Preparing meals is more positive work and often more enjoyable than cleaning. First of all, it involves going to the market, which is for many housewives the best time of the day. The loneliness of the household weighs on the woman just as routine tasks leave her head empty. She is happy when, in Midi towns, she can sew, wash, and peel vegetables while chatting on her doorstep; fetching water from the river is a grand adventure for half-cloistered Muslim women: I saw a little village in Kabyle where the women tore down the fountain an official had built on the plaza; going down every morning to the wadi flowing at the foot of the hill was their only distraction. All the time they are doing their marketing, waiting in lines, in shops, on street corners, they talk about things that affirm their “homemaking worth” from which each one draws the sense of her own importance; they feel part of a community that—for an instant—is opposed to the society of men as the essential to the inessential. But above all, making a purchase is a profound pleasure: it is a discovery, almost an invention. Gide observes in his Journals that the Muslims, unfamiliar with games of chance, have replaced them with the discovery of hidden treasures; this is the poetry and adventure of mercantile civilizations. The housewife is oblivious to the gratuitousness of games: but a good firm cabbage and a ripe Camembert are treasures that must be subtly discovered in spite of the cunning shopkeeper; between seller and buyer, relations of dealing and ruse are established: for her, winning means getting the best goods for the lowest price; concern for a restricted budget is not enough to explain the extreme importance given to being economical: winning the game is what counts. When she suspiciously inspects the stalls, the housewife is queen; the world, with its riches and traps, is at her feet, for her taking. She tastes a fleeting triumph when she empties her shopping basket on the table. She puts her canned food and nonperishables in the larder, guarding her against the future, and she contemplates with satisfaction the raw vegetables and meats she is about to submit to her power.
Gas and electricity have killed the magic of fire; but in the countryside, many women still know the joys of kindling live flames from inert wood. With the fire lit, the woman changes into a sorceress. With a simple flip of the hand—beating the eggs or kneading the dough—or by the magic of fire, she effects transmutations of substances; matter becomes food. Colette, again, describes the enchantment of this alchemy:
All is mystery, magic, spell, all that takes place between the time the casserole, kettle, stewpot, and their contents are put on the fire and the moment of sweet anxiety, of voluptuous expectation, when the dish is brought steaming to the table and its headdress removed.
Among other things, she lovingly depicts the metamorphoses that take place in the secret of hot ashes:
Wood ash does a flavorsome job of cooking whatever it is given to cook. The apple, the pear nestling among the ashes, come out wrinkled and smoke-tanned but soft under the skin like a mole’s belly, and however bonne femme the apple cooked in the stove might be, it is a far cry from this jam enclosed in its original robe, thick with flavor, and—if you go about it right—has oozed but a single tear of honey … a tall three-legged cauldron held sifted ash that never saw the fire. But stuffed with potatoes lying side by side without touching, its black claws planted in the embers, the cauldron laid tubers for us white as snow, burning hot, flaky.*
Women writers have particularly celebrated the poetry of making preserves: it is a grand undertaking, marrying pure solid sugar and the soft pulp of fruit in a copper preserving pan; foaming, viscous, boiling, the substance being made is dangerous: it is a bubbling lava the housewife proudly captures and pours into jars. When she covers them with parchment paper and inscribes the date of her victory, it is a triumph over time itself: she has captured the passage of time in the snare of sugar; she has put life in jars. Cooking is more than penetrating and revealing the intimacy of substances. It reshapes and re-creates them. In working the dough, she experiences her power. “The hand as well as the eye has its reveries and poetry,” says Bachelard.30 And he speaks of this “suppleness that fills one’s hands, rebounding endlessly from matter to hand and from hand to matter.” The hand of the cook who kneads is a “gratified hand,” and cooking lends the dough a new value still. “Cooking is thus a great material transformation from whiteness to golden brown, from dough to crust.”31 Women can find a special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry because not everyone can do it: it takes a gift. “Nothing is more complicated than the art of pastry,” writes Michelet. “Nothing proceeds less according to rule, or is less dependent on education. One must be born with it. It is wholly a gift of the mother.”
Here again, it is clear that the little girl passionately enjoys imitating her female elders: with chalk and grass she plays at make-believe; she is happier still when she has a real little oven to play with, or when her mother lets her come into the kitchen and roll out the pastry with her palms or cut the hot burning caramel. But this is like housework: repetition soon dispels these pleasures. For Indians who get their nourishment essentially from tortillas, the women spend half their days kneading, cooking, reheating, and kneading again identical tortillas, under every roof, identical throughout the centuries: they are hardly sensitive to the magic of the oven. It is not possible to transform marketing into a treasure hunt every day, nor to delight in a shiny water tap. Women and men writers can lyrically exalt these triumphs because they never or rarely do housework. Done every day, this work becomes monotonous and mechanical; it is laden with waiting: waiting for the water to boil, for the roast to be cooked just right, for the laundry to dry; even if different tasks are well organized, there are long moments of passivity and emptiness; most of the time, they are accomplished in boredom; between present life and the life of tomorrow, they are but an inessential intermediary. If the individual who executes them is himself a producer or creator, they are integrated into his existence as naturally as body functions; this is why everyday chores seem less dismal when performed by men; they represent for them only a negative and contingent moment they hurry to escape. But what makes the lot of the wife-servant ungratifying is the division of labor that dooms her wholly to the general and inessential; home and food are useful for life but do not confer any meaning on it: the housekeeper’s immediate goals are only means, not real ends, and they reflect no more than anonymous projects. It is understandable that to give meaning to her work, she endeavors to give it her individuality and to attach an absolute value to the results obtained; she has her rituals, her superstitions, she has her ways of setting the table, arranging the living room, mending, cooking a dish; she persuades herself that in her place, no one could make such a good roast, or do the polishing as well; if her husband or daughter wants to help her or tries to do without her, she grabs the needle or the broom. “You don’t know how to sew a button.” Dorothy Parker described with a pitying irony the dismay of a young woman convinced she should bring a personal note to the arrangement of her house, but not knowing how:
Mrs. Ernest Weldon wandered about the orderly living-room, giving it some of those little feminine touches. She was not especially good as a touch-giver. The idea was pretty, and appealing to her. Before she was married, she had dreamed of herself as moving softly about her new dwelling, deftly moving a vase here or straightening a flower there, and thus transforming it from a house to a home. Even now, after seven years of marriage, she liked to picture herself in the gracious act.
But, though she conscientiously made a try at it every night as soon as the rose-shaded lamps were lit, she was always a bit bewildered as to how one went about performing those tiny miracles that make all the difference in the world to a room … Touch-giving was a wife’s job. And Mrs. Weldon was not one to shirk the business she had entered.
With an almost pitiable air of uncertainty, she strayed over to the mantel, lifted a small Japanese vase, and stood with it in her hand, gazing helplessly around the room …
Then she stepped back, and surveyed her innovat
ions. It was amazing how little difference they made to the room.32
The wife wastes a great deal of time and effort searching for originality or her individual perfection; this gives her work the characteristic of a “meticulous and disordered task, with neither stops nor limits,” as Chardonne points out, which makes it so difficult to measure the burden that household cares really mean. According to a recent report (published in 1947 by the newspaper Combat, written by C. Hébert), married women devote about three hours and forty-five minutes to housework (cleaning, food shopping, and so on) each working day, and eight hours on the day of rest, that is thirty hours a week, which corresponds to three-quarters of the working week of a woman worker or employee; this is enormous if it is added to a paid job; it is not much if the wife has nothing else to do (especially as woman workers and employees lose time traveling that has no equivalent here). Caring for children, if there are many, considerably adds to the wife’s fatigue: a poor mother depletes her strength every one of her hectic days. By contrast, bourgeois women who have help are almost idle; and the ransom of this leisure is boredom. Because they are bored, many complicate and endlessly multiply their duties so that they become more stressful than a skilled job. A woman friend who had gone through nervous breakdowns told me that when she was in good health, she took care of her house almost without thinking of it, leaving her time for much more challenging occupations; when neurasthenia prevented her from giving herself to other jobs, she allowed herself to be swallowed up by household cares, devoting whole days to them without managing to finish.
The saddest thing is that this work does not even result in a lasting creation. Woman is tempted—all the more as she is so attentive to it—to consider her work as an end in itself. Contemplating the cake she takes out of the oven, she sighs: what a pity to eat it! What a pity husband and children drag their muddy feet on the waxed floor. As soon as things are used, they are dirtied or destroyed: she is tempted, as we have already seen, to withdraw them from being used; she keeps the jam until mold invades it; she locks the living room doors. But time cannot be stopped; supplies attract rats; worms start their work. Covers, curtains, and clothes are eaten by moths: the world is not a dream carved in stone, it is made of a suspicious-looking substance threatened by decomposition; edible stuff is as questionable as Dalí’s meat monsters: it seemed inert and inorganic but hidden larvae have metamorphosed it into corpses. The housewife who alienates herself in things depends, like things, on the whole world: linens turn gray, the roast burns, china breaks; these are absolute disasters because when things disappear, they disappear irremediably. It is impossible to obtain permanence and security through them. Wars with their looting and bombs threaten wardrobes and the home.
Thus, the product of housework has to be consumed; constant renunciation is demanded of the wife whose work is finished only with its destruction. For her to consent to it without regret, these small holocausts must spark some joy or pleasure somewhere. But as housework is spent in maintaining the status quo, the husband—when he comes home—notices disorder and negligence but takes order and neatness for granted. He attaches more positive importance to a well-prepared meal. The triumphant moment of the cook is when she places a successful dish on the table: husband and children welcome it warmly, not only with words, but also by consuming it joyously. Culinary alchemy continues with the food becoming chyle and blood. Taking care of a body is of more concrete interest, is more vital than care of a parquet floor; the cook’s effort transcends toward the future in an obvious way. However, while it is less futile to depend on an outside freedom than to alienate oneself in things, it is no less dangerous. It is only in the guests’ mouths that the cook’s work finds its truth; she needs their approval; she demands that they appreciate her dishes, that they take more; she is irritated if they are no longer hungry: to the point that one does not know if the fried potatoes are destined for the husband or the husband for the fried potatoes. This ambiguity is found in the housewife’s whole attitude: she keeps the house for her husband; but she also insists on his devoting all the money he earns to buying furniture or a refrigerator. She wants to make him happy: but she approves of his activities only if they fit into the framework of the happiness she has constructed.
There have been periods when these claims were generally satisfied: periods when happiness was also the man’s ideal, when he was primarily attached to his house and family, and when the children themselves chose to define themselves by family, their traditions, and their past. Then she who ruled the home, who presided over the table, was recognized as sovereign; she still plays this glorious role as wife in relation to some landowners, or some rich farmers who occasionally still perpetuate the patriarchal civilization. But on the whole, marriage today is the survival of obsolete customs with the wife’s situation much more thankless than before since she still has the same duties while these no longer confer the same rights; she has the same chores without the rewards or honor from doing them. Today, man marries to anchor himself in immanence but not to confine himself in it; he wants a home but also to remain free to escape from it; he settles down, but he often remains a vagabond in his heart; he does not scorn happiness, but he does not make it an end in itself; repetition bores him; he seeks novelty, risk, resistance to overcome, camaraderie, friendships that wrest him from the solitude of the couple. Children even more than husbands want to go beyond the home’s limits: their life is elsewhere, in front of them; the child always desires what is other. The wife tries to constitute a universe of permanence and continuity: husband and children want to go beyond the situation she creates and which for them is only a given. Thus, if she is loath to admit the precariousness of the activities to which her whole life is devoted, she is led to impose her services by force: from mother and housewife she becomes cruel mother and shrew.
So the wife’s work within the home does not grant her autonomy; it is not directly useful to the group, it does not open onto the future, it does not produce anything. It becomes meaningful and dignified only if it is integrated into existences that go beyond themselves, toward the society in production or action: far from enfranchising the matron, it makes her dependent on her husband and children; she justifies her existence through them: she is no more than an inessential mediation in their lives. That the civil code erased “obedience” from her duties changes nothing in her situation; her situation is not based on what the couple wants but on the very structure of the conjugal community. The wife is not allowed to do any positive work and consequently to have herself known as a complete person. Regardless of how well she is respected, she is subjugated, secondary, parasitic. The heavy curse weighing on her is that the very meaning of her existence is not in her hands. This is the reason the successes and failures of her conjugal life have much more importance for her than for the man: he is a citizen, a producer, before being a husband; she is above all, and often exclusively, a wife; her work does not extract her from her condition; it is from her condition, on the contrary, that her work derives its price or not. Loving, generously devoted, she will carry out her tasks joyously; these chores will seem insipid to her if she accomplishes them with resentment. They will never play more than an inessential role in her destiny; in the misadventures of conjugal life they will be of no help. We thus have to see how this condition is concretely lived, one that is essentially defined by bed “service” and housework “service” in which the wife finds her dignity only in accepting her vassalage.
It is a crisis that pushes the young girl from childhood to adolescence; an even more acute crisis thrusts her into adult life. The anxieties inherent in all passages from one condition to another are superimposed on those that a somewhat brusque sexual initiation provokes in a woman. Nietzsche writes:
And then to be hurled, as by a gruesome lightning bolt, into reality and knowledge, by marriage … To catch love and shame in a contradiction and to be forced to experience at the same time delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror, and wh
o knows what else, in the face of the unexpected neighborliness of god and beast!… Thus a psychic knot has been tied that may have no equal.*
The excitement that surrounded the traditional “honeymoon” was meant in part to hide this confusion: thrown outside her everyday world for a few weeks, all connections with society being temporarily broken, the young woman was no longer situated in space, in time, in reality.33 But sooner or later she has to take her place there again; and she finds herself in her new home, but never without apprehension. Her ties with her father’s home are much stronger than her ties with the young man’s. Tearing oneself away from one’s family is a definitive weaning: this is when she experiences the anguish of abandon and the giddiness of freedom. The break is more or less painful, depending on the case; if she has already broken the ties connecting her to her father, brothers and sisters, and above all her mother, she can leave painlessly; if, still dominated by them, she can practically remain in their protection, she will be less affected by her change in condition; but ordinarily, even if she wanted to escape from the paternal household, she feels disconcerted when she is separated from the little society in which she was integrated, cut off from her past, her child’s universe with its familiar principles and unquestioned values. Only an ardent and full erotic life could make her bathe again in the peace of immanence; but usually she is at first more upset than fulfilled; that sexual initiation is more or less successful simply adds to her confusion. The day after her wedding finds many of the same reactions she had on her first menstruation: she often experiences disgust at this supreme revelation of her femininity, horror at the idea that this experience will be renewed. She also feels the bitter disappointment of the day after; once she began menstruating, the girl sadly realized she was not an adult; deflowered, now the young woman is an adult, and the last step is taken: Now what? This worrying disappointment is moreover linked as much to marriage itself as it is to defloration: a woman who had already “known” her fiancé, or who had “known” other men, but for whom marriage represents the full accession to adult life will often have the same reaction. Living the beginning of an enterprise is exalting; but nothing is more depressing than discovering a destiny over which one no longer has a hold. From this definitive, immutable background, freedom emerges with the most intolerable gratuitousness. Previously the girl, sheltered by her parents’ authority, made use of her freedom in revolt and hope; she used it to refuse and go beyond a condition in which she nevertheless found security; her own transcendence toward marriage took place from within the warmth of the family; now she is married, there is no other future in front of her. The doors of home are closed around her: of all the earth, this will be her portion. She knows exactly what tasks lie ahead of her: the same as her mother’s. Day after day, the same rites will be repeated. When she was a girl, her hands were empty: in hope, in dreams, she possessed everything. Now she has acquired a share of the world and she thinks in anguish: there is nothing more than this, forever. Forever this husband, this home. She has nothing more to expect, nothing more to want. However, she is afraid of her new responsibilities. Even if her husband is older and has authority, the fact that she has sexual relations with him removes some of his prestige: he cannot replace a father, and even less a mother, and he cannot give her her freedom. In the solitude of the new home, tied to a man who is more or less a stranger, no longer child but wife, and destined to become mother in turn, she feels numb; definitively removed from her mother’s breast, lost in the middle of a world to which no aim calls her, abandoned in an icy present, she discovers the boredom and blandness of pure facticity. This is the distress so stunningly expressed in the young countess Tolstoy’s diary;* she enthusiastically gave her hand to the great writer she admired; after the passionate embraces she submitted to on the wooden balcony at Yasnaya Polyana, she found herself disgusted by carnal love, far from her family, cut off from her past, at the side of a man to whom she had been engaged for one week, someone who was seventeen years her senior, with a totally foreign past and interests; everything seems empty, icy to her; her life is no more than an eternal sleep. Her diary account of the first years of her marriage must be quoted.