The Second Sex (44 page)

“Every Land is the Promised Land.”
⁶⁶

Nothing that has come from God’s hands, nothing that is given, can be in itself bad: “We pray to God with the entirety of his work! Nothing he
made is in vain, nothing is alien to anything else.”
⁶⁷

And furthermore, there is nothing that is unnecessary. “All things that he has created commune together, all at one and the same time are necessary each to each.”
⁶⁸

Thus it is that woman has her place in the harmony of the universe; but it is not just an ordinary place; there is a “strange and, in Lucifer’s eyes, scandalous passion that binds the Eternal to this momentary flower of Nothingness.”
⁶⁹

Of course, woman can be destructive: In Lechy, Claudel incarnated the bad woman who drives man to his destruction;
⁷⁰
in
Break of Noon
, Ysé ruins the life of those trapped by her love. But if there were not this risk of loss, there would not be salvation either. Woman “is the element of risk he deliberately introduced into the midst of his marvelous construction.”
⁷¹
It is good that man should know the temptations of the flesh. “It is this enemy within us that gives our lives their dramatic element, their poignant salt. If our souls were not so brutally assailed, they would continue to sleep, yet here they leap up … This struggle is the apprenticeship of victory.”
⁷²
Man is summoned to become aware of his soul not only by the spiritual path but also by that of the flesh. “And what flesh speaks more forcefully to man than the flesh of a woman?”
⁷³
Whatever wrenches him from sleep, from security, is useful: love in whatever form it presents has the virtue of appearing in “our small personal worlds, ordered by our conventional reasoning, as a deeply perturbing element.”
⁷⁴
Often woman is but a deceptive giver of illusions:

But there is also usefulness in illusion; this is what the Guardian Angel announces to Doña Prouhèze:

By God’s will, what Prouhèze was for Rodrigo is “a sword through his heart.”
⁷⁷

But woman in God’s hands is not only this blade, this burn; the riches of this world are not meant to be always refused: they are also nourishment; man must take them with him and make them his own. The loved one will embody for him all the recognizable beauty in the universe; she will be a chant of adoration on his lips.

“How lovely you are, Violaine, and how lovely is the world where you are.”
⁷⁸

“Who is she who stands before me, gentler than the breeze, like the moon among the young foliage?… Here she is like the fresh honeybee unfolding its newborn wings, like a lanky doe, and like a flower that does not even know it is beautiful.”
⁷⁹

“Let me breathe your scent like that of the earth, when it glows and is washed like an altar, and brings forth blue and yellow flowers.

“And let me breathe the summer’s aroma that smells of grass and hay, and is like the autumn’s fragrance.”
⁸⁰

She is the sum of all nature: the rose and the lily, the star, the fruit, the bird, the wind, the moon, the sun, the fountain, “the peaceful tumult, in noon’s light, of a great port.”
⁸¹

And she is still more: a peer.

“Now, this time for me, that luminous point of night’s living sands is something quite different from a star,

“Someone human like me …”
⁸²

“You will be alone no more, and I will be in you and with you, with you
forever, the devoted one. Someone yours forever who will never be absent, your wife.”
⁸³

“Someone to listen to what I say and trust in me.

“A soft-voiced companion who takes us in her arms and attests she is a woman.”
⁸⁴

Body and soul, in taking her into his heart, man finds his roots in this earth and accomplishes himself.

“I took this woman, and she is my measure and my earthly allotment.”
⁸⁵
She is a burden, and man is not made to be burdened.

“And the foolish man finds himself surprised by this absurd person, this great heavy and cumbersome thing.

“So many dresses, so much hair, what can he do?

“He is no longer able, he no longer wants to be rid of her.”
⁸⁶

This burden is also a treasure. “I am a great treasure,” says Violaine.

Reciprocally, woman achieves her earthly destiny by giving herself to man.

“For what is the use of being a woman, unless to be gathered?

“And being this rose, if not to be devoured? And of being born,

“Unless to belong to another and to be the prey of a powerful lion?”
⁸⁷

“What shall we do, who can only be a woman in his arms, and in his heart a cup of wine?”
⁸⁸

“But you my soul say: I have not been created in vain and he who is called to gather me is alive!”

“The heart that was waiting for me, ah! what joy for me to fill it.”
⁸⁹

Of course this union of man and woman is to be consummated in the presence of God; it is holy and belongs in the eternal; it should be consented to by a deep movement of the will and
cannot
be broken by an individual caprice. “Love, the consent that two free people grant each other, seemed to God so great a thing that he made it a sacrament. In this as in all other matters the sacrament gives reality to that which was but the heart’s supreme desire.”
⁹⁰
And further:

“Marriage is not pleasure but the sacrifice of pleasure, it is the study made by two souls who forever, henceforth, and to end beyond themselves,

“Must be content with each other.”
⁹¹

It is not only joy that man and woman will bring to each other through this union; each will take possession of the other’s being. “He it was who knew how to find that soul within my soul!… He it was who came to me and held out his hand. He was my calling! How can I describe it? He was my origin: it was he by whom and for whom I came into the world.”
⁹²

“A whole part of myself which I thought did not exist because I was busy elsewhere and not thinking of it. Ah! My God, it exists, it does exist, terribly.”
⁹³

And this being appears as justified, necessary for the one it completes. “It is in him that you were necessary,” says Prouhèze’s Angel. And Rodrigo:

“For what is it to die but to stop being necessary?

“When was she able to do without me? When shall I cease to be for her that without which she could not have been herself?”
⁹⁴

“They say that no soul was made except in a life and in a mysterious relationship with other lives.

“But for us it is still more than that. For I exist as I speak; one single thing resonating between two people.

“When we were being fashioned, Orion, I think that a bit of your substance was left over and that I am made of what you lack.”
⁹⁵

In the marvelous necessity of this union, paradise is regained, death conquered:

“At last the being who existed in paradise is here remade of a man and woman.”
⁹⁶

“We will never manage to do away with death unless it be by one another.

“As purple mixed with orange gives pure red.”
⁹⁷

Finally, in the form of another, each one attains the Other, that is God, in his plenitude.

“What we give one another is God in different guises.”
⁹⁸

“Would your desire for heaven have been so great if you had not glimpsed it once in my eyes?”
⁹⁹

“Ah! Stop being a woman and let me at last see on your face the God you are powerless to hide.”
¹⁰⁰

“The love of God calls in us on the same faculty as the love of his creatures, it calls on our feeling that we are not complete in ourselves and that the supreme God in which we are consummated is someone outside ourselves.”
¹⁰¹

Thus each finds in the other the meaning of his earthly life and also irrefutable proof of the insufficiency of this life:

“Since I cannot grant him heaven, at least I can tear him from the earth. I alone can give him need in the measure of his desire.”
¹⁰²

“What I was asking from you, and what I wanted to give you, is not compatible with time, but with eternity.”
¹⁰³

Yet woman’s and man’s roles are not exactly symmetrical. On the social level, man’s primacy is evident. Claudel believes in hierarchies and, among others, the family’s: the husband is the head. Anne Vercors rules over her home. Don Pelagio sees himself as the gardener entrusted with the care of this delicate plant, Doña Prouhèze; he gives her a mission she does not dream of refusing. The fact alone of being a male confers privilege. “Who am I, poor girl, to compare myself to the male of my race?” asks Sygne.
¹⁰⁴

It is man who labors in the fields, who builds cathedrals, who fights with the sword, who explores the world, who acts, who undertakes. God’s plans are accomplished on earth through him. Woman is merely an auxiliary. She is the one who stays in place, who waits, and, who, like Sygne, maintains: “I am she who remains and who am always there.”

She defends the heritage of Coûfontaine, keeps his accounts in order while he is far away fighting for the cause. The woman brings the relief of hope to the fighter: “I bring irresistible hope.”
¹⁰⁵
And that of pity.

“I had pity on him. For where was he to turn, when he sought his mother, but to his own humiliated mother,

“In a spirit of confession and shame.”
¹⁰⁶

And Tête d’Or, dying, murmurs:

“That is the wounded man’s courage, the crippled man’s support,

“The dying man’s company …”

Claudel does not hold it against man that woman knows him in his weakest moments; on the contrary: he would find man’s arrogance as displayed in Montherlant and Lawrence sacrilege. It is good that man knows he is carnal and lowly, that he forgets neither his origin nor his death, which is symmetrical to it. Every wife could say the same words as Marthe:

“It is true, it was not I who gave you life.

“But I am here to ask you for life once more. And a man’s confusion in the presence of a woman comes from this very question

“Like conscience in the presence of a creditor.”
¹⁰⁷

And yet this weakness has to yield to force. In marriage, the wife
gives herself
to the husband, who takes care of her: Lâla lies down on the ground before Coeuvre, who places his foot on her. The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage. In George’s hands, Sygne takes the vow of the knight to his sovereign.

“You are the lord and I the poor sibyl who keeps the fire.”
¹⁰⁸

“Let me take an oath like a new knight! O my lord! O my elder, let me swear in your hands

“After the fashion of a nun who makes her profession,

“O male of my race!”
¹⁰⁹

Fidelity and loyalty are the greatest of the female vassal’s human virtues. Sweet, humble, resigned as a woman, she is, in the name of her race and her lineage, proud and invincible; such is the proud Sygne de Coûfontaine and Tête d’Or’s princess, who carries on her shoulder the corpse of her assassinated father, who accepts the misery of a lonely and wild life, the suffering of a crucifixion, and who assists Tête d’Or in his agony before he dies at her side. Conciliator and mediator is thus how woman often appears: she is docile Esther accountable to Mordecai, Judith obeying the priests; she can overcome her weakness, her faintheartedness, and her modesty through loyalty to the cause that is hers since it is that of her masters; she draws strength from her devotion, which makes her a precious instrument.

So on the human level she is seen as drawing her greatness from her very subordination. But in God’s eyes, she is a perfectly autonomous person. The fact that for man existence surpasses itself while for woman it
maintains itself only establishes a difference between them on earth: in any case, transcendence is accomplished not on earth but in God. And woman has just as direct a connection with him as her companion does; perhaps hers is even more intimate and secret. It is through a man’s voice—what is more, a priest’s—that God speaks to Sygne; but Violaine hears his voice in the solitude of her heart, and Prouhèze only deals with the Guardian Angel. Claudel’s most sublime figures are women: Sygne, Violaine, Prouhèze. This is partly because saintliness for him lies in renunciation. And woman is less involved in human projects; she has less personal will: made to give and not to take, she is closer to perfect devotion. It is through her that the earthly joys that are permissible and good will be surpassed, but their sacrifice is still better. Sygne accomplishes this for a definite reason: to save the pope. Prouhèze resigns herself to it first because she loves Rodrigo with a forbidden love:

“Would you then have wanted me to put an adulteress into your hands?… I would have been only a woman who soon dies on your heart and not that eternal star that you thirst for.”
¹¹⁰