Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
We understand that the awkward age is a period of painful distress for the girl. She does not want to remain a child. But the adult world seems frightening or boring to her. Colette Audry says:
So I wanted to grow up, but never did I seriously dream of leading the life I saw adults lead … And thus the desire to grow up without ever assuming an adult state, without ever feeling solidarity with parents, mistresses of the house, housewives, or heads of family, was forming in me.
She would like to free herself from her mother’s yoke; but she also has an ardent need for her protection. The faults that weigh on her consciousness—solitary sexual practices, dubious friendships, improper books—make this refuge necessary. The following letter, written to a girlfriend by a fifteen-year-old girl, is typical:
Mother wants me to wear a long dress at the big dance party at W.’s—my first long dress. She is surprised that I do not want to. I begged her to let me wear my short pink dress for the last time … I am so afraid. This long dress makes me feel as if Mummy were going on a long trip and I did not know when she would. Isn’t that silly? And sometimes she looks at me as though I were still a little girl. Ah, if she knew! She would tie my hands to the bed and despise me.
52
Stekel’s book
Frigidity in Woman
is a remarkable document on female childhood. In it a Viennese
süsse Mädel
wrote a detailed confession at about the age of twenty-one.
*
It is a concrete synthesis of all the moments we have studied separately:
“At the age of five I chose for my playmate Richard, a boy of six or seven … For a long time I had wanted to know how one can tell whether a child is a girl or a boy. I was told: by the earrings … or by the nose. This seemed to satisfy me, though I had a feeling that they were keeping something from me. Suddenly Richard expressed a desire to urinate … Then the thought came to me of lending him my chamber pot … When I saw his organ, which was something entirely new to me, I went into highest raptures: ‘What have you there? My, isn’t that nice! I’d like to have something like that, too.’ Whereupon I took hold of the membrum and held it enthusiastically … My great-aunt’s cough awoke us … and from that day on our doings and games were carefully watched.”
At nine she played “marriage” and “doctor” with two other boys of eight and ten; they touched her parts and one day one of the boys touched her with his organ, saying that her parents had done just the same thing when they got married. “This aroused my indignation: ‘Oh, no! They never did such a nasty thing!’ ” She kept up these games for a long time in a strong sexual friendship with the two boys. One day her aunt caught her and there was a frightful scene with threats to put her in the reformatory. She was prevented from seeing Arthur, whom she preferred, and she suffered a good deal from it; her work went badly, her writing was deformed, and she became cross-eyed. She started another intimacy with Walter and Franz. “Walter became the goal of all thoughts and feeling. I permitted him very submissively to reach under my dress while I sat or stood in front of him at the table, pretending to be busy with a writing exercise; whenever my mother … opened the door, he withdrew his hand on the instant; I, of course, was busy writing … In the course of time, we also behaved as husband and wife; but I never allowed him to stay long; whenever he thought he was inside me, I tore myself away saying that somebody was coming … I did not reflect that this was ‘sinful’…
“My childhood boy friendships were now over. All I had left were girl friends. I attached myself to Emmy, a highly refined, well-educated girl. One Christmas we exchanged gilded heart-shaped lockets with our initials engraved on them—we were, I believe, about twelve years of age at the time—and we looked upon this as a token of ‘engagement’; we swore eternal faithfulness ‘until death do us part.’ I owe to Emmy a goodly part of my training. She taught me also a few things regarding sexual matters. As far back as during my fifth grade at school I began seriously to doubt the veracity of the stork story. I thought that children developed within the body and that the abdomen must be cut open before a child can be brought out. She filled me with particular horror of self-abuse. In school the Gospels contributed a share towards opening our eyes with regard to certain sexual matters. For instance, when Mary came to Elizabeth, the child is said to have ‘leaped in her womb’; and we read other similarly remarkable Bible passages. We underscored these words; and when this was discovered the whole class barely escaped a ‘black mark’ in deportment. My girl friend told me also about the ‘ninth month reminder’ to which there is a reference in Schiller’s
The Robbers …
Emmy’s father moved from our locality and I was again alone. We corresponded, using for the purpose a cryptic alphabet which we had devised between ourselves; but I was lonesome and finally I attached myself to Hedl, a Jewish girl. Once Emmy caught me leaving school in Hedl’s company; she created a scene on account of her jealousy … I kept up my friendship with Hedl until I entered the commercial school. We became close friends. We both dreamed of becoming sisters-in-law sometimes, because I was fond of one of her brothers. He was a student. Whenever he spoke to me I became so confused that I gave him an irrelevant answer. At dusk we sat in the music room, huddled together on the little divan, and often tears rolled down my cheek for no particular reason as he played the piano.
“Before I befriended Hedl, I went to school for a number of weeks with a certain girl, Ella, the daughter of poor people. Once she caught her parents in a ‘tête-à-tête.’ The creaking of the bed had awakened her … She came and told me that her father had crawled on top of her mother, and that the mother had cried out terribly; and then the father said to her mother: ‘Go quickly and wash so that nothing will happen!’ After this I was angry at her father and avoided him on the street, while for her mother I felt
the greatest sympathy. (He must have hurt her terribly if she cried out so!)
“Again with another girl I discussed the possible length of the male membrum; I had heard that it was 12 to 15 cm long. During the fancy-work period (at school) we took the tape-measure and indicated the stated length on our stomachs, naturally reaching to the navel. This horrified us; if we should ever marry we would be literally impaled.”
She saw a male dog excited by the proximity of a female, and felt strange stirrings inside herself. “If I saw a horse urinate in the street, my eyes were always glued to the wet spot in the road; I believe the length of time (urinating) is what always impressed me.” She watched flies in copulation and in the country domesticated animals doing the same.
“At twelve I suffered a severe attack of tonsillitis. A friendly physician was called in. He seated himself on my bed and presently he stuck his hand under the covers, almost touching me on the genitalia. I exclaimed: ‘Don’t be so rude!’ My mother hurried in; the doctor was much embarrassed. He declared I was a horrid monkey, saying he merely wanted to pinch me on the calf. I was compelled to ask his forgiveness … When I finally began to menstruate and my father came across the blood-stained cloths on one occasion, there was a terrible scene. How did it happen that he, so clean a man, had to live among such dirty females?… I felt the injustice of being put in the wrong on account of my menstruation.” At fifteen she communicated with another girl in shorthand “so that no one else could decipher our missives. There was much to report about conquests. She copied for me a vast number of verses from the walls of lavatories; I took particular notice of one. It seemed to me that love, which ranged so high in my fantasy, was being dragged in the mud by it. The verse read: ‘What is love’s highest aim? Four buttocks on a stem.’ I decided I would never get into that situation; a man who loves a young girl would be unable to ask such a thing of her.
“At fifteen and a half I had a new brother. I was tremendously jealous, for I had always been the only child in the family. My friend reminded me to observe ‘how the baby boy was constructed,’ but with the best intentions I was unable to give her the desired information … I could not look there. At about this time another girl described to me a bridal night scene … I think that then I made up my mind to marry after all, for I was very curious; only the ‘panting
like a horse,’ as mentioned in the description, offended my aesthetic sense … Which one of us girls would not have gladly married then to undress before the beloved and be carried to bed in his arms? It seemed so thrilling!”
It will perhaps be said—even though this is a normal and not a pathological case—that this child was exceptionally “perverse”; she was only less watched over than others. If the curiosities and desires of “well-bred” girls do not manifest themselves in acts, they nonetheless exist in the form of fantasies and games. I once knew a very pious and disconcertingly innocent girl—who became an accomplished woman, devoted to maternity and religion—who one evening confided all trembling to an older woman, “How marvelous it must be to get undressed in front of a man! Let’s suppose you are my husband”; and she began to undress, all trembling with emotion. No upbringing can prevent the girl from becoming aware of her body and dreaming of her destiny; the most one can do is to impose strict repression that will then weigh on her for her whole sexual life. What would be desirable is that she be taught, on the contrary, to accept herself without excuses and without shame.
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity; she already knew her sex condemned her to a mutilated and frozen existence; she now discovers it in the form of an impure illness and an obscure crime. Her inferiority was at first understood as a privation: the absence of a penis was converted to a stain and fault. She makes her way toward the future wounded, shamed, worried, and guilty.
1.
Judith Gautier says in her accounts of her memories that she cried and wasted away so terribly when she was pulled away from her wet nurse that she had to be reunited with her. She was weaned much later.
2.
This is Dr. Lacan’s theory in
Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu (Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual
). This fundamental fact would explain that during its development “the self keeps the ambiguous form of spectacle.”
3.
In
L’orange bleue (The Blue Orange
), Yassu Gauclère says about her father: “His good mood seemed as fearsome as his impatiences because nothing explained to me what could bring it about … As uncertain of the changes in his mood as I would have been of a god’s whims, I revered him with anxiety … I threw out my words as I might have played heads or tails, wondering how they would be received.” And further on, she tells the following anecdote: “For example, one day, after being scolded, I began my litany: old table, floor brush, stove, large bowl, milk bottle, casserole, and so on. My mother heard me and burst out laughing … A few days later, I tried to use my litany to soften my grandmother, who once again had scolded me: I should have known better this time. Instead of making her laugh, I made her angrier and got an extra punishment. I told myself that adults’ behavior was truly incomprehensible.”
4.
Le sabbath (Witches’ Sabbath
).
5.
“And already beginning to exercise his codpiece, which each and every day his nurses would adorn with lovely bouquets, fine ribbons, beautiful flowers, pretty tufts, and they spent their time bringing it back and forth between their hands like a cylinder of salve, then they laughed their heads off when it raised its ears, as if they liked the game. One would call it my little spigot, another my ninepin, another my coral branch, another my stopper, my cork, my gimlet, my ramrod, my awl, my pendant.”
6.
Cited by A. Bálint,
The Psychoanalysis of the Nursery
.
7.
See Volume I, Chapter 2,
this page
.
8.
Besides Freud’s and Adler’s works, there is today an abundant literature on the subject. Abraham was the first one to put forward the idea that the girl considered her sex a wound resulting from a mutilation. Karen Horney, Jones, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, H. Deutsch, and A. Bálint studied the question from a psychoanalytical point of view. Saussure tries to reconcile psychoanalysis with Piaget’s and Luquet’s ideas. See also Pollack,
Children’s Ideas on Sex Differences
.
9.
Cited by A. Bálint.
10.
“On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women,”
International Journal of Psycho analysis
(1923–24).
11.
Montherlant’s “The caterpillars,”
June Solstice
.
12.
See Volume I, Part One,
Chapter 2
.
13.
It is clear, though, in some cases.
14.
Cf. Ellis [discussion of “undinism” in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
.
—TRANS.]
.
15.
H. Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, Volume 13.
16.
In an allusion to an episode she related previously: at Portsmouth a modern urinette for ladies was opened that called for the standing position; all the clients were seen to depart hastily as soon as they entered.
17.
Florrie’s italics.
18.
“Psychologie génétique et psychanalyse” (“Genetic Psychology and Psychoanalysis”),
Revue Française de Psychanalyse
(1933).
19.
H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
. She also cites the authority of K. Abraham and J.H.W. van Ophuijsen.
20.
The analogy between the woman and the doll remains until the adult age; in French, a woman is vulgarly called a doll; in English, a dressed-up woman is said to be “dolled up.”
*
Bashkirtseff,
I Am the Most Interesting Book of All
.—T
RANS
.
21.
At least in her early childhood. In today’s society, adolescent conflicts could, on the contrary, be exacerbated.
22.
There are, of course, many exceptions: but the mother’s role in bringing up a boy cannot be studied here.
23.
Jung, “Pyschic Conflicts of a Child.”
24.
This was a made-up older brother who played a big role in her games.
*
In Jung,
Development of Personality
.—T
RANS
.
25.
“His generous person inspired in me a great love and an extreme fear,” says Mme de Noailles, speaking of her father. “First of all, he astounded me. The first man astounds a little girl. I well understood that everything depended on him.”
26.
It is worth noting that the cult of the father is most prevalent with the oldest child: the man is more involved in his first paternal experience; it is often he who consoles his daughter, as he consoles his son, when the mother is occupied with newborns, and the daughter becomes ardently attached to him. On the contrary, the younger child never has her father to herself; she is ordinarily jealous of both him and her older sister; she attaches herself to that same sister whom the devoted father invests with great prestige, or she turns to her mother, or she revolts against her family and looks for relief somewhere else. In large families, the youngest girl child finds other ways to have a special place. Of course, many circumstances can motivate the father to have special preferences. But almost all of the cases I know confirm this observation on the contrasting attitudes of the oldest and the youngest sisters.
27.
“Moreover, I was no longer suffering from my inability to
see
God, because I had recently managed to imagine him in the form of my dead grandfather; this image in truth was rather human; but I had quickly glorified it by separating my grandfather’s head from his bust and mentally putting it on a sky blue background where white clouds made him a collar,” Yassu Gauclère says in
The Blue Orange
.
28.
There is no doubt that women are infinitely more passive, given to man, servile, and humiliated in Catholic countries, Italy, Spain, and France, than in the Protestant Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon ones. And this comes in great part from their own attitude: the cult of the Virgin, confession, and so on invites them to masochism.
29.
Aux yeux du souvenir
(In the Eyes of Memory).
30.
Unlike Le Hardouin’s masochistic imagination, Audry’s is sadistic. She wants the beloved to be wounded, in danger, for her to save him heroically, not without humiliating him. This is a personal note, characteristic of a woman who will never accept passivity and will attempt to conquer her autonomy as a human being.
31.
Cf. V. Leduc,
L’asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin);
S. de Tervagne,
La haine maternelle
(Maternal Hatred); H. Bazin,
Vipère au poing (Viper in the Fist
).
32.
There is an exception, for example, in a Swiss school where boys and girls participating in the same coeducation, in privileged conditions of comfort and freedom, all declared themselves satisfied; but such circumstances are exceptional. Obviously, the girls
could be
as happy as the boys, but in present society the fact is that they are not.
33.
Richard Wright,
Native Son
.
34.
See
Introduction
to Volume I.
*
Claudine’s House
.—T
RANS
.
35.
Cited by Dr. W. Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
36.
“Filled with repugnance, I implored God to grant me a religious vocation that would allow me to escape the laws of maternity. And after having long reflected on the repugnant mysteries that I hid in spite of myself, reinforced by such repulsion as by a divine sign, I concluded: chastity is certainly my vocation,” writes Yassu Gauclère in
The Blue Orange
. Among others, the idea of perforation horrified her. “Here, then, is what makes the wedding night so terrible! This discovery overwhelmed me, adding the physical terror of this operation that I imagined to be extremely painful to the disgust I previously felt. My terror would have been all the worse if I had supposed that birth came about through the same channel; but having known for a long time that children were born from their mother’s belly, I believed that they were detached by segmentation.”
*
The Constant Nymph
.—T
RANS
.
37.
These purely physiological processes have already been described in Volume I, Chapter 1. [In Part One, “Destiny.”—T
RANS
.]
38.
Stekel,
Frigidity in Woman
.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Cf. The works of Daly and Chadwick, cited by Deutsch, in
Psychology of Women
(1946).
41.
Moi
(Me).
42.
Translated by Clara Malraux.
43.
Disguised as a man during the Fronde, Mme de Chevreuse, after a long excursion on horseback, was unmasked because of bloodstains seen on the saddle.
44.
Dr. W. Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
45.
She was a girl from a very poor Berlin family.
46.
Cited also by H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
.
47.
Except, of course, in numerous cases where the direct or indirect intervention of the parents, or religious scruples, make a sin of it. Little girls have sometimes been subjected to abominable persecutions, under the pretext of saving them from “bad habits.”
48.
Frigidity in Woman
.
49.
Liepmann,
Youth and Sexuality
.
50.
Cf. H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
.
51.
Me
.
52.
Quoted by H. Deutsch,
Psychology of Women
.
*
Süsse Mädel:
“sweet girl.”—T
RANS
.