The woman who presides over these mysteries is proud to feel she is the creator of a perfect moment, the dispenser of happiness and gaiety. She is the one bringing the guests together, she is the one making the event take place, she is the gratuitous source of joy and harmony.
This is exactly what Mrs. Dalloway feels:
But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering;… Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?… An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance … anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen.
If there is pure generosity in this homage to others, the party is really a party. But social routine quickly changes the potlatch into an institution, the gift into an obligation, and the party hardens into a rite. All the while savoring the “dinner out,” the invited woman ponders having to return the invitation: she sometimes complains of having been entertained too well. “The Xs … wanted to impress us,” she says bitterly to her husband. I have been told that during the last war in a little Portuguese city, tea parties had become the most costly of potlatches: at each gathering the mistress of the house had to serve more varied cakes and in greater number than the previous one; this burden became so heavy that one day all the women decided together not to serve anything anymore with the tea. The party loses its generous and magnificent character in such circumstances; it is one more chore; the accessories that make up a party are only a source of worry: you have to check the crystal and the tablecloth, measure the champagne and petits fours; a broken cup, the silk upholstering of a burned armchair, are a disaster; tomorrow you have to clean, put away, put in order: the woman dreads this extra work. She feels this multiple dependence that defines the housewife’s destiny: she is dependent on the soufflé, the roast, the butcher, the cook, the extra help; she is dependent on the husband, who frowns every time something goes wrong; she is dependent on the guests, who judge the furniture and wine and who decide if the evening has been a success or not. Only generous or self-confident women will go through this ordeal with a light heart. A triumph can give them a heady satisfaction. But in this respect many resemble Mrs. Dalloway, about whom Woolf tells us: Although she loved these triumphs … and their brilliance and the excitement they brought, she also felt the hollowness, the sham. The woman can only take pleasure in it if she does not attach too much importance to it; if she does, she will be tormented by a perpetually unsatisfied vanity. Besides, few women are wealthy enough to find their life’s occupation in “socializing.” Those who devote themselves to it entirely usually try not only to make a cult of it but also to go beyond this social life toward other aims: genuine salons have a literary or political side. These women try to influence men and to play a personal role. They escape from the condition of the married woman. She is not usually fulfilled by the pleasures and ephemeral triumphs rarely bestowed on her and that often mean as much fatigue as distraction. Social life demands that woman “represent,” that she show off, but does not create between her and others real communication. It does not wrest her from her solitude.
“It is painful to think,” writes Michelet, “that woman, the relative being who can only live in a couple, is more often alone than man. He finds social life everywhere, makes new contacts. As for her, she is nothing without her family. And the family weighs her down; all weight is on her.” And, in fact, the woman kept confined, isolated, does not have the joys of a comradeship that involves pursuing aims together; her work does not occupy her mind, her education did not give her either the taste or the habit of independence, and yet she spends her days in solitude; we have seen that this is one of the miseries Sophia Tolstoy complained of. Her marriage often took her away from her father’s home and the friends of her youth. In Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships), Colette described the uprooting of a bride transported from her province to Paris; only the long correspondence she exchanged with her mother provided any relief; but letters are no substitute for presence, and she cannot admit her disappointments to Sido. Often, there is no longer any real closeness between the young woman and her family: neither her mother nor her sisters are her friends. Nowadays, due to a housing crisis, many young couples live with their families or in-laws; but this enforced presence is far from ever providing real companionship for the young woman.
The feminine friendships she is able to keep or make are precious for a woman; they are very different from relations men have; men relate to each other as individuals through their ideas, their own personal projects; women, confined within the generality of their destiny as women, are united by a kind of immanent complicity. And what they seek first of all from each other is the affirmation of their common universe. They do not discuss opinions: they exchange confidences and recipes; they join together to create a kind of counter-universe whose values outweigh male values; when they meet, they find the strength to shake off their chains; they negate male sexual domination by confiding their frigidity to each other and cynically deriding the appetites or the clumsiness of their males; they also contest with irony the moral and intellectual superiority of their husbands and men in general. They compare their experiences: pregnancies, deliveries, children’s illnesses, their own illnesses, and housework become the essential events of human history. Their work is not technical: in transmitting recipes for cooking or housework, they give them the dignity of a secret science founded in oral traditions. Sometimes they examine moral problems together. Letters to the editor in women’s magazines are a good example of these exchanges; we can hardly imagine a Lonely Hearts column reserved for men; they meet in the world, which is their world, whereas women must define, measure, and explore their own space; mostly they share beauty tips or cooking or knitting recipes, and they ask each other for advice; real anxieties can sometimes be perceived in women’s tendency to talk and show off. The woman knows the male code is not hers, that man even expects she will not observe it since he pushes her to abortion, adultery, misdeeds, betrayal, and lies he officially condemns; she then asks other women to help her to define a sort of “parallel law,” a specifically feminine moral code. It is not only out of malevolence that women comment on and criticize the conduct of their girlfriends so much: to judge them and to lead their own lives, they need much more moral invention than men.
What makes these relationships valuable is their truthfulness. When confronting man, woman is always onstage; she lies when pretending to accept herself as the inessential other, she lies when she presents to him an imaginary personage through impersonations, clothes, and catchphrases; this act demands constant tension; every woman thinks more or less “I am not myself” around her husband or her lover; the male world is hard, there are sharp angles, voices are too loud, lights are too bright, contacts brusque. When with other women, the wife is backstage; she sharpens her weapons, she does not enter combat; she plans her clothes, devises makeup, prepares her ruses: she lies around in slippers and robe in the wings before going onstage; she likes this lukewarm, soft, relaxed atmosphere. Colette describes the moments she spends with her girlfriend Marco like this: “Brief confidences, the amusements of two women shut away from the world, hours that were now like those in a sewing room, now like the idle ones of convalescence.”9
She enjoys playing the adviser to the older woman:
As we sat under the balcony awning on those hot afternoons, Marco mended her underclothes. She sewed badly, but conscientiously, and I flattered my vanity by giving her pieces of advice, such as: “You’re using too coarse a thread f
or fine needles … You shouldn’t put blue baby ribbon in chemises, pink is much prettier in lingerie and up against the skin.” It was not long before I gave her others, concerning her face powder, the color of her lipstick, a hard line she penciled around the edge of her beautifully shaped eyelids. “D’you think so? D’you think so?” she would say. My youthful authority was adamant. I took the comb, I made a charming little gap in her tight, sponge-like fringe, I proved expert at softly shadowing her eyes and putting a faint pink glow high up on her cheekbones, near her temples.
A bit further on, she shows us Marco anxiously preparing to face a young man she wants to win over:
She was about to wipe her wet eyes but I stopped her.
“Let me do it, Marco.”
With my two thumbs, I raised her upper eyelids so that the two tears about to fall should be reabsorbed and not smudge the mascara on her lashes by wetting them.
“There! Wait, I haven’t finished.”
I retouched all her features. Her mouth was trembling a little. She submitted patiently, sighing as if I were dressing a wound. To complete everything, I filled the puff in her handbag with a rosier shade of powder. Neither of us uttered a word meanwhile.
“Whatever happens,” I told her, “don’t cry. At all costs, don’t let yourself give way to tears”…
She pressed her hand to her forehead, under her fringe.
“I ought to have bought that black dress last Saturday—the one I saw in the secondhand shop … Tell me, could you possibly lend me some very fine stockings? I’ve left it too late now to …”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Thank you. Don’t you think a flower to brighten up my dress? No, not a flower on the bodice. Is it true that iris is a scent that’s gone out of fashion? I’m sure I had heaps of other things to ask you … heaps of things.”
And in still another of her books, Le toutounier, Colette evoked this other side of women’s life. Three sisters, unhappy or troubled in their loves, gather every night around the old sofa from their childhood; there they relax, pondering the worries of the day, preparing tomorrow’s battles, tasting the ephemeral pleasures of a reparative rest, a good sleep, a warm bath, a crying session, they barely speak, but each one creates a nesting space for the others; and everything taking place with them is real.
For some women, this frivolous and warm intimacy is more precious than the serious pomp of their relations with men. It is in another woman that the narcissist, as in the days of her adolescence, sees a favorite double; it is through her attentive and competent eyes that she can admire her wellcut dress, her elegant interior. Over and above marriage, the best friend remains her favorite witness: she can still continue to be a desirable and desired object. In almost every young girl, as we have seen, there are homosexual tendencies; the often awkward embraces of her husband do not efface these tendencies; this is the source of the sensual softness woman feels for her counterparts and that has no equal in ordinary men. Sensual attachment between two women friends can be sublimated into exalted sentimentality or expressed in diffuse or real caresses. Their embraces can also be no more than a distracting pastime—such is the case for harem women whose principal concern is to kill time—or they can become of primary importance.
It is nonetheless rare for feminine complicity to reach true friendship; women feel more spontaneous solidarity with each other than men do, but from within this solidarity they do not transcend toward each other: together they are turned toward the masculine world, whose values each hopes to monopolize for herself. Their relations are not built on their singularity, but are lived immediately in their generality: and from there, the element of hostility comes into play. Natasha, who cherished the women in her family because they could witness the births of her babies, nevertheless felt jealous of them: every one of them could embody the woman in Pierre’s eyes.10 Women’s mutual understanding lies in the fact that they identify with each other: but then each one competes with her companion. A housewife has a more intimate relationship with her maid than a man—unless he is homosexual—has with his valet or chauffeur; they tell each other secrets, and sometimes they are accomplices; but there are also hostile rivalries between them, because while freeing herself from the actual work, the mistress of the house wants to assume the responsibility and credit for the work she assigns; she wants to think of herself as irreplaceable, indispensable. “Everything goes wrong as soon as I’m not there.” She harasses her maid in order to find fault with her; if she does her job too well, the mistress cannot be proud of feeling unique. Likewise, she systematically becomes irritated with teachers, governesses, nurses, and children’s maids who care for her offspring, with parents and friends who help her out; she gives the excuse that they do not respect “her will,” that they do not carry out “her ideas”; the truth is that she has neither particular will nor ideas; what irritates her, on the contrary, is that others carry out her functions exactly as she would. This is one of the main sources of family and domestic discussions that poison the life of the home: the less able she is to show her own merits, the fiercer she is in wanting to be sovereign. But where women especially see each other as enemies is in the area of seduction and love; I have pointed out this rivalry in girls: it often continues throughout life. We have seen how they seek absolute validation in the ideal of the fashionable woman or the socialite; she suffers from not being surrounded by glory; she cannot bear to perceive the slightest halo around someone else’s head; she steals all the credit others receive; and what is an absolute if not unique? A woman who truly loves is satisfied to be glorified in one heart, she will not envy her friends’ superficial success; but she feels threatened in her very love. The fact is that the theme of the woman betrayed by her best friend is not only a literary cliché; the closer two women are as friends, the more their duality becomes dangerous. The confidante is invited to see through the eyes of the woman in love, to feel with her heart, with her flesh: she is attracted by the lover, fascinated by the man who seduces her friend; she feels protected enough by her loyalty to let her feelings go; she does not like playing an inessential role: soon she is ready to surrender, to offer herself. Many women prudently avoid their “intimate girlfriends” as soon as they fall in love. This ambivalence keeps women from relying on their mutual feelings. The shadow of the male always weighs heavily on them. Even when not mentioning him, the verse of Saint-John Perse applies: “And the sun is not named, but its presence is among us.”
Together women take revenge on him, set traps for him, malign him, insult him: but they wait for him. As long as they stagnate in the gynaeceum, they bask in contingency, in blandness, in boredom; this limbo has retained some of the warmth of the mother’s breast: but it is still limbo. Woman is content to linger there on condition that she will soon be able to emerge from it. She is thus content enough in the dampness of her bathroom imagining she will later make her entrance into the luminous salon. Women are comrades for each other in captivity, they help each other endure their prison, even prepare their escape: but their liberator will come from the masculine world.
For most women, this world keeps its glow after marriage; only the husband loses his prestige; the wife discovers that his pure manly essence tarnishes: but man still remains the truth of the universe, the supreme authority, the wonderful, adventure, master, gaze, prey, pleasure, salvation; he still embodies transcendence, he is the answer to all questions. And the most loyal wife never consents to give him up completely and close herself in a dismal tête-à-tête with a contingent individual. Her childhood left her in absolute need of a guide; when the husband fails to fulfill this role, she turns to another man. Sometimes her father, a brother, an uncle, a relative, or an old friend has kept his former prestige: so she will lean on him. There are two categories of men whose professions destine them to become confidants and mentors: priests and doctors. The first have that great advantage of not having to be paid for these consultations; the confessional renders them defens
eless in the face of the babbling of the pious; they avoid “sacristy pests” and “holy Marys” as best they can; but their duty is to lead their flock on the moral path, a most urgent duty as women gain social and political importance and the Church endeavors to make instruments of them. The “spiritual guide” dictates his political opinions to his penitent and influences her vote; and many husbands are irritated by his interference in their conjugal life: it is he who defines what they do in the privacy of the bedroom as licit or illicit; he is concerned in the education of the children; he advises the woman on her conduct with her husband; she who always hailed man as a god kneels with pleasure before the male who is the earthly substitute for God. The doctor is better protected as he requires payment; and he can close his door to clients who are too indiscreet; but he is the target of more specific, more stubborn aims; three-quarters of the men harassed by nymphomaniacs are doctors; to undress in front of a man is a great exhibitionistic pleasure for many women.
Stekel says: I know some women who find satisfaction only in an examination by a doctor they like. In particular, there are among spinsters many rich women who see their doctor for “a very careful” examination because of minor discharges or a banal problem. Others suffer from a cancer phobia or infections from toilets, and these phobias provide them with the pretext to have an examination.
He cites two cases, among others:
A spinster, B.V.…, 43 years old and rich, goes to see a doctor once a month, after her period, demanding a very careful examination because she believed that something was wrong. She changes doctors every month and plays the same game each time. The doctor asks her to undress and lie down on the table or couch. She refuses, saying that she is too modest, that she cannot do such a thing, that it is against nature! The doctor forces her or gently persuades her, and she finally undresses, explaining she is a virgin and he should not hurt her. He promises to give her a rectal exam. Her orgasm often comes as soon as the doctor examines her; it is repeated, intensified, during the rectal exam. She always uses a false name and pays right away … She admits to having entertained the hope of being raped by a doctor.