The Second Sex

  These examples all prove that there is no such thing as maternal “instinct”: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it. It is, as we have seen, extremely variable.

  But the fact is that if circumstances are not positively unfavorable, the mother will find herself enriched by a child. “It was like a response to the reality of her own existence … through him she had a grasp on all things and on herself to begin with,” wrote Colette Audry about a young mother.

  And she has another character say these words:

  He was heavy in my arms, and on my breast, like the heaviest thing in the world, to the limit of my strength. He buried me in silence and darkness. All at once he had put the weight of the world on my shoulders. That was indeed why I wanted him. I was too light myself. Alone, I was too light.

  While some women are “breeders” rather than mothers and lose interest in their child as soon as it is weaned, or as soon as it is born, and only desire another pregnancy, many others by contrast feel that it is the separation itself that gives them the child; it is no longer an indistinct part of themselves but a piece of the world; it no longer secretly haunts the body but can be seen, touched; after the melancholy of delivery, Cécile Sauvage expresses the joy of possessive motherhood:

  Here you are my little lover

  On your mother’s big bed

  I can kiss you, hold you,

  Feel the weight of your fine future;

  Good day my little statue

  Of blood, of joy and naked flesh,

  My little double, my excitement …

  It has been said again and again that woman happily finds an equivalent of the penis in the infant: this is completely wrong. In fact, the adult man no longer sees his penis as a wonderful toy: his organ is valued in relation to the desirable objects it allows him to possess; by the same token, the adult woman envies the male for the prey he acquires, not the instrument of this acquisition; the infant satisfies this aggressive eroticism that the male embrace does not fulfill: the infant is homologous to this mistress that she is for the male and that he is not for her; of course there is no exact correspondence; every relation is unique; but the mother finds in the child—like the lover in the beloved—a carnal plenitude, not in surrender but in domination; she grasps in the child what man seeks in woman: an other, both nature and consciousness, who is her prey, her double. He embodies all of nature. Audry’s heroine tells us she found in her child:

  The skin that was for my fingers to touch, that fulfilled the promise of all little kittens, all flowers …

  His skin has that sweetness, that warm elasticity that, as a little girl, the woman coveted in her mother’s flesh and, later, everywhere in the world. He is plant and animal, he holds rains and rivers in his eyes, the azure of the sky and the sea, his fingernails are coral, his hair a silky growth, he is a living doll, a bird, a kitten; my flower, my pearl, my chick, my lamb … His mother murmurs words almost of a lover and uses, like a lover, the possessive adjective; she uses the same words of appropriation: caresses, kisses; she hugs the infant to her body, she envelops him in the warmth of her arms, of her bed. At times these relations have a clearly sexual cast. Thus in the confession collected by Stekel I have already cited, we read:

  I nursed my baby but I took no particular joy in doing so because he did not thrive well. We were both losing ground. The act of nursing seemed something sexual to me. I was always ashamed of it … it was for me a majestic experience to feel the warm little body snuggling up to me … The touch of his little hands thrilled me … My whole love went out to him … The child would cling to me and did not leave my side. It was troublesome to try to keep him away from me … When he saw me in bed he crawled up at once—he was two years of age at the time—and tried to lie on top of me. At the same time his little hands wandered over my breasts and tried to reach down. I found this very pleasurable; it was not easy for me to send the child away. Frequently I fought against the temptation of playing with his genitals.

  Motherhood takes on a new aspect when the child grows older; at first he is only a “standard baby,” existing in his generality: little by little he becomes individualized. Very dominating or very carnal women grow cold toward him; it is then that some others—like Colette—begin to take an interest in him. The mother’s relation to the child becomes more and more complex: he is a double, and at times she is tempted to alienate herself completely in him, but he is an autonomous subject, and therefore rebellious; today he is warmly real, but in the far-off future he is an adolescent, an imaginary adult; he is her wealth, a treasure: but he is also a responsibility, a tyrant. The joy the mother can find in him is a joy of generosity; she must take pleasure in serving, giving, creating happiness, such as the mother depicted by Colette Audry:

  Thus, he had a happy storybook infancy, but his infancy was to storybook infancy as real roses were to postcard roses. And this happiness of his came out of me like the milk with which I nourished him.

  Like the woman in love, the mother is delighted to feel needed; she is justified by the demands she responds to; but what makes maternal love difficult and great is that it implies no reciprocity; the woman is not before a man, a hero, a demigod, but a little stammering consciousness, lost in a fragile and contingent body; the infant possesses no value, and he can bestow none; the woman remains alone before him; she expects no compensation in exchange for her gifts, she justifies them with her own freedom. This generosity deserves the praise that men forever bestow on her; but mystification begins when the religion of Motherhood proclaims that all mothers are exemplary. For maternal devotion can be experienced in perfect authenticity; but in fact, this is rarely the case. Ordinarily, maternity is a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.

  The great risk our mores present for the infant is that the mother to whom he is tied and bound is almost always an unfulfilled woman: sexually she is frigid or unsatisfied; socially she feels inferior to man; she has no hold on the world or the future; she will try to compensate for her frustrations through the child; when one recognizes how the present situation of woman makes her full development difficult, how many desires, revolts, pretensions, and claims she secretly harbors, one is frightened that helpless little children are given over to her. Just as when she both pampered and tortured her dolls, her behavior is symbolic: but these symbols become bitter reality for the child. A mother who beats her child does not only beat the child, and in a way she does not beat him at all: she is taking her vengeance on man, on the world, or on herself; but it is the child who receives the blows. Mouloudji expresses this painful misunderstanding in Enrico: Enrico well understands it is not he whom his mother beats so wildly; and waking from her delirium, she sobs with remorse and tenderness; he does not hold it against her, but he is no less disfigured by her blows. And the mother described in Violette Leduc’s In the Prison of Her Skin, in lashing out against her daughter, is in fact taking revenge on the seducer who abandoned her, on life that humiliated and defeated her. This cruel aspect of motherhood has always been known; but with hypocritical prudishness, the idea of the “bad mother” has been defused by inventing the cruel step mother; the father’s second wife torments the child of the deceased “good mother.” Indeed, Mme Fichini is a mother figure, the exact counterpart of the edifying Mme de Fleurville described by Mme de Ségur. Since Jules Renard’s Poil de carotte (Carrot Top), there have been more and more accusations: Enrico, In the Prison of Her Skin, Simone de Tervagne’s Maternal Hatred, Hervé Bazin’s Viper in the Fist. While the types sketched in these novels are some what exaggerated, the majority of women suppress their spontaneous impulses out of morality and decency; but these impulses flare up in scenes, slaps, anger fits, insults, punishments, and so on. In addition to frankly sadistic women, there are many who are especially capricious; what delights them is to dominate; when the baby is tiny,
he is a toy: if it is a boy, they shamelessly play with his penis; if it is a girl, they treat her like a doll; later they only want a little slave who will blindly obey them: vain, they show the child off like a trained pet; jealous and exclusive, they set him apart from the rest of the world. Also, the woman often continues to expect gratitude for the care she gives the child: she shapes an imaginary being through him who will recognize her with gratitude for being an admirable mother and one in whom she recognizes herself. When Cornelia, proudly showing her children, said, “These are my jewels,” she gave an ill-fated example to posterity; too many mothers live in the hope of one day repeating this arrogant gesture; and they do not hesitate to sacrifice the little flesh-and-blood individual whose contingent and indecisive existence does not fulfill them. They force him to resemble their husbands, or, on the contrary, not to resemble them, or to reincarnate a father, a mother, or a venerated ancestor; they model him on someone prestigious: a German socialist deeply admired Lily Braun, recounts Helene Deutsch; the famous activist had a brilliant son who died young; her imitator was determined to treat her own son like a future genius, and as a result he became a bandit. Harmful to the child, this ill-adapted tyranny is always a source of disappointment for the mother. Deutsch cites another striking example, of an Italian woman whose case history she followed for several years.

  Mrs. Mazzetti … had a number of small children … who caused her difficulties, all of them, one after the other. Personal contact with Mrs. Mazzetti soon revealed that although she sought help it was difficult to influence her … Her entire bearing … was consistently used only in face of the outside world, but … in relations with her family, she gave way to uncontrolled emotional outbursts … we learned that coming from a poor, uncultured milieu, she had always had the urge to become something “better.” She always attended night schools and would perhaps have achieved something in harmony with her aspirations if she had not met her husband. He … exerted an irresistible sexual attraction upon her. At the age of sixteen she had sexual relations with him, soon became pregnant, and found herself compelled to marry him … She continually tried to raise herself again … she went to night school, etc. The man was a first class workman … Mrs. Mazzetti evidently had emphasized her superiority to him in a very aggressive way, which drove this simple man to … alcoholism. He tried to devaluate his wife’s superiority by … making her repeatedly pregnant … After her separation from her husband she turned all her emotions to the children, and began to treat them as she had treated her husband … As long as the children were small she appeared to be attaining her goal. They were very ambitious, successful in school, etc. When Louise, the oldest child, approached the age of sixteen, her mother seems to have fallen into a state of anxiety that was based upon her own past experiences. This anxiety was expressed in heightened watchfulness and strictness, to which Louise reacted with protests, and had an illegitimate child … The children emotionally clung to their father and were against their mother who tried to impose her moral standards on them … She could never be kind to more than one of her older children at a time, and always indulged her negative, aggressive emotions at the expense of the others. Since the children thus alternated as objects of her love, the child who had just been loved was driven to rage, jealousy, and revenge … one daughter after another became promiscuous, they brought syphilis and illegitimate children into the home, the little boys began to steal, and Mrs. Mazzetti could not understand that ideal demands instead of tender harmony pushed them in that direction.

  This authoritarian upbringing and capricious sadism I spoke of are often mixed together; to justify her anger, the mother uses the pretext of wanting to “shape” the child; and inversely, failure in her endeavor exasperates her hostility.

  Masochistic devotion is another quite common attitude, and no less harmful for the child; some mothers make themselves slaves of their offspring to compensate for the emptiness in their hearts and to punish themselves for the hostility they do not want to admit; they endlessly cultivate a morbid anxiety, they cannot bear to let their child do anything on his own; they give up all pleasure, all personal life, enabling them to assume the role of victim; and from these sacrifices they derive the right to deny the child all independence; this renunciation is easily reconciled with a tyrannical will to domination; the mater dolorosa turns her suffering into a weapon she uses sadistically; her displays of resignation spur guilt feelings in the child, which he will often carry through his whole life: they are more harmful than aggressive displays. Tossed about, baffled, the child finds no defense mechanism: sometimes blows, sometimes tears, show him to be a criminal. The mother’s main excuse is that the child is far from bringing her that satisfying self-accomplishment she was promised since childhood: she takes out on him the mystification of which she was a victim and that the child innocently exposes. She did what she wanted with her dolls; when she helped care for her sister’s or a friend’s baby, it was without responsibility. But now society, her husband, her mother, and her own pride hold her responsible for this little foreign life as if it were her own composition: the husband in particular is irritated by the child’s faults just as he is by a spoiled dinner or his wife’s improper behavior; his abstract demands often weigh heavily on the mother’s relation to the child; an independent woman—thanks to her solitude, her carefree state, or her authority in the household—will be much more serene than those carrying the weight of dominating demands in making her child obey. For the great difficulty is to contain within a fixed framework a mysterious existence like that of animals, turbulent and disorderly, like the forces of nature, but human nonetheless; one cannot train a child in silence like training a dog, nor persuade him with adult words: he plays on this ambiguity, pitting words against the animality of sobs and tantrums, and constraints against the insolence of language. Of course, the problem thus posed is challenging, and when she has time for it, the mother enjoys being an educator: peacefully settled in a park, the baby is still as good an excuse as he was when he nestled in her stomach; often still more or less infantile herself, she delights in being silly with him, reviving games, words, interests, and joys of days gone by. But when she is washing, cooking, nursing another infant, shopping, entertaining callers, and mainly when she is taking care of her husband, the child is no more than a bothersome, harassing presence; she does not have the leisure time to “train” him; she must first keep him from making trouble; he demolishes, tears, dirties, he is a constant danger to objects and to himself; he fidgets, he screams, he talks, he makes noise: he lives for himself; and this life disturbs his parents’ life. Their interest and his do not converge: therein lies the drama. Forever burdened by him, parents inflict sacrifices on him for reasons he does not understand: they sacrifice him for their tranquillity and his own future. It is natural for him to rebel. He does not understand the explanations his mother tries to give him: she cannot penetrate his consciousness; his dreams, his phobias, his obsessions, and his desires shape an opaque world: the mother can only gropingly control a being who sees these abstract laws as absurd violence from the outside. As the child grows older, this lack of comprehension remains: he enters a world of interests and values from which his mother is excluded; he often scorns her for it. The boy in particular, proud of his masculine prerogatives, laughs off a woman’s orders: she insists on him doing his homework, but she cannot solve his problems, translate his Latin text; she cannot “keep up” with him. The mother is sometimes driven to tears over this task whose difficulty the husband rarely appreciates: raising an individual with whom one does not communicate but who is nonetheless a human being; interfering in a foreign freedom that defines and affirms itself only by rebelling against you.

  The situation differs, depending on whether the child is a boy or a girl; and while boys are more “difficult,” the mother generally gets along better with them. Because of the prestige woman attributes to men, and also the privileges they hold concretely, many women wish for a son. ?
??It’s marvelous to bring a man into the world,” they say; as has been seen, they dream of giving birth to a “hero,” and the hero is obviously of the male sex. The son will be a chief, a leader of men, a soldier, a creator; he will impose his will on the face of the earth, and his mother will share in his immortality; the houses she did not build, the countries she did not explore, the books she did not read, he will give to her. Through him she will possess the world: but on condition that she possesses her son. This is the source of her paradoxical attitude. Freud believes that the mother-son relationship contains the least ambivalence; but in fact in motherhood, as in marriage and love, woman has an ambiguous attitude to masculine transcendence; if her conjugal or love life has made her hostile to men, she will find satisfaction in dominating the male reduced to his infantile figure; she will treat the arrogantly pretentious sex organ with an ironic familiarity: at times she will frighten the child by announcing she will cut it off if he does not behave. Even if she is humble and more peaceful and respects the future hero in her son, she does what she can to reduce him to his immanent reality in order to ensure that he is really hers: just as she treats her husband like a child, she treats her child like a baby. It is too rational, too simple, to think she wishes to castrate her son; her dream is more contradictory: she wants him to be infinite and yet fit in the palm of her hand, dominating the whole world and kneeling before her. She encourages him to be soft, greedy, selfish, shy, sedentary, she forbids sports and friends, and she makes him unsure of himself because she wants to have him for herself; but she is disappointed if he does not at the same time become an adventurer, a champion, a genius she can be proud of. There is no doubt that her influence is often harmful—as Montherlant maintains and as Mauriac demonstrates in Génitrix. Luckily, boys can fairly easily escape this hold; customs and society encourage them to. And the mother herself is resigned to it: she knows very well that the struggle against man is unfair. She consoles herself by acting the mater dolorosa or by pondering the pride of having given birth to one of her conquerors.