Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
Ponge has evoked the struggle, in the heart of the laundry woman, between uncleanliness and purity:
Whoever has not lived for at least one winter in the company of a wash boiler knows nothing of a certain order of highly touching qualities and emotions.
*
It is necessary—wincing—to have heaved it, brimful with soiled fabrics, off the ground and carried it over to the stove—where one must then drag it in a particular way so as to sit it right on top of the burner.
Beneath it one needs to have stirred up the fire, to set the boiler in motion gradually, touched its warm or burning sides often; next listened to the deep internal hum, from that point onward to have lifted the lid several times to check the tension of the spurts and the regularity of the wettings.
Finally, it is necessary to have embraced it once again, boiling hot, so as to set it back down on the ground …
The wash boiler is so conceived that, filled with a heap of disgusting rags, the inner emotion, the boiling indignation it feels, conducted toward the higher part of its being, rains back down on this heap of disgusting rags that turns its stomach—and this virtually endlessly—and that the outcome is a purification …
True, the linens, when the boiler received them, had already been soaked free of the worst of their filth.
Nonetheless, it has an idea or a feeling of the diffuse dirtiness of things inside it, which by dint of emotion, seethings, and exertions, it manages to get the best of—to remove the spots from the fabrics:
so that these, rinsed in a catastrophe of cool water, will appear white to an extreme …
And here in effect the miracle takes place:
Thousands of white flags are all at once deployed—which mark not a capitulation but a victory—and are perhaps not merely the sign of the bodily cleanness of this place’s inhabitants.
26
These dialectics can give housework the charm of a game: the little girl readily enjoys shining the silver, polishing doorknobs. But for a woman to find positive satisfaction, she must devote her efforts to an interior she can be proud of; if not, she will never know the pleasure of contemplation, the only pleasure that can repay her efforts. An American reporter, who lived several months among American Southern “poor whites,” has described the pathetic destiny of one of these women, overwhelmed with burdens, who labored in vain to make a hovel livable.
27
She lived with her husband and seven children in a wooden shack, the walls covered with soot, crawling with cockroaches; she had tried to “make the house pretty,” in the main room, the fireplace covered with bluish plaster, a table, and a few pictures hanging on the wall suggested a sort of altar. But the hovel remained a hovel, and Mrs. G. said with tears in her eyes, “Oh, I do
hate
this house
so bad!
Seems like they ain’t nothing in the whole world I can do to make it pretty!” Legions of women have in common only endlessly recurrent fatigue in a battle that never leads to victory. Even in the most privileged cases, this victory is never final. Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife; day after day, one must wash dishes, dust furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty, and torn again. The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering a positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil. It is a struggle that begins again every day. We know the story of the valet who despondently refused to polish his master’s boots. “What’s the point?” he asked. “You have to begin again the next day.” Many still unresigned young girls share this discouragement. I recall an essay of a sixteen-year-old student that opened with words like these: “Today is housecleaning day. I hear the noise of the vacuum Mama walks through the living room. I would like to run away. I swear when I grow up, there will never be a
housecleaning day in my house.” The child thinks of the future as an indefinite ascent toward some unidentified summit. Suddenly in the kitchen, where her mother is washing dishes, the little girl realizes that over the years, every afternoon at the same time, these hands have plunged into greasy water and wiped the china with a rough dish towel. And until death they will be subjected to these rites. Eat, sleep, clean … the years no longer reach toward the sky, they spread out identical and gray as a horizontal tablecloth; every day looks like the previous one; the present is eternal, useless, and hopeless. In the short story “La poussière” (Dust), Colette Audry subtly describes the sad futility of an activity that stubbornly resists time:
The next day while cleaning the sofa with a horsehair brush, she picked up something that she first took for an old morsel of cotton or a big feather. But it was only a dust ball like those that form on high wardrobes that you forget to dust or behind furniture between the wall and the wood. She remained pensive before this curious substance. So here they were living in these rooms for eight or ten weeks and already, in spite of Juliette’s vigilance, a dust ball had had the time to take form, to grow, crouching in a shadow like those gray beasts that frightened her when she was small. A fine ash of dust proclaims negligence, the beginning of carelessness, it’s the impalpable sediment from the air we breathe, clothes that flutter, from the wind coming through open windows; but this tuft already represented a second stage of dust, triumphant dust, a thickening that takes shape and from sediment becomes waste. It was almost pretty to look at, transparent and light like bramble puffs, but more drab …
The dust had beaten out all the world’s vacuum power. It had taken over the world and the vacuum cleaner was no more than a witness object destined to show everything the human race was capable of ruining in work, matter, and ingenuity in struggling against all-powerful dirt. It was waste made instrument …
It was their life together that was the cause of everything, their little meals that left skin peelings, dust from both of them that mingled everywhere … Every couple secretes these little bits of litter that must be destroyed to make space for new ones … What a life one spends—and to be able to go out with a fresh little shirt, attractive to passersby, so your engineer husband looks good in his life. Mantras replayed in Marguerite’s head: take care of the wooden
floors … for the care of brass, use … she was in charge of the care of two ordinary beings for the rest of their days.
28
Washing, ironing, sweeping, routing out tufts of dust in the dark places behind the wardrobe, this is holding away death but also refusing life: for in one movement time is created and destroyed; the housewife only grasps the negative aspect of it. Hers is the attitude of a Manichaean. The essence of Manichaeism is not only to recognize two principles, one good and one evil: it is also to posit that good is attained by the abolition of evil and not by a positive movement; in this sense, Christianity is hardly Manichaean in spite of the existence of the devil, because it is in devoting oneself to God that one best fights the devil and not in trying to conquer him. All doctrines of transcendence and freedom subordinate the defeat of evil to progress toward good. But the wife is not called to build a better world; the house, the bedroom, the dirty laundry, the wooden floors, are fixed things: she can do no more than rout out indefinitely the foul causes that creep in; she attacks the dust, stains, mud, and filth; she fights sin, she fights with Satan. But it is a sad destiny to have to repel an enemy without respite instead of being turned toward positive aims; the housewife often submits to it in rage. Bachelard uses the word “malice” for it; psycho analysts have written about it. For them, housekeeping mania is a form of sadomasochism; it is characteristic of mania and vice to make freedom want what it does not want; because the maniacal housewife detests having negativity, dirt, and evil as her lot, she furiously pursues dust, accepting a condition that revolts her. She attacks life itself through the rubbish left from any living growth. Whenever a living being enters her sphere, her eye shines with a wicked fire. “Wipe your feet; don’t mess up everything; don’t touch that.” She would like to stop everyone from breathing: the least breath is a threat. Every movement threatens her with more thankless work: a child’s somersault is a tear to sew up. Seeing life as a promise of decomposition demanding more endless work, she loses her joie de vivre; her eyes sharpen, her face looks preoccupied and serious, always on guard; she protects herself through prudence and avarice. She closes the windows because sun would bring in insects, germs, and dust; besides, the sun eats away at the silk wall coverings; the antique armchairs are hidden under loose covers and embalmed in mothballs: light would fade them. She does not even care to let her visitors see these treasures: admiration sullies. This defiance turns to bitterness and
causes hostility to everything that lives. In the provinces, some bourgeois women have been known to put on white gloves to make sure no invisible dust remains on the furniture: these were the kinds of women the Papin sisters murdered several years ago; their hatred of dirt was inseparable from their hatred of their servants, of the world, and of each other.
Few women choose such a gloomy vice when they are young. Those who generously love life are protected from it. Colette tells us about Sido:
The fact is that, though she was active and always on the go, she was not a sedulous housewife. She was clean and tidy, fastidious even, but without a trace of that solitary, maniacal spirit that counts napkins, lumps of sugar, and full bottles. With a flannel in her hands, and one eye on the servant dawdling over her window-cleaning and smiling at the man next door, she would utter nervous exclamations like impatient cries for freedom.
“When I take a lot of time and trouble wiping my Chinese cups,” she would say, “I can actually feel myself getting older.”
But she always persevered loyally until the job was finished. Then off she would go, down the two steps that led into the garden, and at once her resentment and her nervous exasperation subsided.
*
It is in this nervousness and resentment that frigid or frustrated women, old maids, desperate housewives, and those condemned by their husbands to a solitary and empty existence are satisfied. I knew, among others, an elderly woman who woke up every morning at five o’clock to inspect the wardrobes and begin rearranging them; it seems that at twenty she was gay and coquettish; closed up in her isolated estate, with a husband who neglected her and a single child, she took to arranging as others take to drink. For Élise in
The Bold Chronicle of a Strange Marriage
, the taste for housework stems from the exasperated desire to rule the universe, from a living exuberance, and from a will for domination, which, for lack of an outlet, leads nowhere; it is also a challenge to time, the universe, life, men, and everything that exists:
Since dinner from nine o’clock onwards, she has been doing the washing. It is midnight. I have been dozing, but her fortitude annoys me because it insults my rest by making it look like laziness.
Élise:
“If you want things to be clean, you shouldn’t be afraid of getting your hands dirty first.”
And the house will soon be so spotless that we shall hardly dare live in it. There are divans, but you are expected to lie down beside them on the parquet floor. The cushions are too clean. You are afraid to soil or crumple them by putting your head or your feet on them, and every time I step on a carpet, I am followed with a carpet sweeper to remove the marks that I’ve made.
In the evening:
“It’s done.”
What is the point of her moving every object and every piece of furniture and going over all the floors, the walls, and the ceilings from the time she gets up till the time she goes to bed?
For the moment, it is the housewife who is uppermost in her. Once she has dusted the insides of her cupboards, she dusts the geraniums on the windowsills.
His mother:
Élise always keeps so busy she does not notice she is alive.
Housework in fact allows the woman an indefinite escape far from herself. Chardonne rightly remarks:
Here is a meticulous and disordered task, with neither stops nor limits. In the home, a woman certain to please quickly reaches her breaking point, a state of distraction and mental void that effaces her.
*
This escape, this sadomasochism in which woman persists against both objects and self, is often precisely sexual. “The kind of housecleaning that calls for bodily gymnastics amounts to a bordello for women,” says Violette Leduc.
29
It is striking that the taste for cleanliness is of utmost importance in Holland where women are cold, and in puritanical civilizations that juxtapose the joys of the flesh with an ideal of order and purity. If the Mediterranean Midi lives in joyous filth, it is not only because water is scarce there: love of the flesh and its animality is conducive to tolerating human odor, squalor, and even vermin.
Preparing meals is more positive work and often more enjoyable than
cleaning. First of all, it involves going to the market, which is for many housewives the best time of the day. The loneliness of the household weighs on the woman just as routine tasks leave her head empty. She is happy when, in Midi towns, she can sew, wash, and peel vegetables while chatting on her doorstep; fetching water from the river is a grand adventure for half-cloistered Muslim women: I saw a little village in Kabyle where the women tore down the fountain an official had built on the plaza; going down every morning to the wadi flowing at the foot of the hill was their only distraction. All the time they are doing their marketing, waiting in lines, in shops, on street corners, they talk about things that affirm their “homemaking worth” from which each one draws the sense of her own importance; they feel part of a community that—for an instant—is opposed to the society of men as the essential to the inessential. But above all, making a purchase is a profound pleasure: it is a discovery, almost an invention. Gide observes in his
Journals
that the Muslims, unfamiliar with games of chance, have replaced them with the discovery of hidden treasures; this is the poetry and adventure of mercantile civilizations. The housewife is oblivious to the gratuitousness of games: but a good firm cabbage and a ripe Camembert are treasures that must be subtly discovered in spite of the cunning shopkeeper; between seller and buyer, relations of dealing and ruse are established: for her, winning means getting the best goods for the lowest price; concern for a restricted budget is not enough to explain the extreme importance given to being economical: winning the game is what counts. When she suspiciously inspects the stalls, the housewife is queen; the world, with its riches and traps, is at her feet, for her taking. She tastes a fleeting triumph when she empties her shopping basket on the table. She puts her canned food and nonperishables in the larder, guarding her against the future, and she contemplates with satisfaction the raw vegetables and meats she is about to submit to her power.