The Second Sex

  There are many hybrid forms between mentor and beast. Sometimes man is at once father and lover; the sexual act becomes a sacred orgy, and the loving wife finds ultimate salvation in the arms of her husband, redeemed by total abdication. This love-passion within married life is very rare. And at times the wife will love her husband platonically but will be unable to abandon herself in the arms of a man she respects too much. Such is this woman whose case Stekel reports. “Mrs. D.S., a great artist’s widow, is now forty years old. Although she adored her husband, she was completely frigid with him.” On the contrary, she may experience pleasure with him that she suffers as a common disgrace, killing all respect and esteem she has for him. Besides, an erotic failure relegates her husband to the ranks of a brute: hated in his flesh, he will be reviled in spirit; inversely, we have seen how scorn, antipathy, and rancor doomed the wife to frigidity. What often happens is that the husband remains a respected superior being after the sexual experience, excused of his animalistic weaknesses; it seems that this was the case, among others, of Adèle Hugo. Or else he is a pleasant partner, without prestige. Katherine Mansfield descried one of the forms this ambivalence can take in her short story “Prelude”:

  For she really was fond of him; she loved and admired and respected him tremendously. Oh, better than anyone else in the world. She knew him through and through. He was the soul of truth and decency, and for all his practical experience he was awfully simple, easily pleased and easily hurt … If only he wouldn’t jump at her so, and bark so loudly, and watch her with such eager, loving eyes. He was too strong for her; she had always hated things that rushed at her, from a child. There were times when he was frightening—really frightening—when she just had not screamed at the top of her voice: “You are killing me.” And at those times she had longed to say the most coarse, hateful things … Yes, yes, it was true … For all her love and respect and admiration she hated him … It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment. There were all her feelings for him, sharp and defined, one as true as the other. And there was this other, this hatred, just as real as the rest. She could have done her feelings up in little packets and given them to Stanley. She longed to hand him that last one, for a surprise. She could see his eyes as he opened that.

  The young wife rarely admits her feelings to herself with such sincerity. To love her husband and to be happy is a duty to herself and society; this is what her family expects of her; or if her parents were against the marriage, she wants to prove how wrong they were. She usually begins her conjugal life in bad faith; she easily persuades herself that she feels great love for her husband; and this passion takes on a more manic, possessive, and jealous form the less sexually satisfied she is; to console herself for this disappointment that she refuses at first to admit, she has an insatiable need for her husband’s presence. Stekel cites numerous examples of these pathological attachments:

  A woman remained frigid for the first years of her marriage, due to childhood fixations. She then developed a hypertrophic love as is frequently found in women who cannot bear to see that their husbands are indifferent to them. She lived only for her husband, and thought only of him. She lost all will. He had to plan her day every morning, tell her what to buy, etc. She carried out everything conscientiously. If he did not tell her what to do, she stayed in her room doing nothing and worried about him. She could not let him go anywhere without accompanying him. She could not stay alone, and she liked to hold his hand … She was unhappy and cried for hours, trembling for her husband and if there were no reasons to tremble, she created them.

  My second case concerned a woman closed up in her room as if it were a prison for fear of going out alone. I found her holding her husband’s hands, pleading with him to stay near her … Married for seven years, he was never able to have relations with his wife.

  Sophia Tolstoy’s case was similar; it comes out clearly in the passage I have cited and all throughout her diaries that as soon as she was married, she realized she did not love her husband. Sexual relations with him disgusted her; she reproached him for his past, found him old and boring, had nothing but hostility for his ideas; and it seems that greedy and brutal in bed, he neglected her and treated her harshly. To her hopeless cries, her confessions of ennui, sadness, and indifference, were nevertheless added Sophia’s protestations of passionate love; she wanted her beloved husband near her always; as soon as he was away from her, she was tortured with jealousy. She writes:

  January 11, 1863: My jealousy is a congenital illness, or it may be because in loving him I have nothing else to love; I have given myself so completely to him that my only happiness is with him and from him.

  January 15, 1863:*

  I have been feeling [out of sorts and] angry that he should love everything and everyone, when I want him to love only me … The moment I think fondly of something or someone I tell myself no, I love only Lyovochka. But I absolutely must learn to love something else as he loves his work … but I hate being alone without him … My need to be near him grows stronger every day.

  October 17, 1863: I feel I don’t understand him properly, that’s why I am always jealously following him.

  July 31, 1868: It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions—as though I were the unhappiest of women!… Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours? I have been married six years now, but I love him more and more … I still love him with the same passionate, poetic, fevered, jealous love, and his composure occasionally irritates me.

  September 16, 1876:† I avidly search his diaries for any reference to love, and am so tormented by jealously that I can no longer see anything clearly. I am afraid of my resentment of Lyovochka for leaving me … I choke back the tears, or hide away several times a day and weep with anxiety. I have a fever every day and a chill at night … “What is he punishing me for?” I keep asking myself. “Why, for loving him so much.”

  These pages convey the feeling of a vain effort to compensate for the absence of a real love with moral and “poetic” exaltation; demands, anxieties, jealousy, are expressions of the emptiness in her heart. A great deal of morbid jealousy develops in such conditions; in an indirect way, jealousy conveys a dissatisfaction that woman objectifies by inventing a rival; never feeling fulfillment with her husband, she rationalizes in some way her disappointment by imagining him deceiving her.

  Very often, the wife persists in her pretense through morality, hypocrisy, pride, or timidity. “Often, an aversion for the dear husband will go unnoticed for a whole life: it is called melancholia or some other name,” says Chardonne.38 But the hostility is no less felt even though it is not named. It is expressed with more or less violence in the young wife’s effort to refuse her husband’s domination. After the honeymoon and the period of confusion that often follows, she tries to win back her autonomy. This is not an easy undertaking. The fact that her husband is often older than she is, that he possesses in any case masculine prestige, and that he is the “head of the family” according to the law means he bears moral and social superiority; very often he also possesses—or at least appears to—an intellectual superiority. He has the advantage of culture or at least professional training over his wife; since adolescence, he has been interested in world affairs: they are his affairs; he knows a little law, he follows politics, he belongs to a party, a union, clubs; worker and citizen, his thinking is connected to action; he knows that one cannot cheat reality: that is, the average man has the technique of reasoning, the taste for facts and experience, a certain critical sense; here is what many girls lack; even if they have read, listened to lectures, touched upon the fine arts, their knowledge amassed here and there does not constitute culture; it is not because of an intellectual defect that they have not learned to reason: it is because they have not had to practice it; for them thinking is more of a game than an instrument; lacking intellectual training, even intelligent, sensitive, and sincere women do not know how to present their opinions and draw
conclusions from them. That is why a husband—even if far more mediocre—will easily take the lead over them; he knows how to prove himself right, even if he is wrong. Logic in masculine hands is often violence. Chardonne explained this kind of sly oppression well in Epithalamium. Older, more cultivated, and more educated than Berthe, Albert uses this pretext to deny any value to opinions of his wife that he does not share; he untiringly proves he is right; for her part she becomes adamant and refuses to accept that there is any substance in her husband’s reasoning: he persists in his ideas, and that is the end of it. Thus a serious misunderstanding deepens between them. He does not try to understand feelings or deep-rooted reactions she cannot justify; she does not understand what lives behind her husband’s pedantic and overwhelming logic. He even goes so far as to become irritated by the ignorance she never hid from him, and challenges her with questions about astronomy; he is flattered, nonetheless, to tell her what to read, to find in her a listener he can easily dominate. In a struggle where her intellectual shortcomings condemn her to losing every time, the young wife has no defense other than silence, or tears, or violence:

  Her head spinning, as if overcome by blows, Berthe could no longer think when she heard that erratic and strident voice, and Albert continued to envelop her in an imperious drone to confuse her, to injure her in the distress of her humiliated spirit … she was defeated, disarmed before the asperities of an inconceivable argumentation, and to release herself from this unjust power, she cried: Leave me alone! These words seemed too weak to her; she saw a crystal flask on her dressing table, and all at once threw the bottle at Albert.

  Sometimes a wife will fight back. But often, with good or bad will, like Nora in A Doll’s House,39 she lets her husband think for her; it is he who will be the couple’s consciousness. Through timidity, awkwardness, or laziness, she leaves it up to the man to formulate their common opinions on all general and abstract subjects. An intelligent woman, cultivated and independent but who, for fifteen years, had admired a husband she deemed superior, told me how, after his death she was obliged, to her dismay, to have her own convictions and behavior: she is still trying to guess what he would have thought and decided in each situation. The husband is generally comfortable in this role of mentor and chief.40 In the evening after a difficult day dealing with his equals and obeying his superiors, he likes to feel absolutely superior and dispense incontestable truths.41 Happy to find in his wife a double who shores up his self-confidence, he tells her about the day’s events, tells her how he wins over his adversaries; he comments on the daily paper and the political news, he gladly reads aloud to his wife so that even her connection with culture should not be her own. To increase his authority, he likes to exaggerate feminine incapacity; she accepts this subordinate role with more or less docility. We have seen the surprised pleasure of women who, sincerely regretting their husbands’ absence, discover in themselves at such times unsuspected possibilities; they run businesses, bring up children, decide and administer without help. They suffer when their husbands return and doom them again to incompetence.

  Marriage incites man to a capricious imperialism: the temptation to dominate is the most universal and the most irresistible there is; to turn over a child to his mother or to turn over a wife to her husband is to cultivate tyranny in the world; it is often not enough for the husband to be supported and admired, to give counsel and guidance; he gives orders, he plays the sovereign; all the resentments accumulated in his childhood, throughout his life, accumulated daily among other men whose existence vexes and wounds him, he unloads at home by unleashing his authority over his wife; he acts out violence, power, intransigence; he issues orders in a severe tone, or he yells and hammers the table: this drama is a daily reality for the wife. He is so convinced of his rights that his wife’s least show of autonomy seems a rebellion to him; he would keep her from breathing without his consent. She, nonetheless, rebels. Even if she started out recognizing masculine prestige, her dazzlement is soon dissipated; one day the child recognizes his father is but a contingent individual; the wife soon discovers she is not before the grand Suzerain, the Chief, the Master, but a man; she sees no reason to be subjugated to him; in her eyes, he merely represents unjust and unrewarding duty. Sometimes she submits with a masochistic pleasure: she takes on the role of victim, and her resignation is only a long and silent reproach; but she often fights openly against her master as well, and begins tyrannizing him back.

  Man is being naive when he imagines he will easily make his wife bend to his wishes and “shape” her as he pleases. “A wife is what her husband makes her,” says Balzac; but he says the opposite a few pages further on. In the area of abstraction and logic, the wife often resigns herself to accepting male authority; but when it is a question of ideas and habits she really clings to, she opposes him with covert tenacity. The influence of her childhood and youth is deeper for her than for the man, as she remains more closely confined in her own personal history. She usually does not lose what she acquires during these periods. The husband will impose a political opinion on his wife, but he will not change her religious convictions, nor will he shake her superstitions: this is what Jean Barois saw, he who imagined having a real influence on the devout little ninny who shared his life. Overcome, he says: “A little girl’s brain, conserved in the shadows of a provincial town: all the assertions of ignorant stupidity: this can’t be cleaned up.” In spite of opinions she has learned and principles she reels off like a parrot, the wife retains her own vision of the world. This resistance can render her incapable of understanding a husband smarter than herself; or, on the contrary, she will rise above masculine seriousness like the heroines in Stendhal or Ibsen. Sometimes, out of hostility toward the man—either because he has sexually disappointed her or, on the contrary, because he dominates her and she wants revenge—she will clutch on to values that are not his; she relies on the authority of her mother, father, brother, or some masculine personality who seems “superior” to her, a confessor, or a sister to prove him wrong. Or rather than opposing him with anything positive, she continues to contradict him systematically, attack him, insult him; she strives to instill in him an inferiority complex. Of course, if she has the necessary capacity, she will delight in outshining her husband, imposing her advice, opinions, directives; she will seize all moral authority. In cases where it is impossible to contest her husband’s intellectual superiority, she will try to take her revenge on a sexual level. Or she will refuse him, as Halévy tells us about Mme Michelet:

  She wanted to dominate everywhere: in bed because she had to do that and at the worktable. It was the table she aimed for, and Michelet defended it at first while she defended the bed. For several months, the couple was chaste. Finally Michelet got the bed and Athénaïs Mialaret soon after had the table: she was born a woman of letters and it was her true place.*

  Either she stiffens in his arms and inflicts the insult of her frigidity on him; or she shows herself to be capricious and coquettish, imposing on him the attitude of suppliant; she flirts, she makes him jealous, she is unfaithful to him: in one way or another, she tries to humiliate him in his virility. While caution prevents her from pushing him too far, at least she preciously keeps in her heart the secret of her haughty coldness; she confides sometimes to her diary, more readily to her friends: many married women find it amusing to share “tricks” they use to feign pleasure they claim not to feel; and they laugh wildly at the vain naïveté of their dupes; these confidences are perhaps another form of playacting: between frigidity and willful frigidity, the boundaries are uncertain. In any case, they consider themselves to be unfeeling and satisfy their resentment this way. There are women—ones likened to the praying mantis—who want to triumph night and day: they are cold in embrace, contemptuous in conversations, and tyrannical in their behavior. This is how—according to Mabel Dodge’s testimony—Frieda behaved with Lawrence. Unable to deny his intellectual superiority, she attempted to impose her own vision of the worl
d on him where only sexual values counted:

  He must see through her and she had to see life from the sex center. She endorsed or repudiated experience from that angle.

  One day she declared to Mabel Dodge:

  “He has to get it all from me. Unless I am there, he feels nothing. Nothing. And he gets his books from me,” she continued, boastfully. “Nobody knows that. Why, I have done pages of his books for him.”

  Nonetheless, she bitterly and ceaselessly needs to prove this need he has for her; she demands he take care of her without respite: if he does not do it spontaneously, she corners him:

  I discovered that Frieda would not let things slide. I mean between them. Their relationship was never allowed to become slack. When … they were going along smoothly … not noticing each other much, when the thing between them tended to slip into unconsciousness and rest, Frieda would burst a bombshell at him. She never let him forget her. What in the first days must have been the splendor of fresh and complete experience had become, when I knew them, the attack and the defense between enemies … Frieda would sting him in a tender place … At the end of an evening when he had not particularly noticed her, she would begin insulting him.*

  Married life had become for them a series of scenes repeated over and over in which neither of them would give in, turning the least quarrel into a titanic duel between Man and Woman.

  In a very different way, the same untamed will to dominate is found in Jouhandeau’s Élise, driving her to undermine her husband as much as possible:

  Élise: Right from the start, around me, I undermine everything. Afterwards, I don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t only have to deal with monkeys or monsters.