Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
Rejecting logical principles and moral imperatives, skeptical about the laws of nature, woman lacks a sense of the universal; the world seems to her a confused collection of individual cases; this is why she more readily
accepts a neighbor’s gossip than a scientific explanation; she doubtless respects the printed book, but this respect skims along the written pages without grasping the content; by contrast, the anecdote told by an unknown person waiting in a line or in a drawing room instantly takes on overwhelming authority; in her domain, everything is magic; outside, everything is mystery; she is ignorant of the criterion for credibility; only immediate experience convinces her: her own experience or another’s, as long as it is forcefully affirmed. As for herself, she feels she is a special case because she is isolated in her home and has no active contact with other women; she always expects destiny and men to make an exception in her favor; she believes in whatever insights come her way far more than in reasoning that is valid for everyone; she readily admits that they have been sent by God or by some obscure world spirit; in relation to misfortunes or accidents, she calmly thinks, “That can’t happen to me,” or else she imagines, “I’ll be the exception”: she enjoys special favors; the shopkeeper will give her a discount, the policeman will let her go to the head of the line; she has been taught to overestimate the value of her smile, but no one told her that all women smiled. It is not that she thinks herself more special than her neighbor: it is that she does not make comparisons; for the same reason experience rarely proves her wrong: she suffers one failure, then another, but she does not add them up.
This is why women do not succeed in building a solid “counter-universe” where they can defy males; they sporadically rant against men in general, they tell stories about the bedroom or childbirth, they exchange horoscopes and beauty secrets. But to truly build this “world of grievances” that their resentment calls for, they lack conviction; their attitude to man is too ambivalent. Indeed, he is a child, a contingent and vulnerable body, an innocent, an unwanted drone, a mean tyrant, an egotist, a vain man: and he is also the liberating hero, the divinity who sets the standards. His desire is a gross appetite, his embraces a degrading chore: yet his ardor and virile force are also a demiurgic energy. When a woman ecstatically utters, “This is a man!” she is evoking both the sexual vigor and the social effectiveness of the male she admires: in both are expressed the same creative sovereignty; she does not think he can be a great artist, a grand businessman, a general, or a chief without being a great lover: his social success is always a sexual attraction; inversely, she is ready to recognize genius in the man who satisfies her. She is, in fact, turning to a masculine myth here. The phallus for Lawrence and many others is both living energy and human transcendence. Thus in the pleasures of the bed, woman can see a communion with the spirit of the world. Worshipping man as in a mystical
cult, she loses and finds herself in his glory. The contradiction is easily perceived here due to the different types of individuals who are virile. Some—whose contingence she encounters in everyday life—are the incarnation of human misery; in others, man’s grandeur is exalted. But the woman even accepts that these two figures be fused into one. “If I become famous,” wrote a girl in love with a man she considered superior, “R.… will surely marry me because it will flatter his vanity; his chest will swell with me on his arm.” Yet she admired him madly. The same individual, in the eyes of the woman, may very well be stingy, mean, vain, foolish, and a god; after all, gods have their weaknesses. One feels a demanding severity—the opposite of authentic esteem—for an individual who is loved in his freedom and humanity, whereas a woman kneeling before her male can very well pride herself on “knowing how to deal with him,” or “handle him,” and she complaisantly flatters his “weaknesses” without his losing prestige; this is the proof that she does not feel friendship for his individual person as expressed in his real acts; blindly she bows to the general essence her idol is part of: virility is a sacred aura, a given fixed value, which is affirmed despite the weaknesses of the individual who bears it; this individual does not count; by contrast, the woman, jealous of his privilege, is delighted to exercise sly superiority over him.
The same ambiguity of woman’s feelings for man is found in her general attitude concerning her self and the world; the domain in which she is enclosed is invested by the masculine universe; but it is haunted by obscure forces of which men themselves are the playthings; if she allies herself with these magical virtues, she will, in her turn, acquire power. Society subjugates Nature; but Nature dominates it; the Spirit affirms itself over Life; but it dies if life no longer supports it. Woman uses this ambivalence to assign more truth to a garden than a city, to an illness than an idea, to a birth than a revolution; she tries to reestablish this reign of the earth, of the Mother, imagined by Bachofen, to be able to find herself as the essential facing the inessential. But as she herself is an existent that a transcendence inhabits, she will only be able to valorize this region where she is confined by transfiguring it: she lends it a transcendent dimension. Man lives in a coherent universe that is a thought reality. Woman struggles with a magic reality that does not allow thinking: she escapes through thoughts lacking real content. Instead of assuming her existence, she contemplates in the heavens the pure Idea of her destiny; instead of acting, she erects her statue in her imagination; instead of reasoning, she dreams. From here comes the fact that while being so “physical,” she is also so artificial, while being so terrestrial, she can be so ethereal. Her life is spent scrubbing pots and pans,
and it is a marvelous romance; vassal to man, she believes she is his idol; debased in her flesh, she exalts Love. Because she is condemned to know only life’s contingent facticity, she becomes priestess of the Ideal.
This ambivalence is marked by the way woman deals with her body. It is a burden: weakened by the species, bleeding every month, passively propagating, for her it is not the pure instrument of her grasp on the world but rather an opaque presence; it is not certain that it will give her pleasure, and it creates pains that tear her apart; it contains threats: she feels danger in her “insides.” Her body is “hysterical” because of the close connection between endocrine secretions and nervous and sympathetic systems commanding muscles and viscera; it expresses reactions the woman refuses to accept: in sobs, convulsions, and vomiting, her body escapes her, it betrays her; it is her most intimate reality, but it is a shameful reality that she keeps hidden. And yet it is her marvelous double; she contemplates it in the mirror with amazement; it is the promise of happiness, a work of art, a living statue; she shapes it, adorns it, displays it. When she smiles into the mirror, she forgets her carnal contingence; in love’s embrace, in motherhood, her image disappears. But often, dreaming about herself, she is surprised to be both that heroine and that flesh.
Nature symmetrically provides her with a double face: it supplies the stew and incites mystical effusions. In becoming a housewife and mother, woman gave up her free getaways into fields and woods, she preferred the calm cultivation of the kitchen garden, she tamed flowers and put them in vases: yet she is still exalted by moonlights and sunsets. In the terrestrial fauna and flora, she sees food and ornamentation before all; yet a sap flows that is generosity and magic. Life is not only immanence and repetition: it is also a dazzling face of light; in flowering meadows, it is revealed as Beauty. In tune with nature by the fertility of her womb, woman also feels swept by the breath that animates her and is spirit. And insofar as she is unsatisfied and feels like the uncompleted and unlimited girl, her soul will then rush forward on endlessly unwinding roads toward limitless horizons. Slave to her husband, children, and home, she finds it intoxicating to be alone, sovereign on the hillside; she is no longer spouse, mother, housewife, but a human being; she contemplates the passive world: and she recalls that she is a whole consciousness, an irreducible freedom. In front of the mystery of water and the mountain summit’s thrust, male supremacy is abolished; walking through the heather, dipping her hand in the river, she lives not for others but for herself. The woman who maintained her independence through all her servitudes will ardently love her own freedom in Nature. The others will find in it only the pretext for refined raptures, and
they will hesitate at twilight between the fear of catching a cold and a swooning soul.
This double belonging to the carnal world and to a “poetic” world defines the metaphysics and wisdom to which the woman more or less explicitly adheres. She tries to combine life and transcendence; this is to say she rejects Cartesianism and all doctrines connected to it; she is comfortable in a naturalism similar to that of the Stoics or Neoplatonists of the sixteenth century: it is not surprising that women, Margaret of Navarre being the first of them, should be attached to such a philosophy, at once so material and so spiritual. Socially Manichaean, the woman has a deep need to be ontologically optimistic: the moralities of action do not suit her, since it is forbidden for her to act; she submits to the given: so the given must be Good; but a Good recognized by reason like that of Spinoza or by calculation like that of Leibniz cannot touch her. She requires a good that is a living Harmony and within which she situates herself by the mere fact of living. The notion of harmony is one of the keys of the feminine universe: it implies perfection in immobility, the immediate justification of each element as part of the whole, and her passive participation in the totality. In a harmonious world, woman thus attains what man will seek in action: she has purchase on the world, she is necessary to it, she cooperates in the triumph of Good. Moments women consider revelations are those where they discover they are in harmony with a reality based on peace with one’s self. These are the moments of luminous happiness that Virginia Woolf—in
Mrs. Dalloway
, in
To the Lighthouse
—that Katherine Mansfield, all through her work, grant to their heroines as a supreme recompense. The joy that is a surge of freedom is reserved for the man; what the woman knows is an impression of smiling plenitude.
7
One understands that simple ataraxia, in her eyes, can be of utmost importance, as she normally lives in the tension of denial, recrimination, and demands; one could never reproach her for savoring a beautiful afternoon or the sweetness of an evening. But it is a delusion to try to find here the true definition of the hidden soul of the world. Good
is
not; the world is not harmony, and no individual has a necessary place in it.
There is a justification, a supreme compensation, that society has always been bent on dispensing to woman: religion. There must be religion for women as for the people, for exactly the same reasons: when a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, the mirage of transcendence must be offered to it. It is to man’s total advantage to have God endorse the codes he creates: and specifically because he exercises sovereign authority over the woman, it is only right that this authority be conferred on him by the sovereign being. Among others, for Jews, Muslims, and Christians, man is the master by divine right: fear of God will stifle the slightest inclination of revolt in the oppressed. Their credulity can be counted on. Woman adopts an attitude of respect and faith before the masculine universe: God in his heaven seems barely farther from her than a government minister, and the mystery of Genesis matches that of an electrical power station. But more important, if she throws herself so willingly into religion, it is because religion fills a profound need. In modern civilization, where freedom plays an important role—even for the woman—religion becomes less of an instrument of constraint than of mystification. The woman is less often asked to accept her inferiority in the name of God than to believe, thanks to him, that she is equal to the male lord; even the temptation to revolt is avoided by pretending to overcome injustice. The woman is no longer robbed of her transcendence, since she will dedicate her immanence to God; souls’ merits are judged only in heaven and not according to their terrestrial accomplishments; here below, as Dostoevsky would have said, they are never more than occupations: shining shoes or building a bridge is the same vanity; over and above social discriminations, equality of the sexes is reestablished. This is why the little girl and the adolescent girl throw themselves into devotion with an infinitely greater fervor than their brothers; God’s gaze that transcends his transcendence humiliates the boy: he will forever remain a child under this powerful guardianship, it is a more radical castration than that with which he feels his father’s existence threatens him. But the “eternal girl child” finds her salvation in this gaze that metamorphoses her into a sister of the angels; it cancels out the privilege of the penis. A sincere faith helps the girl avoid all inferiority complexes: she is neither male nor female, but God’s creature. This is why we find a virile steadfastness in the great female saints: Saint Bridget and Saint Catherine of Siena arrogantly tried to rule the world; they recognized no male authority: Catherine even directed her directors very severely; Joan of Arc and Saint Teresa followed their own paths with an intrepidness surpassed by no man. The Church sees to it that God never authorizes women to escape from male guardianship; it has put these powerful weapons in masculine hands only: refusal of absolution and excommunication; for her
obstinate visions, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Nevertheless, even subjected by God’s will to men’s laws, the woman finds a solid recourse against them through him. Masculine logic is refuted by mysteries; males’ pride becomes a sin, their agitation is not only absurd but culpable: Why remodel this world created by God himself? The passivity to which woman is doomed is sanctified. Reciting her rosary by the fire, she knows she is closer to heaven than her husband, who is out at political meetings. There is no need to
do
anything to save her soul, it is enough to
live
without disobeying. The synthesis of life and spirit is completed: the mother not only engenders body but also gives God a soul; this is higher work than penetrating the secrets of the atom. With the complicity of the heavenly Father, woman can make a claim to the glory of her femininity against man.