against a wild pear tree, she was aware, by her inward hearing, of the tidal wave of sap that rose so full and strong that she could almost imagine it roaring like the sea. Then a tremor of wind shook the flowering tree-tops, and she awoke again to the senses, to the strangeness of these utterances of the leaves … Every petal, every leaf, seemed to be conning some memory of profundities whence it had come. Every curving flower seemed full of echoes too majestic for its fragility … A breath of scented air came from the hilltops and stole among the branches. That which had form, and knew the mortality which is in form, trembled before that which passed, formless and immortal … Because of it the place became no mere congregation of trees, but a thing fierce as stellar space … For it possesses itself forever in a vitality withheld, immutable. It was this that drew Amber with breathless curiosity into the secret haunts of nature. It was this that struck her now into a kind of ecstasy …
Women as different as Emily Brontë and Anna de Noailles experienced similar fervor in their youth—and it continued throughout their lives.
The texts I have cited convincingly show the comfort the adolescent girl finds in fields and woods. In the paternal house reign mother, laws, custom, and routine, and she wants to wrest herself from this past; she wants to become a sovereign subject in her own turn: but socially she only accedes to her adult life by becoming woman; she pays for her liberation with an abdication; but in the midst of plants and animals she is a human being; a subject, a freedom, she is freed both from her family and from males. She finds an image of the solitude of her soul in the secrecy of forests and the tangible figure of transcendence in the vast horizons of the plains; she is herself this limitless land, this summit jutting toward the sky; she can follow, she will follow, these roads that leave for an unknown future; sitting on the hilltop, she dominates the riches of the world spread out at her feet, given to her; through the water’s palpitations, the shimmering of the light, she anticipates the joys, tears, and ecstasies that she does not yet know; the adventures of her own heart are confusedly promised her by ripples on the pond and patches of sun. Smells and colors speak a mysterious language, but one word stands out with triumphant clarity: “life.” Existence is not only an abstract destiny inscribed in town hall registers; it is future and carnal richness. Having a body no longer seems like a shameful failing; in these desires that the adolescent girl repudiates under the maternal gaze, she recognizes the sap mounting in the trees; she is no longer cursed, she proudly claims her kinship with leaves and flowers; she rumples a corolla, and she knows that a living prey will fill her empty hands one day. Flesh is no longer filth: it is joy and beauty. Merged with sky and heath, the girl is this vague breath that stirs up and kindles the universe, and she is every sprig of heather; an individual rooted in the soil and infinite consciousness, she is both spirit and life; her presence is imperious and triumphant like that of the earth itself.
Beyond Nature she sometimes seeks an even more remote and stunning reality; she is willing to lose herself in mystical ecstasies; in periods of faith many young female souls demanded that God fill the emptiness of their being; the vocations of Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila were revealed to them at a young age.16 Joan of Arc was a girl. In other periods, humanity appears the supreme end; so the mystical impulse flows into defined projects; but it is also a youthful desire for the absolute that gave birth to the flame that nourished the life of Mme Roland or Rosa Luxemburg. From her subjugation, her impoverishment, and the depths of her refusal, the girl can extract the most daring courage. She finds poetry; she finds heroism too. One of the ways of assuming the fact that she is poorly integrated into society is to go beyond its restricting horizons.