Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
That prestige is reflected in the supernatural world. Generally, as a result of the role religion plays in women’s lives, the little girl, more dominated by the mother than the boy, is also more subjected to religious influences. And in Western religions, God the Father is a man, an old man
endowed with a specifically virile attribute, luxuriant white beard.
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For Christians, Christ is even more concretely a man of flesh and blood with a long blond beard. Angels have no sex, according to theologians; but they have masculine names and are shown as handsome young men. God’s emissaries on earth—the pope, the bishop whose ring is kissed, the priest who says Mass, the preacher, the person one kneels before in the secrecy of the confessional—these are men. For a pious little girl, relations with the eternal Father are analogous to those she maintains with her earthly father; as they take place on an imaginary level, she experiences an even more total surrender. The Catholic religion, among others, exercises on her the most troubling of influences.
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The Virgin welcomes the angel’s words on her knees. “I am the
handmaiden
of the Lord,” she answers. Mary Magdalene is prostrate at Christ’s feet, and she washes them with her long womanly hair. Women saints declare their love to a radiant Christ on their knees. On his knees, surrounded by the odor of incense, the child gives himself up to God’s and the angels’ gaze: a man’s gaze. There are many analogies between erotic and mystical language as spoken by women; for example, Saint Thérèse writes of the child Jesus:
Oh my beloved, by your love I accept not to see on earth the sweetness of your gaze, not to feel the inexpressible kiss from your mouth, but I beg of you to embrace me with your love …
My beloved, of your first smile
Let me soon glimpse the sweetness
.
Ah! Leave me in my burning deliriousness
,
Yes, let me hide myself in your heart!
I want to be mesmerized by your divine gaze; I want to become prey to your love. One day, I have hope, you will melt on me
carrying me to love’s hearth; you will put me into this burning chasm to make me become, once and for all, the lucky victim.
But it must not be concluded from this that these effusions are always sexual; rather, when female sexuality develops, it is penetrated with the religious feeling that woman has devoted to man since childhood. It is true that the little girl experiences a thrill in the confessional and even at the foot of the altar close to what she will later feel in her lover’s arms: woman’s love is one of the forms of experience in which a consciousness makes itself an object for a being that transcends it; and these are also the passive delights that the young pious girl tastes in the shadows of the church.
Prostrate, her face buried in her hands, she experiences the miracle of renunciation: on her knees she climbs to heaven; her abandon in God’s arms assures her an assumption lined with clouds and angels. She models her earthly future on this marvelous experience. The child can also discover it in other ways: everything encourages her to abandon herself in dreams to the arms of men to be transported to a sky of glory. She learns that to be happy, she has to be loved; to be loved, she has to await love. Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Skin, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures. In songs and tales, the young man sets off to seek the woman; he fights against dragons, he combats giants; she is locked up in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, chained to a rock, captive, put to sleep: she is waiting.
One day my prince will come … Someday he’ll come along, the man I love …
the popular refrains breathe dreams of patience and hope in her. The supreme necessity for woman is to charm a masculine heart; this is the recompense all heroines aspire to, even if they are intrepid, adventuresome; and only their beauty is asked of them in most cases. It is thus understandable that attention to her physical appearance can become a real obsession for the little girl; princesses or shepherds, one must always be pretty to conquer love and happiness; ugliness is cruelly associated with meanness, and when one sees the misfortunes that befall ugly girls, one does not know if it is their crimes or their disgrace that destiny punishes. Young beauties promised a glorious future often start out in the role of victim; the story of Geneviève de Brabant or of Griselda are not as innocent as it would seem; love and suffering are intertwined in a troubling way; woman is assured of the most delicious triumphs when falling to the bottom of abjection; whether it be a question of God or a man, the little girl learns that by consenting to the most serious renunciations, she will become all-powerful: she takes pleasure in a masochism that promises her supreme conquests. Saint Blandine, white and bloody in the paws of lions,
Snow White lying as if dead in a glass coffin, Sleeping Beauty, Atala fainting, a whole cohort of tender heroines beaten, passive, wounded, on their knees, humiliated, teach their younger sisters the fascinating prestige of martyred, abandoned, and resigned beauty. It is not surprising that while her brother plays at the hero, the little girl plays so easily at the martyr: the pagans throw her to the lions, Bluebeard drags her by her hair, the king, her husband, exiles her to the depth of the forests; she resigns herself, she suffers, she dies, and her brow is haloed with glory. “While still a little girl, I wanted to draw men’s attention, trouble them, be saved by them, die in their arms,” Mme de Noailles writes. A remarkable example of these masochistic musings is found in
La voile noire
(The Black Sail) by Maria Le Hardouin.
At seven, from I don’t know which rib, I made my first man. He was tall, thin, very young, dressed in a suit of black satin with long sleeves touching the ground. His beautiful blond hair cascaded in heavy curls onto his shoulders … I called him Edmond … Then a day came when I gave him two brothers … These three brothers: Edmond, Charles, and Cedric, all three dressed in black satin, all three blond and slim, procured for me strange blessings. Their feet shod in silk were so beautiful and their hands so fragile that I felt all sorts of movements in my soul … I became their sister Marguerite … I loved to represent myself as subjected to the whims of my brothers and totally at their mercy. I dreamed that my oldest brother, Edmond, had the right of life and death over me. I never had permission to raise my eyes to his face. He had me whipped under the slightest pretext. When he addressed himself to me, I was so overwhelmed by fear and respect that I found nothing else to answer him and mumbled constantly “Yes, my lordship,” “No, my lordship,” and I savored the strange delight of feeling like an idiot … When the suffering he imposed on me was too great, I murmured “Thank you, my lordship,” and there came a moment when, almost faltering from suffering, I placed, so as not to shout, my lips on his hand, while, some movement finally breaking my heart, I reached one of these states in which one desires to die from too much happiness.
At an early age, the little girl already dreams she has reached the age of love; at nine or ten, she loves to make herself up, she pads her blouse, she disguises herself as a lady. She does not, however, look for any erotic experience
with little boys: if she does go with them into the corner to play “doctor,” it is only out of sexual curiosity. But the partner of her amorous dreaming is an adult, either purely imaginary or based on real individuals: in the latter case, the child is satisfied to love him from afar. In Colette Audry’s memoirs there is a very good example of a child’s dreaming;
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she recounts that she discovered love at five years of age:
This naturally had nothing to do with the little sexual pleasures of childhood, the satisfaction I felt, for example, straddling a certain chair in the dining room or caressing myself before falling asleep … The only common characteristic between the feeling and the pleasure is that I carefully hid them both from those around me … My love for this young man consisted in thinking of him before falling asleep and imagining marvelous stories … In Privas, I was in love with all the department heads of my father’s office … I was never very deeply hurt by their departure, because they were barely more than a pretext for my amorous musings … In the evening in bed I got my revenge for too much youth and shyness. I prepared everything very carefully, I did not have any trouble making him present to me, but it was a question of transforming myself, me, so that I could see myself from the interior because I became her, and stopped being I. First, I was pretty and eighteen years old. A tin of sweets helped me a lot: a long tin of rectangular and flat sweets that depicted two girls surrounded by doves. I was the dark, curly-headed one, dressed in a long muslin dress. A ten-year absence had separated us. He returned scarcely aged, and the sight of this marvelous creature overwhelmed him. She seemed to barely remember him, she was unaffected, indifferent, and witty. I composed truly brilliant conversations for this first meeting. They were followed by misunderstandings, a whole difficult conquest, cruel hours of discouragement and jealousy for him. Finally, pushed to the limit, he admitted his love. She listened to him in silence, and just at the moment he thought all was lost, she told him she had never stopped loving him, and they embraced a little. The scene normally took place on a park bench, in the evening. I saw the two forms close together, I heard the murmur of voices, I felt at the same time the warm body contact. But then everything came
loose … never did I broach marriage
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… The next day I thought of it a little while washing. I don’t know why the soapy face I was looking at in the mirror delighted me (the rest of the time I didn’t find myself beautiful) and filled me with hope. I would have considered for hours this misty, tilted face that seemed to be waiting for me from afar on the road to the future. But I had to hurry; once I dried my face, everything was over, and I got back my banal child’s face, which no longer interested me.
Games and dreams orient the girl toward passivity; but she is a human being before becoming a woman; and she already knows that accepting herself as woman means resigning and mutilating herself; while renunciation might be tempting, mutilation is abhorrent. Man and Love are still far away in the mist of the future; in the present, the little girl seeks activity, autonomy, like her brothers. The burden of freedom is not heavy for children, because it does not involve responsibility; they know they are safe in the shelter of adults: they are not tempted to flee from themselves. The girl’s spontaneous zest for life, her taste for games, laughter, and adventure, make her consider the maternal circle narrow and stultifying. She wants to escape her mother’s authority, an authority that is wielded in a more routine and intimate manner than the one that boys have to accept. Rare are the cases in which she is as understanding and discreet as in this Sido that Colette painted with love. Not to mention the almost pathological cases—there are many
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—where the mother is a kind of executioner, satisfying her domineering and sadistic instincts on the child; her daughter is the privileged object opposite whom she attempts to affirm herself as sovereign subject; this attempt makes the child balk in revolt. Colette Audry described this rebellion of a normal girl against a normal mother:
I wouldn’t have known how to answer the truth, however innocent it was, because I never felt innocent in front of Mama. She was the essential adult, and I resented her for it as long as I was not yet cured. There was deep inside me a kind of tumultuous and fierce
sore that I was sure of always finding raw … I didn’t think she was too strict; nor that she hadn’t the right. I thought: no, no, no with all my strength. I didn’t even blame her for her authority or for her orders or arbitrary defenses but for
wanting to subjugate me
. She said it sometimes: when she didn’t say it, her eyes and voice did. Or else she told ladies that children are much more docile after a punishment. These words stuck in my throat, unforgettable: I couldn’t vomit them; I couldn’t swallow them. This anger was my guilt in front of her and also my shame in front of me (because in reality she frightened me, and all I had on my side in the form of retaliation were a few violent words or acts of insolence) but also my glory, nevertheless: as long as the sore was there, and living the silent madness that made me only repeat, “Subjugate, docile, punishment, humiliation,” I wouldn’t be subjugated.
Rebellion is even more violent in the frequent cases when the mother has lost her prestige. She appears as the one who waits, endures, complains, cries, and makes scenes: and in daily reality this thankless role does not lead to any apotheosis; victim, she is scorned; shrew, she is detested; her destiny appears to be the prototype of bland
repetition:
with her, life only repeats itself stupidly without going anywhere; blocked in her housewifely role, she stops the expansion of her existence, she is obstacle and negation. Her daughter wants
not
to take after her. She dedicates a cult to women who have escaped feminine servitude: actresses, writers, and professors; she gives herself enthusiastically to sports and to studies, she climbs trees, tears her clothes, tries to compete with boys. Very often she has a best friend in whom she confides; it is an exclusive friendship like a love affair that usually includes sharing sexual secrets: the little girls exchange information they have succeeded in getting and talk about it. Often there is a triangle, one of the girls falling in love with her girlfriend’s brother: thus Sonya in
War and Peace
is in love with her best friend Natasha’s brother. In any case, this friendship is shrouded in mystery, and in general at this period the child loves to have secrets; she makes a secret of the most insignificant thing: thus does she react against the secrecies that thwart her curiosity; it is also a way of giving herself importance; she tries by all means to acquire it; she tries to be part of adults’ lives, she makes up stories about them that she only half believes and in which she plays a major role. With her friends, she feigns returning boys’ scorn with scorn; they form a closed group, they sneer and mock them. But in fact, she is flattered when they treat her as an equal; she seeks their approbation. She would like to belong to the privileged
caste. The same movement that in primitive hordes subjects woman to male supremacy is manifested in each new “arrival” by a refusal of her lot: in her, transcendence condemns the absurdity of immanence. She is annoyed at being oppressed by rules of decency, bothered by her clothes, enslaved to cleaning tasks, held back in all her enthusiasms; on this point there have been many studies that have almost all given the same result:
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all the boys—like Plato in the past—say they would have hated to be girls; almost all the girls are sorry not to be boys. According to Havelock Ellis’s statistics, one boy out of a hundred wanted to be a girl; more than 75 percent of the girls would have preferred to change sex. According to a study by Karl Pipal (cited by Baudouin in his work
L’âme enfantine
[
The Mind of the Child]
), out of twenty boys of twelve to fourteen years of age, eighteen said they would rather be anything in the whole world than a girl; out of twenty-two girls, ten wished to be boys and gave the following reasons: “Boys are better: they do not have to suffer like women … My mother would love me more … A boy does more interesting work … A boy has more aptitude for school … I would have fun frightening girls … I would not fear boys anymore … They are freer … Boys’ games are more fun … They are not held back by their clothes.” This last observation is recurrent: almost all the girls complain of being bothered by their clothes, of not being free in their movements, of having to watch their skirts or light-colored outfits that get dirty so easily. At about ten or twelve years of age, most little girls are really tomboys, that is, children who lack the license to be boys. Not only do they suffer from it as a privation and an injustice, but the regime they are condemned to is unhealthy. The exuberance of life is prohibited to them, their stunted vigor turns into nervousness; their goody-goody occupations do not exhaust their brimming energy; they are bored: out of boredom and to compensate for the inferiority from which they suffer, they indulge in morose and romantic daydreams; they begin to have a taste for these facile escapes and lose the sense of reality; they succumb to their emotions with a confused exaltation; since they cannot act, they talk, readily mixing up serious words with totally meaningless ones; abandoned, “misunderstood,” they go looking for consolation in narcissistic sentiments: they look on themselves as heroines in novels, admire themselves, and complain; it is natural for them to become
keen on their appearance and to playact: these defects will grow during puberty. Their malaise expresses itself in impatience, tantrums, tears; they indulge in tears—an indulgence many women keep later—largely because they love to play the victim: it is both a protest against the harshness of their destiny and a way of endearing themselves to others. “Little girls love to cry so much that I have known them to cry in front of a mirror in order to double the pleasure,” says Monsignor Dupanloup. Most of their dramas concern relations with their family; they try to break their bonds with their mothers: either they are hostile to them, or they continue to feel a profound need for protection; they would like to monopolize their fathers’ love for themselves; they are jealous, touchy, demanding. They often make up stories; they imagine they are adopted, that their parents are not really theirs; they attribute a secret life to them; they dream about their sexual relations; they love to imagine that their father is misunderstood, unhappy, that he is not finding in his wife the ideal companion that his daughter would be for him; or, on the contrary, that the mother rightly finds him rough and brutal, that she is appalled by any physical relations with him. Fantasies, acting out, childish tragedies, false enthusiasms, strange things: the reason must be sought not in a mysterious feminine soul but in the child’s situation.