Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
It has sometimes been asserted that narcissism is the fundamental attitude of all women;
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but overextending this notion destroys it as La Rochefoucauld destroyed the notion of egotism. In fact, narcissism is a well-defined process of alienation: the self is posited as an absolute end, and the subject escapes itself in it. There are many other—authentic or inauthentic—attitudes found in woman: we have already studied some of them. What is true is that circumstances invite woman more than man to turn toward self and to dedicate her love to herself.
All love demands the duality of a subject and an object. Woman is led to narcissism by two convergent paths. As subject, she is frustrated; as a little girl, she was deprived of this alter ego that the penis is for the boy; later, her aggressive sexuality remained unsatisfied. Of far greater importance is that she is forbidden virile activities. She is busy, but she does not
do
anything; in her functions as wife, mother, and housewife, she is not recognized in her singularity. Man’s truth is in the houses he builds, the forests he clears, the patients he cures: not being able to accomplish herself in projects and aims, woman attempts to grasp herself in the immanence of her person. Parodying Sieyès’s words, Marie Bashkirtseff wrote: “Who am I? Nothing. What would I like to be? All.” It is because they are nothing that many women fiercely limit their interests to their self alone, that their self becomes hypertrophied so as to be confounded with All. “I am my own heroine,” continues Marie Bashkirtseff. A man who acts necessarily confronts himself. Inefficient and separated, woman can neither situate nor assess herself; she gives herself sovereign importance because no important object is accessible to her.
If she can put
herself
forward in her own desires, it is because since
childhood she has seen herself as an object. Her education has encouraged her to alienate herself wholly in her body, puberty having revealed this body as passive and desirable; it is a thing she can touch, that satin or velvet arouses, and that she can contemplate with a lover’s gaze. In solitary pleasure, it may happen that the woman splits into a male subject and a female object; Dalbiez studied the case of Irène, who said to herself, “I’m going to love myself,” or more passionately, “I’m going to possess myself,” or in a paroxysm, “I’m going to fecundate myself.”
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Marie Bashkirtseff is also both subject and object when she writes, “It’s really a pity that no one sees my arms and torso, all this freshness and youth.”
In truth, it is not possible to be
for self
positively Other and grasp oneself as object in the light of consciousness. Doubling is only dreamed. For the child, it is the doll that materializes this dream; she recognizes herself in it more concretely than in her own body because there is separation between the two. Mme de Noailles expresses this need to be two so as to establish a tender dialogue between self and self in, among other works,
Le livre de ma vie
(The Book of My Life):
I loved dolls, I endowed their immobility with the life of my own existence; I could not have slept under the warmth of a cover if they were not also wrapped in wool and feathers … I dreamed of truly savoring pure solitude as two … This need to persist intact, to be twice myself, I felt it avidly as a little child … Oh! How I wanted in the tragic instants where my dreamy sweetness was the plaything of hurtful tears to have another little Anna next to me who would throw her arms around my neck, who would console me, understand me … during my life I met her in my heart and I held her tight: she helped me not in the form of hoped-for consolation but in the form of courage.
The adolescent girl leaves her dolls dormant. But throughout her life, woman will be vigorously encouraged to leave and come back to herself by the magic of the mirror. Otto Rank brought to light the mirror-double relation in myths and dreams. It is above all in woman that the reflection allows itself to be assimilated to the self. Male beauty is a sign of transcendence,
that of woman has the passivity of immanence: the latter alone is made to arrest man’s gaze and can thus be caught in the immobile trap of the mirror’s silvering; man who feels and wants himself to be activity and subjectivity does not recognize himself in his immobile image; it does not appeal to him, since the man’s body does not appear to him as an object of desire; while the woman, knowing she is and making herself object, really believes she is seeing
herself
in the mirror: passive and given, the reflection is a thing like herself; and as she covets feminine flesh, her flesh, she enlivens the inert qualities she sees with her admiration and desire. Mme de Noailles, who knew about this, confides to us:
I was less vain about the gifts of the mind, so vigorous in me that I did not doubt them, than about the image reflected by a frequently consulted mirror … Only physical pleasure satisfies the soul fully.
The words “physical pleasure” are vague and inadequate here. What satisfies the soul is that, while the mind will have to prove its worth, the contemplated face is here, today, given and indubitable. The whole future is concentrated in this rectangle of light, and its frame makes a universe; outside these narrow limits, things are no more than disorganized chaos; the world is reduced to this piece of glass where one image shines: the One and Only. Every woman drowned in her reflection reigns over space and time, alone, sovereign; she has total rights over men, fortune, glory, and sensual pleasure. Marie Bashkirtseff was so intoxicated by her beauty that she wanted to fix it in indestructible marble; it is herself she would have thus destined to immortality:
Coming home I get undressed, I am naked and am struck by the beauty of my body as if I had never seen it. A statue has to be made of me, but how? Without getting married, it is almost impossible. And I have to, I would only get ugly, spoiled … I have to take a husband, if only to have my statue made.
Cécile Sorel, preparing for an amorous rendezvous, depicts herself like this:
I am in front of my mirror. I would like to be more beautiful. I fight with my lion’s mane. Sparks fly from my comb. My head is a sun in the middle of my tresses set like golden rays.
I also recall a young woman I saw one morning in the restroom of a café; she was holding a rose, and she looked a little drunk; she brought her lips to the mirror as if to drink her image, and she was murmuring while smiling: “Adorable, I find myself adorable.” Both priestess and idol, the narcissist crowned with glory hovers in the heart of eternity, and on the other side of the clouds kneeling creatures worship her: she is God contemplating himself. “I love myself, I am my God!” said Mme Mejerowsky. To become God is to realize the impossible synthesis of the in-itself and for-itself: the moments an individual thinks he has succeeded are special times of joy, exaltation, and plenitude. One day in an attic, Roussel, at nineteen, felt the aura of glory around his head: he never got over it. The girl who saw beauty, desire, love, and happiness deep in her mirror, endowed with her own features—animated, so she thinks, by her own consciousness—will try her whole life to use the promises of this blinding revelation. “It is you I love,” confides Marie Bashkirtseff to her reflection one day. Another day she writes: “I love myself so much, I make myself so happy that I was as if crazy at dinner.” Even if the woman is not of irreproachable beauty, she will see her soul’s unique riches appear on her face, and that will be enough to make her drunk. In the novel where she portrayed herself as Valérie, Mme Krüdener describes herself like this:
She has something special that I have never yet seen in any woman. One can be as graceful, much more beautiful, and be far from her. She is perhaps not admired, but she has something ideal and charming that makes one pay attention. Seeing her so delicate, so svelte that she is a thought …
It should not be surprising that those less advantaged might sometimes experience the ecstasy of the mirror: they are moved by the mere fact of being a thing of flesh, which is there; like man, all they need is the pure generosity of young feminine flesh; and since they grasp themselves as a singular subject, with a little bad faith they will also endow their generic qualities with an individual charm; they will discover some gracious, rare, or amusing feature in their face or body; they will think they are beautiful just because they feel they are women.
Moreover, the mirror is not the only instrument of doubling, although it is the favored one. Each person can try to create a twin brother in his inner dialogue. Alone most of the day, fed up with household tasks, woman has the leisure to shape her own figure in dreams. As a young girl, she dreamed of the future; trapped in an uncertain present, she tells her story
to herself; she retouches it so as to introduce an aesthetic order, transforming her contingent life into a destiny well before her death.
We know, for example, how attached women are to their childhood memories; women’s literature makes it clear; in general, childhood takes a secondary place in men’s autobiographies; women, on the other hand, often go no further than recounting their early years; these are the favorite subjects of their novels and stories. A woman who confides in a woman friend or a lover almost always begins her stories with these words: “When I was a little girl …” They are nostalgic for this period when they felt their father’s beneficent and imposing hand on their head while tasting the joys of independence; protected and justified by adults, they were autonomous individuals with a free future opening before them: now, however, they are poorly protected by marriage and love and have become servants or objects, imprisoned in the present. They reigned over the world, conquering it day after day: and now they are separated from the universe, doomed to immanence and repetition. They feel dispossessed. But what they suffer from the most is being swallowed up in generality: a wife, mother, housewife, or one woman among millions of others; as a child, by contrast, the woman lived her condition in an individual way; she was unaware of the analogies between her apprenticeship to the world and that of her friends; through her parents, teachers, and friends, she was recognized in her individuality, she thought herself incomparable to any other woman, unique, promised to unique possibilities. She returns emotionally to this younger sister whose freedom, demands, and sovereignty she abdicated and whom she more or less betrayed. The woman she has become misses this human being she was; she tries to find this dead child in her deepest self. The words “little girl” move her; but “What a funny little girl” do even more, words that revive her lost originality.
She is not satisfied with marveling from afar at this precious childhood: she tries to revive it in her. She tries to convince herself that her tastes, ideas, and feelings have kept their exceptional freshness. Perplexed, quizzical, and playing with her necklace or twisting her ring, she murmurs: “That’s funny … That’s just how I am … You know? Water fascinates me … Oh! I adore the countryside.” Each preference seems like an eccentricity, each opinion a challenge to the world. Dorothy Parker captured this widespread true-to-life characteristic:
She liked to think of herself as one for whom flowers would thrive, who must always have blossoms about her, if she would be truly happy … She told people, in little bursts of confidence, that she
loved flowers. There was something almost apologetic in her way of uttering her tender avowal, as if she would beg her listeners not to consider her too bizarre in her taste. It seemed rather as though she expected the hearer to fall back, startled, at her words, crying, “Not really! Well, what
are
we coming to?” She had other little confessions of affection … always with a little hesitation, as if understandably delicate about baring her heart, she told her love for color, the country, a good time, a really interesting play, nice materials, well-made clothes, and sunshine. But it was her fondness for flowers that she acknowledged oftenest. She seemed to feel that this, even more than her other predilections, set her apart from the general.
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The woman eagerly tries to confirm these analyses in her behavior; she chooses a color: “Green is really my color”; she has a favorite flower, perfume, musician, superstitions, and fetishes that she treats with respect; she does not have to be beautiful to express her personality in her outfits and home. The character she portrays is more or less coherent and original according to her intelligence, obstinacy, and depth of alienation. Some women just randomly put together a few sparse and mismatched traits; others systematically create a figure whose role they consistently play: it has already been said that women have trouble differentiating this game from the truth. Around this heroine, life goes on like a sad or marvelous novel, always somewhat strange. Sometimes it is a novel already written. I do not know how many girls have told me they see themselves in Judy of “Dust.”
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I remember an old, very ugly lady who used to say: “Read
The Lily in the Valley
.
‡
it’s my story”; as a child I used to contemplate this wilted lily for hours. Others, more vaguely, murmur: “My life is a novel.” A good or bad star hovers over them. “Things like this only happen to me,” they say. Rotten luck dogs them, or good luck smiles on them: in any case, they have a destiny. Cécile Sorel writes with the naïveté that characterizes her
Mémoires:
“This is how I made my debut in the world. My first friends were genius and beauty.” And in
The Book of My Life
, a fabulous narcissistic monument, Mme de Noailles writes:
The governesses disappeared one day: chance took their place. It mistreated the creature both powerful and weak as much as it had
satisfied it, it kept it from shipwrecks, where it was like a combative Ophelia, saving her flowers and whose voice ever rises. It asked the creature to hope that this final promise be kept: The Greeks use death.
This other example of narcissistic literature must be cited:
From the sturdy little girl I was with delicate but rounded arms and legs and healthy cheeks, I acquired a more frail physique, more evanescent that made me a pathetic adolescent, in spite of the source of life that can spring forth from my desert, my famine, and my brief and mysterious deaths as strangely as Moses’s rock. I will not boast of my courage as I have the right to. It is part of my strengths, my luck. I could describe it as one says: I have green eyes, black hair, a small and powerful hand.