Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
The “unripe fruit” defends herself against man by exhibiting a childish and perverse nature. This is often how the girl has been described: halfwild, half-dutiful. Colette, for one, depicted her in
Claudine at School
and also in
Le blé en herbe (Green Wheat
) in the guise of the seductive Vinca. She maintains an interest in the world around her, over which she reigns sovereign; but she is also curious and feels a sensual and romantic desire for man. Vinca gets scratched by brambles, fishes for shrimp, and climbs trees, and yet she quivers when her friend Phil touches her hand; she knows the
agitation of the body becoming flesh, the first revelation of woman as woman; aroused, she begins to want to be pretty: at times she does her hair, she uses makeup, dresses in gauzy organdy, she takes pleasure in appearing attractive and seductive; she also wants to exist
for herself
and not only
for others
, at other times, she throws on old formless dresses, unbecoming trousers; there is a whole part of her that criticizes seduction and considers it as giving in: so she purposely lets herself be seen with ink-stained fingers, messy hair, dirty. This rebelliousness gives her a clumsiness she resents: she is annoyed by it, blushes, becomes even more awkward, and is horrified by these aborted attempts at seduction. At this point, the girl no longer wants to be a child, but she does not accept becoming an adult, and she blames herself for her childishness and then for her female resignation. She is in a state of constant denial.
This is the characteristic trait of the girl and gives the key to most of her behavior; she does not accept the destiny nature and society assign to her; and yet she does not actively repudiate it: she is too divided internally to enter into combat with the world; she confines herself to escaping reality or to contesting it symbolically. Each of her desires is matched by an anxiety: she is eager to take possession of her future, but she fears breaking with her past; she would like “to have” a man, she balks at being his prey. And behind each fear hides a desire: rape is abhorrent to her, but she aspires to passivity. Thus she is doomed to bad faith and all its ruses; she is predisposed to all sorts of negative obsessions that express the ambivalence of desire and anxiety.
One of the most common forms of adolescent contestation is giggling. High school girls and shopgirls burst into laughter while recounting love or risqué stories, while talking about their flirtations, meeting men, or seeing lovers kiss; I have known schoolgirls going to lovers’ lane in the Luxembourg Gardens just to laugh; and others going to the Turkish baths to make fun of the fat women with sagging stomachs and hanging breasts they saw there; scoffing at the female body, ridiculing men, laughing at love, are ways of disavowing sexuality: this laughter that defies adults is a way of overcoming one’s own embarrassment; one plays with images and words to kill the dangerous magic of them: for example, I saw twelve-year-old students burst out laughing when they saw a Latin text with the word
femur
. If in addition the girl lets herself be kissed and petted, she will get her revenge in laughing outright at her partner or with friends. I remember in a train compartment one night two girls being fondled one after the other by a traveling salesman overjoyed with his good luck: between each session they laughed hysterically, reverting to the behavior of the awkward
age in a mixture of sexuality and shame. Girls giggle and they also resort to language to help them: some use words whose coarseness would make their brothers blush; half-ignorant, they are even less shocked by those expressions that do not evoke very precise images; the aim, of course, is to prevent these images from taking shape, at least to defuse them; the dirty stories high school girls tell each other are less to satisfy sexual instincts than to deny sexuality: they only want to consider the humorous side, like a mechanical or almost surgical operation. But like laughter, the use of obscene language is not only a protest: it is also a defiance of adults, a sort of sacrilege, a deliberately perverse kind of behavior. Rebuffing nature and society, the girl nettles and challenges them by many oddities. She often has food manias: she eats pencil lead, sealing wax, bits of wood, live shrimp, she swallows dozens of aspirins at a time, or she even ingests flies or spiders; I knew a girl—very obedient otherwise—who made horrible mixtures of coffee and white wine that she forced herself to swallow; other times she ate sugar soaked in vinegar; I saw another chewing determinedly into a white worm found in lettuce. All children endeavor to experience the world with their eyes, their hands, and more intimately their mouths and stomachs: but at the awkward age, the girl takes particular pleasure in exploring what is indigestible and repugnant. Very often, she is attracted by what is “disgusting.” One of them, quite pretty and attractive when she wanted to be and carefully dressed, proved really fascinated by everything that seemed “dirty” to her: she touched insects, looked at dirty sanitary napkins, sucked the blood of her cuts. Playing with dirty things is obviously a way of overcoming disgust; this feeling becomes much more important at puberty: the girl is disgusted by her too-carnal body, by menstrual blood, by adults’ sexual practices, by the male she is destined for; she denies it by indulging herself specifically in the familiarity of everything that disgusts her. “Since I have to bleed each month, I prove that my blood does not scare me by drinking that of my cuts. Since I will have to submit myself to a revolting test, why not eat a white worm?” This attitude is affirmed more clearly in self-mutilation, so frequent at this age. The girl gashes her thigh with a razor, burns herself with cigarettes, cuts and scratches herself; so as not to go to a boring garden party, a girl during my youth cut her foot with an ax and had to spend six weeks in bed. These sadomasochistic practices are both an anticipation of the sexual experience and a revolt against it; girls have to undergo these tests, hardening themselves to all possible ordeals and rendering them harmless, including the wedding night. When she puts a slug on her chest, when she swallows a bottle of aspirin, when she wounds herself, the girl is defying her future
lover: you will never inflict on me anything more horrible than I inflict on myself. These are morose and haughty initiations in sexual adventure. Destined to be a passive prey, she claims her freedom right up to submitting to pain and disgust. When she inflicts the cut of the knife, the burning of a coal on herself, she is protesting against the penetration that deflowers her: she protests by nullifying it. Masochistic, since she welcomes the pain caused by her behavior, she is above all sadistic: as autonomous subject, she beats, scorns, and tortures this dependent flesh, this flesh condemned to submission that she detests but from which she does not want to separate herself. Because, in all these situations, she does not choose authentically to reject her destiny. Sadomasochistic crazes imply a fundamental bad faith: if the girl indulges in them, it means she accepts, through her rejections, her future as woman; she would not mutilate her flesh with hatred if first she did not recognize herself as flesh. Even her violent outbursts arise from a situation of resignation. When a boy revolts against his father or against the world, he engages in effective violence; he picks a quarrel with a friend, he fights, he affirms himself as subject with his fists: he imposes himself on the world; he goes beyond it. But affirming herself, imposing herself, are forbidden to the adolescent girl, and that is what fills her heart with revolt: she hopes neither to change the world nor to emerge from it; she knows or at least believes, and perhaps even wishes, herself tied up: she can only destroy; there is despair in her rage; during a frustrating evening, she breaks glasses, windows, vases: it is not to overcome her lot; it is only a symbolic protest. The girl rebels against her future enslavement through her present powerlessness; and her vain outbursts, far from freeing her from her bonds, often merely restrict her even more. Violence against herself or the universe around her always has a negative character: it is more spectacular than effective. The boy who climbs rocks or fights with his friends regards physical pain, the injuries and the bumps, as an insignificant consequence of the positive activities he indulges in; he neither seeks nor flees them for themselves (except if an inferiority complex puts him in a situation similar to women’s). The girl watches herself suffer: she seeks in her own heart the taste of violence and revolt rather than being concerned with their results. Her perversity stems from the fact that she remains stuck in the childish universe from which she cannot or does not really want to escape; she struggles in her cage rather than seeking to get out of it; her attitudes are negative, reflexive, and symbolic. This perversity can take disturbing forms. Many young virgins are kleptomaniacs; kleptomania is a very ambiguous “sexual sublimation”; the desire to transgress laws, to violate a taboo, the giddiness of the dangerous and forbidden act, are certainly
essential in the girl thief: but there is a double face. Taking objects without having the right is affirming one’s autonomy arrogantly, it is putting oneself forward as subject facing the things stolen and the society that condemns stealing, and it is rejecting the established order as well as defying its guardians; but this defiance also has a masochistic side; the thief is fascinated by the risk she runs, by the abyss she will be thrown into if she is caught; it is the danger of being caught that gives such a voluptuous attraction to the act of taking; thus looked at with blame, or with a hand placed on her shoulder in shame, she can realize herself as object totally and without recourse. Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality. All perverse or illegal conduct found in girls has the same meaning. Some specialize in sending anonymous letters; others find pleasure in mystifying those around them: one fourteen-year-old persuaded a whole village that a house was haunted by spirits. They simultaneously enjoy the clandestine exercise of their power, disobedience, defiance of society, and the risk of being exposed; this is such an important element of their pleasure that they often unmask themselves, and they even sometimes accuse themselves of faults or crimes they have not committed. It is not surprising that the refusal to become object leads to constituting oneself as object: this process is common to all negative obsessions. It is in a single movement that in a hysterical paralysis the ill person fears paralysis, desires it, and brings it on: he is cured from it only by no longer thinking about it; likewise with psychasthenic tics. The depth of the girl’s bad faith is what links her to these types of neuroses: manias, tics, conspiracies, perversities; many neurotic symptoms are found in her due to this ambivalence of desire and anxiety that has been pointed out. It is quite common, for example, for her to “run away”; she goes away at random, she wanders far from her father’s house, and two or three days later she comes back by herself. It is not a real departure or a real act of rupture with the family; it is mere playacting, and the girl is often totally disconcerted if it is suggested that she leave her circle definitively: she wants to leave while not wanting to at the same time. Running away is sometimes linked to fantasies of prostitution: the girl dreams she is a prostitute, she plays this role more or less timidly; she wears excessive makeup, she leans out the window and winks at passersby; in some cases, she leaves the house and carries the drama so far that it becomes confused with reality. Such conduct often expresses a disgust with sexual desire, a feeling of guilt: since I have these thoughts, these appetites, I am no better than a prostitute, I am one, thinks a girl. Sometimes, she attempts to free herself: let’s get it over with, let’s go to the limit, she says to herself;
she wants to prove to herself that sexuality is of little importance by giving herself to the first one. At the same time, such an attitude is often a manifestation of hostility to the mother, either that the girl is horrified by her austere virtue or that she suspects her mother of being, herself, of easy morality; or she holds a grudge against her father who has shown himself too indifferent. In any case, in this obsession—as in the fantasies of pregnancy about which we have already spoken and that are often associated with it—there is the meeting of this inextricable confusion of revolt and complicity, characterized by psychasthenic dizziness. It is noteworthy that in all these behaviors the girl does not seek to go beyond the natural and social order, she does not attempt to push back the limits of the possible or to effectuate a transmutation of values; she settles for manifesting her revolt within an established world where boundaries and laws are preserved; this is the often-defined “devilish” attitude, implying a basic deception: the good is recognized so that it can be trampled upon, the rule is set so that it can be violated, the sacred is respected so that it is possible to perpetuate the sacrileges. The girl’s attitude is defined essentially by the fact that in the agonizing shadows of bad faith, she refuses the world and her own destiny at the same time as she accepts them.
However, she does not confine herself to contesting negatively the situation imposed on her; she also tries to compensate for its insufficiencies. Although the future frightens her, the present dissatisfies her; she hesitates to become woman; she frets at still being only a child; she has already left her past; she is not yet committed to a new life. She is occupied, but she does not
do
anything; because she does not do anything, she
has
nothing, she
is nothing
. She tries to fill this void by playacting and mystifications. She is criticized for being devious, a liar, and troublesome. The truth is she is doomed to secrets and lies. At sixteen, a woman has already gone through disturbing experiences: puberty, menstrual periods, awakening of sexuality, first arousals, first passions, fears, disgust, and ambiguous experiences: she has hidden all these things in her heart; she has learned to guard her secrets preciously. The mere fact of having to hide her sanitary napkins and of concealing her periods inclines her to lies. In the short story “Old Mortality,” Katherine Anne Porter recounts that young American women from the South, around 1900, made themselves ill by swallowing mixtures of salt and lemon to stop their periods when going to balls: they were afraid that the young men would recognize their state by the bags under their eyes, by contact with their hands, by a smell perhaps, and this idea upset them. It is difficult to play the idol, the fairy, or the remote princess when one feels a bloody piece of material between one’s legs and, more generally,
when one knows the primal misery of being a body. Modesty, a spontaneous refusal to let oneself be grasped as flesh, comes close to hypocrisy. But above all, the adolescent girl is condemned to the lie of pretending to be object, and a prestigious one, while she experiences herself as an uncertain, dispersed existence, knowing her failings. Makeup, false curls, corsets, padded bras, are lies; the face itself becomes a mask: spontaneous expressions are produced artfully, a wondrous passivity is imitated; there is nothing more surprising than suddenly discovering in the exercise of one’s feminine functions a physiognomy with which one is familiar; its transcendence denies itself and imitates immanence; one’s eyes no longer perceive, they reflect; one’s body no longer lives: it waits; every gesture and smile becomes an appeal; disarmed, available, the girl is nothing but a flower offered, a fruit to be picked. Man encourages her in these lures by demanding to be lured: then he gets irritated, he accuses. But for the guileless girl, he has nothing but indifference and even hostility. He is only seduced by the one who sets traps for him; offered, she is still the one who stalks her prey; her passivity takes the form of an undertaking, she makes her weakness a tool of her strength; since she is forbidden to attack outright, she is reduced to maneuvers and calculations; and it is in her interest to appear freely given; therefore, she will be criticized for being perfidious and treacherous, and she is. But it is true that she is obliged to offer man the myth of her submission because he insists on dominating. And can one demand that she stifle her most essential claims? Her complaisance can only be perverted right from the outset. Besides, she cheats not only out of concerted, deliberate ruse. Because all roads are barred to her, because she cannot
do
, because she must
be
, a curse weighs on her. As a child, she played at being a dancer or a saint; later, she plays at being herself; what is really the truth? In the area in which she has been shut up, this is a word without sense. Truth is reality unveiled, and unveiling occurs through acts: but she does not act. The romances she tells herself about herself—and that she also often tells others—seem better ways of expressing the possibilities she feels in herself than the plain account of her daily life. She is unable to take stock of herself: so she consoles herself by playacting; she embodies a character she seeks to give importance to; she tries to stand out by extravagant behavior because she does not have the right to distinguish herself in specific activities. She knows she is without responsibilities, insignificant in this world of men: she makes trouble because she has nothing else important to do. Giraudoux’s Electra is a woman who makes trouble, because it is up to Orestes alone to accomplish a real murder with a real sword. Like the child, the girl wears herself out in scenes and rages, she
makes herself ill, she manifests signs of hysteria to try to attract attention and be someone who
counts
. She interferes in the destiny of others so that she can count; she uses any weapon she can; she tells secrets, she invents others, she betrays, she calumniates; she needs tragedy around her to feel alive since she finds no support in her own life. She is unpredictable for the same reason; the fantasies we form and the images by which we are lulled are contradictory: only action unifies the diversity of time. The girl does not have a real will but has desires, and she jumps from one to the other at random. What makes her flightiness sometimes dangerous is that at every moment, committing herself in dream only, she commits herself wholly. She puts herself on a level of intransigence and perfection; she has a taste for the definitive and absolute: if she cannot control the future, she wants to attain the eternal. “I will never give up. I want everything always. I need to prefer my life in order to accept it,” writes Marie Lenéru. So echoes Anouilh’s Antigone: “I want everything, immediately.” This childish imperialism can only be found in an individual who dreams his destiny: dreams abolish time and obstacles, they need to be exaggerated to compensate for the small amount of reality; whoever has authentic projects knows a finitude that is the gauge of one’s concrete power. The girl wants to receive
everything
because there is
nothing
that depends on her. That is where her character of
enfant terrible
comes from, faced with adults and man in particular. She does not accept the limitations an individual’s insertion in the real world imposes; she defies him to go beyond them. Thus Hilda expects Solness to give her a kingdom: as she is not the one who has to conquer it, she wants it without limits; she demands that he build the highest tower ever built and that he “climb as high as he builds”: he hesitates to climb, because he is afraid of heights; she who remains on the ground and looks on denies contingency and human weakness; she does not accept that reality imposes a limit on her dreams of grandeur.
14
Adults always seem mean and cautious to the girl who stops at nothing because she has nothing to lose; imagining herself taking the boldest risks, she dares them to match her in reality. Unable to put herself to the test, she invests herself with the most astonishing qualities without fear of being contradicted.