Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
The “wedding night” transforms the erotic experience into an ordeal that neither partner is able to surmount, too involved with personal problems
to think generously of each other; it is invested with a solemnity that makes it formidable; and it is not surprising that it often dooms the woman to frigidity forever. The difficult problem facing the husband is this: if he “titillates his wife too lasciviously,” she might be scandalized or outraged; it seems this fear paralyzes American husbands, among others, especially in college-educated couples, says the Kinsey Report, because wives, more conscious of themselves, are more deeply inhibited. But if he “respects” her, he fails to waken her sensuality. This dilemma is created by the ambiguity of the feminine attitude: the young woman both wants and rejects pleasure; she demands a delicateness from which she suffers. Unless he is exceptionally lucky, the husband will necessarily appear as either clumsy or a libertine. It is thus not surprising that “conjugal duties” are often only a repugnant chore for the wife. According to Diderot,
Submission to a master she dislikes is a torture to her. I have seen a virtuous wife shiver with horror at her husband’s approach. I have seen her plunge into a bath and never think herself properly cleansed from the soilure of her duty. This sort of repugnance is almost unknown with us. Our organ is more indulgent. Many women die without having experienced the extreme of pleasure. This sensation which I am willing to consider a passing attack of epilepsy is rare with them, but never fails to come when we call for it. The sovereign happiness escapes them in the arms of the man they adore. We experience it with an easy woman we dislike. Less mistresses of their
sensations
than we are, their reward is less prompt and certain. A hundred times their expectation is deceived.
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Many women, indeed, become mothers and grandmothers without ever having experienced pleasure or even arousal; they try to get out of their soilure of duty by getting medical certificates or using other pretexts. The Kinsey Report says that in America, many wives “report that they consider their coital frequencies already too high and wish that their husbands did not desire intercourse so often. A very few wives wish for more frequent coitus.” We have seen, though, that woman’s erotic possibilities are almost indefinite. This contradiction points up the fact that marriage, claiming to regulate feminine eroticism, kills it.
In
Thérèse Desqueyroux
, Mauriac described the reactions of a young “reasonably married” woman to marriage in general and to conjugal duties in particular:
Perhaps she was seeking less a dominion or a possession out of this marriage than a refuge. What finally pushed her into it, after all—wasn’t it a kind of panic? A practical girl, a child housewife, she was in a hurry to take up her station in life, to find her definitive place; she wanted assurance against some peril that she could not name. She was never so rational and determined as she had been during the engagement period; she embedded herself in the family bloc, “she settled down,” she entered into an order of life. She saved herself …
The suffocating wedding day in the narrow Saint-Clair church, where the women’s cackling drowned out the wheezing harmonium, and the body odor overpowered the incense—this was the day when Thérèse realized she was lost. She had entered the cage like a sleepwalker and, as the heavy door groaned shut, the miserable child in her reawakened. Nothing had changed, but she had the sensation that she would never again be able to be alone. In the thick of a family, she would smolder, like a hidden fire that leaps up onto a branch, lights up a pine tree, then another, then step by step creates a whole forest of torches …
On the evening of that half-peasant, half-bourgeois wedding day, groups of the guests crowded around their car, forcing it to slow down; the girls’ dresses fluttered in the crowd … Thérèse, thinking of the night that was coming, murmured, “It was horrible …” but then caught herself and said, “no—not so horrible.” On their trip to the Italian lakes, had she suffered so much? No—she played the game; don’t lie … Thérèse knew how to bend her body to these charades, and she took a bitter pleasure in the accomplishment. This unknown world of sensual pleasure into which the man forced her—her imagination helped her conceive that there was a real pleasure there for her too, a possible happiness—but what happiness? As when, before a country scene pouring with rain, we imagine to ourselves what it looks like in the sunshine—thus it was that Thérèse looked upon sensuality.
Bernard, the boy with the vacant stare,… what an easy dupe! He was as sunk in his pleasure as those sweet little pigs you can watch through the fence, snorting with happiness in their trough
(“and I was the trough,” thought Thérèse) … Where had he learned it, this ability to classify everything relating to the flesh, to distinguish the honorable caress from that of the sadist? Never a moment’s hesitation …
“Poor Bernard! He’s no worse than others. But desire transforms the one who approaches us into a monster, a different being … I played dead, as if the slightest movement on my part could make this madman, this epileptic, strangle me.”
Here is a blunter account. Stekel obtained this confession from which I quote the passage about married life. It concerns a twenty-eight-year-old woman, brought up in a refined and cultivated home:
I was a happy fiancée; I finally had the feeling I was safe, all at once I was the focus of attention. I was spoiled, my fiancé admired me, all this was new for me … our kisses (my fiancé had never attempted any other caresses) had aroused me to such a point that I could not wait for the wedding day … The morning of the wedding I was in such a state of excitation that my camisole was soaking with sweat: Just the idea that I was finally going to know the stranger I had so desired. I had the infantile image that the man was supposed to urinate in the woman’s vagina … In our room, there was already a little disappointment when my husband asked me if he should move away. I asked him to do that because I was really ashamed in front of him. The undressing scene had played such a role in my imagination. He came back, very embarrassed, when I was in bed. Later on, he admitted that my appearance had intimidated him: I was the incarnation of radiant and eager youth. Barely had he undressed than he shut out the light. Barely kissing me, he immediately tried to take me. I was frightened and asked him to let me alone. I wanted to be very far from him. I was horrified at this attempt without prior caresses. I found him brutal and often criticized him for it later. It was not brutality but very great clumsiness and a lack of sensitivity. All the attempts that night were in vain. I began to be very unhappy, I was ashamed of my stupidity, I thought I was at fault and badly formed … Finally, I settled for his kisses. Ten days later he succeeded in deflowering me, I had felt nothing. It was a major disappointment! Then I felt a little joy during coitus but success was very disturbing, my husband laboring hard to reach his goal … In Prague in my brother-in-law’s bachelor apartment I imagined my
brother-in-law’s feelings learning I had slept in his bed. That is when I had my first orgasm, making me very happy. My husband made love with me every day during the first weeks. I was still reaching orgasm but I was not satisfied because it was too short and I was excited to the point of crying … After two births … coitus became less and less satisfying. It rarely led to orgasm, my husband always reaching it before me; I followed each session anxiously (how long is it going to continue?). If he was satisfied leaving me at halfway, I hated him. Sometimes, I imagined my cousin during coitus or the doctor who had delivered me. My husband tried to excite me with his finger … I was very aroused but, at the same time, I found this means shameful and abnormal and experienced no pleasure … During the whole time of our marriage, he never caressed even one part of my body. One day he told me that he did not dare do anything with me … He never saw me naked because we always kept on our nightclothes, he performed coitus only at night.
This very sensual woman was later perfectly happy in the arms of a lover.
Engagements are specifically meant to create gradations in the young girl’s initiation; but mores often impose extreme chastity on the engaged couple. When the virgin “knows” her future husband during this period, her situation is not very different from that of the young bride; she yields only because her engagement already seems to her as definitive as marriage and the first coitus has the characteristics of a test; once she has given herself—even if she is not pregnant, which would keep her in chains—it is very rare for her to assert herself again.
The difficulties of the first experiences are easily overcome if love or desire generates total consent from the two partners; physical love draws its strength and dignity from the joy lovers give each other and take in the reciprocal consciousness of their freedom; thus there are no degrading practices since, for both of them, their practices are not submitted to but generously desired. But the principle of marriage is obscene because it transforms an exchange that should be founded on a spontaneous impulse into rights and duties; it gives bodies an instrumental, thus degrading, side by dooming them to grasp themselves in their generality; the husband is often frozen by the idea that he is accomplishing a duty, and the wife is ashamed to feel delivered to someone who exercises a right over her. Of course, relations can become individualized at the beginning of married life; sexual apprenticeship is sometimes accomplished in slow gradations;
as of the first night, a happy physical attraction can be discovered between the spouses. Marriage facilitates the wife’s abandon by suppressing the notion of sin still so often attached to the flesh; regular and frequent cohabitation engenders carnal intimacy that is favorable to sexual maturity: there are wives fully satisfied in their first years of marriage. It is to be noted that they remain grateful to their husbands, which makes it possible to pardon them later for the wrongs they might be responsible for. “Women who cannot get out of an unhappy home life have always been satisfied by their husbands,” says Stekel. It remains that the young girl runs a terrible risk in promising to sleep exclusively and for her whole life with a man she does not know sexually, whereas her erotic destiny essentially depends on her partner’s personality: this is the paradox Léon Blum rightfully denounced in his work
Marriage
.
To claim that a union founded on convention has much chance of engendering love is hypocritical; to ask two spouses bound by practical, social, and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity. Yet advocates of marriages of reason have no trouble showing that marriages of love do not have much more chance of ensuring the spouses’ happiness. In the first place, ideal love, which is often what the girl knows, does not always dispose her to sexual love; her platonic adorations, her daydreaming, and the passions into which she projects her infantile or juvenile obsessions are not meant to resist the tests of daily life nor to last for a long time. Even if there is a sincere and violent erotic attraction between her and her fiancé, that is not a solid basis on which to construct the enterprise of a life. Colette writes:
But voluptuous pleasure is not the only thing. In the limitless desert of love it holds a very small place, so flaming that at first one sees nothing else … All about this flickering hearth there lies the unknown, there lies danger … After we have risen from a short embrace, or even from a long night, we shall have to begin to live at close quarters to each other, and in dependence on each other.
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Moreover, even in cases where carnal love exists before marriage or awakens at the beginning of the marriage, it is very rare for it to last many long years. Certainly fidelity is necessary for sexual love, since the two lovers’ desire encompasses their singularity; they do not want it contested
by outside experiences, they want to be irreplaceable for each other; but this fidelity has meaning only as long as it is spontaneous; and spontaneously, erotic magic dissolves rather quickly. The miracle is that it gives to each of the lovers, in the instant and in their carnal presence, a being whose existence is an unlimited transcendence: and
possession
of this being is undoubtedly impossible, but at least each of them is reached in a privileged and poignant way. But when individuals no longer want to reach each other because of hostility, disgust, or indifference between them, erotic attraction disappears; and it dies almost as surely in esteem and friendship: two human beings who come together in the very movement of their transcendence through the world and their common projects no longer need carnal union; and further, because this union has lost its meaning, they are repelled by it. The word “incest” that Montaigne pronounces is very significant. Eroticism is a movement toward the
Other
, and this is its essential character; but within the couple, spouses become, for each other, the
Same;
no exchange is possible between them anymore, no giving, no conquest. If they remain lovers, it is often in embarrassment: they feel the sexual act is no longer an intersubjective experience where each one goes beyond himself, but rather a kind of mutual masturbation. That they consider each other a necessary tool for the satisfaction of their needs is a fact conjugal politeness disguises but which bursts out when this politeness is rejected, for example in observations reported by Dr. Lagache in his work
The Nature and Forms of Jealousy:
*
the wife regards the male member as a certain source of pleasure that belongs to her, and she guards it in as miserly a way as the preserves she stores in the cupboard: if the man gives some away to a woman neighbor, there will be no more for her; she looks at his underwear to see if he has not wasted the precious semen. In
Chroniques maritales (Marcel and Élise: The Bold Chronicle of a Strange Marriage
), Jouhandeau notes this “daily censure practised by the legitimate wife who scrutinises your shirt and your sleep to discover the sign of ignominy.” For his part, the man satisfies his desires on her without asking her opinion.