Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
The “dangerous age” is characterized by certain organic troubles,
1
but the symbolic value they embody gives them their importance. The crisis is felt much less acutely by women who have not essentially staked everything on their femininity; those who work hard—in their home or outside—are relieved when their menstrual servitude ends; peasants and workers’ wives who are constantly threatened with new pregnancies are happy when, finally, that risk no longer exists. In this situation as in many others, women’s disorders come less from the body itself than from their anxious consciousness of it. The moral drama usually begins before the onset of the physiological phenomena, and it does not end until long after they have been eliminated.
Well before the definitive mutilation, woman is haunted by the horror of aging. The mature man is engaged in more important enterprises than those of love; his sexual ardor is less pressing than in his youth; and as he is not expected to have the passive qualities of an object, the alteration of his
face and body does not spoil his possibilities of seduction. By contrast, woman reaches her full sexual blossoming at about thirty-five, having finally overcome all her inhibitions: this is when her desires are the most intense and when she wants to satisfy them the most ardently; she has counted on her sexual attributes far more than man has; to keep her husband, to be assured of protection, and to succeed in most jobs she holds, she has to please; she has not been allowed a hold on the world except through man’s mediation: What will become of her when she no longer has a hold on him? This is what she anxiously wonders while she witnesses, powerless, the degradation of this object of flesh with which she is one; she fights; but dyes, peeling, and plastic surgery can never do more than prolong her dying youth. At least she can play tricks with the mirror. But when the inevitable, irreversible process starts, which is going to destroy in her the whole edifice constructed during puberty, she feels touched by the very inevitability of death.
One might think that the woman who experiences the greatest distress is the one who has been the most passionately enraptured by her beauty and youth; but no; the narcissist is too attentive to her person not to have envisaged the ineluctable moment and not to have worked out an alternative position; she will certainly suffer from her mutilation: but at least she will not be caught short and will adapt rather quickly. The woman who has forgotten, devoted, and sacrificed herself will be disrupted much more by the sudden revelation. “I had only one life to live; this was my lot, so here I am!” To the surprise of her family and friends, a radical change takes place in her: expelled from her shelter, torn away from her projects, she brusquely finds herself, without resources, face-to-face with herself. Beyond this barrier she has unexpectedly struck, she has the feeling that she will do no more than survive; her body will be without promise; the dreams and desires she has not realized will forever remain unaccomplished; she will look back on the past from this new perspective; the time has come to draw the line, to take stock. And she is horrified by the narrow strictures inflicted on her life. Faced with this, her brief and disappointing story, she behaves like an adolescent girl on the threshold of a still inaccessible future: she denies her finitude; to the poverty of her existence she contrasts the nebulous treasures of her personality. Because as a woman she endured her destiny more or less passively, she feels that her chances were taken from her, that she was duped, that she slid from youth to maturity without being aware of it. She discovers that her husband, her milieu, and her occupations were not worthy of her; she feels misunderstood. She withdraws from the surroundings to which she esteems herself superior; she shuts
herself up with the secret she carries in her heart and which is the mysterious key to her unfortunate lot; she tries to see the possibilities she has not exhausted. She begins to keep a diary; if she has understanding confidantes, she pours out her heart in endless conversations; and she ruminates on her regrets, her grievances, all day and all night. Just as the young girl dreams of what her future
will be
, she recalls what her past
could have been;
she remembers the missed occasions and constructs beautiful retrospective romances. Helene Deutsch cites the case of a woman who had broken off an unhappy marriage very early and who had then spent long serene years with a second husband: at forty-five, she painfully began to miss her first husband and to sink into melancholy. The cares of childhood and puberty come back to life, the woman constantly mulls over the story of her youth, and forgotten feelings for her parents, brothers and sisters, and childhood friends come alive once again. Sometimes she indulges in dreamy and passive moroseness. But more often she is jolted into saving her wasted existence. She displays, exhibits, and praises the merits of this personality she has just discovered in contrast with the pettiness of her destiny. Matured by experience, she believes she is finally able to prove her worth; she would like to have another chance. And first in a pathetic effort, she tries to stop time. A maternal woman is sure she can still have a child: she passionately seeks to create life once more. A sensual woman strives to conquer a new lover. The coquette is more than ever determined to please. They all declare they have never felt so young. They want to persuade others that the passage of time has not really touched them; they begin to “dress young,” they act childishly. The aging woman well knows that if she has ceased being a sexual object, it is not only because her flesh no longer provides man with fresh treasures: it is also that her past and her experience make a person of her whether she likes it or not; she has fought, loved, wanted, suffered, and taken pleasure for herself: this autonomy is intimidating; she tries to disavow it; she exaggerates her femininity, she adorns herself, wears perfume, she becomes totally charming, gracious, pure immanence; she admires her male interlocutor with a naive eye and childish intonations; she ostentatiously brings up her memories of girlhood; instead of speaking, she chirps, claps her hands, bursts out laughing. She plays this game with a kind of sincerity. This newfound interest in herself and her desire to wrench herself from old routines and start over again give her the impression of a new beginning.
In fact, it is not really a question of a new start; she discovers no goals in the world toward which she could project herself in a free and effective movement. Her agitation is more eccentric, incoherent, and useless
because it only serves as symbolic compensation for past errors and failures. Among other things and before it is too late, the woman will try to realize all her childhood and adolescent desires: this one goes back to the piano, that one begins to sculpt, to write, to travel; she takes up skiing, foreign languages. She welcomes everything she had refused until then—again before it is too late. She admits her repugnance for a husband she had previously tolerated, and she becomes frigid in his arms; or by contrast, she abandons herself to the passions she repressed; she overwhelms the husband with her demands; she goes back to practicing masturbation, which she had given up since childhood. Her homosexual tendencies—which are latent in almost all women—come out. The subject often carries them over to her daughter; but sometimes unusual feelings arise for a woman friend. In his work
Sex, Life, and Faith
, Rom Landau tells the following story, confided to him by the person herself:
Mrs. X., a woman in the late forties, married for over twenty-five years, mother of three grown-up children, occupied a prominent position in … the social and charitable activities of the town in which she lived. Mrs. X. met a woman in London some ten years her junior who, like herself, was a leading social worker. The two … became friends. Miss Y. invited Mrs. X. to stay as her guest during her next visit to London, and Mrs. X.… accepted. During the second evening of her visit—Mrs. X. assured me repeatedly that she had not the least idea how it happened—she suddenly found herself passionately embracing her hostess, and subsequently she spent the whole night with her … she was terrified … and left London the same day … Never in her life had she read or heard anything about homosexuality and had had no idea that “such things” existed … she could do nothing to stifle her ever-growing feelings for Miss Y.… For the first time in her life she found [her husband’s] caresses unwelcome, even his routine kiss … Finally, she decided to revisit Miss Y. and “clear up” the situation … she only found herself more deeply involved in it; … to be with her filled her with a delight that she had never experienced before … she was troubled by a profound sin-consciousness, and was anxious to discover whether there was a “scientific explanation” of her state and any moral justification for it.
In this case, the subject gave in to a spontaneous drive and was herself deeply disconcerted by it. But often the woman deliberately seeks to live
the romances she has not experienced and that soon she will no longer be able to experience. She leaves her home, both because it seems unworthy of her and because she desires solitude as well as the chance to seek adventure. If she finds it, she throws herself into it greedily. Thus, in this story by Stekel:
Mrs. B.Z. was forty years old, had three children and twenty years of married life behind her when she began to think she was misunderstood, that she had wasted her life; she took up various new activities among which was going skiing in the mountains; there she met a thirty-year-old man and became his mistress; but soon after, he fell in love with Mrs. B.Z.’s daughter … she agreed to their marriage so as to keep her lover near her; there was an unacknowledged but very strong homosexual love between mother and daughter, which partially explains this decision. Nevertheless, the situation soon became intolerable, the lover sometimes leaving the mother’s bed during the night to be with the daughter. Mrs. B.Z.… attempted suicide. It was then—she was forty-six—that she was treated by Stekel. She decided to break it off and while her daughter gave up her marriage plans Mrs. B.Z.… then became an exemplary wife and fell into piousness.
A woman influenced by a tradition of decency and honesty does not always follow through with action. But her dreams are peopled with erotic fantasies that she calls up during waking hours as well; she manifests an exalted and sensual tenderness to her children; she cultivates incestuous obsessions with her son; she secretly falls in love with one young man after another; like an adolescent girl, she is haunted by ideas of rape; she also feels the attraction of prostitution; the ambivalence of her desires and fears produces an anxiety that sometimes leads to neuroses: she scandalizes her family and friends by bizarre behavior that in fact merely expresses her imaginary life.
The boundary between the imaginary and the real is even less distinct in this troubled period than during puberty. One of the most salient characteristics in the aging woman is the feeling of depersonalization that makes her lose all objective landmarks. People in good health who have come close to death also say they have felt a curious impression of doubling; when one feels oneself to be consciousness, activity, and freedom, the passive object affected by fate seems necessarily like another:
I
am not the one run over by a car;
I
am not the old woman the mirror shows me. The
woman who “never felt so young” and who never saw herself so old is not able to reconcile these two aspects of herself; time passes and diminishes her in dreams. So reality fades and becomes less important: likewise, she can no longer tell herself apart from the illusion. The woman relies on interior proof rather than on this strange world where time proceeds in reverse, where her double no longer resembles her, where events have betrayed her. She is thus inclined to ecstasies, visions, and deliriums. And since love is even more than ever her essential preoccupation, it is understandable that she lets herself go to the illusion that she is loved. Nine out of ten erotomaniacs are women; and they are almost all between forty and fifty years old.
However, not everyone is able to cross over the wall of reality so boldly. Deprived of all human love, even in their dreams, many women seek relief in God; the flirt, the lover, and the dissolute become pious around menopause. The vague ideas of destiny, secrecy, and misunderstood personality of woman in her autumn years find a rational unity in religion. The devotee considers her wasted life as a test sent by the Lord; in her unhappiness, her soul has drawn exceptional advantages from misfortune, making her worthy of being visited by the grace of God; she will readily believe that heaven sends her illuminations or even—like Mme Krüdener—that it imperiously entrusts her with a mission. As she has more or less lost the sense of reality during this crisis, the woman is open to any suggestion: any spiritual guide is in a strong position to wield power over her soul. She will also enthusiastically accept more questionable authorities; she is an obvious prey for religious sects, spirits, prophets, faith healers, and any charlatan. Not only has she lost all critical sense by losing contact with the given world, but she is also desperate for a definitive truth: she has to have the remedy, the formula, the key, that will suddenly save her by saving the universe. She scorns more than ever a logic that obviously could not possibly apply to her own case; the only arguments that seem convincing to her are those that are particularly destined for her: revelations, inspirations, messages, signs, or even miracles begin to appear around her. Her discoveries sometimes draw her into paths of action: she throws herself into schemes, undertakings, and adventures whose idea is whispered to her by some adviser or inner voices. Sometimes, she simply deems herself the holder of the truth and absolute wisdom. Whether she is active or contemplative, her attitude is accompanied by feverish exaltation. The crisis of menopause brutally cuts feminine life into two: it is this discontinuity that gives woman the illusion of a “new life”; it is an
other
time opening before her: she approaches it with the fervor of a convert; she is
converted to love, life, God, art, and humanity: she loses and magnifies herself in these entities. She is dead and resuscitated, she views the earth with a gaze that has pierced the secrets of the beyond, and she thinks she is flying toward uncharted heights.