Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
This distress is what often causes long depressions and various psychoses in the young woman. In particular, in the guise of different psychasthenic obsessions, she feels the giddiness of her empty freedom; she develops, for example, fantasies of prostitution we have already seen in young girls. Pierre Janet cites the case of a young bride who could not stand being alone in her apartment because she was tempted to go to the window and wink at passersby.
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Others remain abulic faced with a universe that “no longer seems real,” peopled only with ghosts and painted cardboard sets. There are those who try to refuse their adulthood, who will obstinately persist in refusing it their whole lives, like another patient whom Janet designates with the initials Qi:
Qi, a thirty-six-year-old woman, is obsessed by the idea that she is a little ten- to twelve-year-old girl; especially when she is alone, she lets herself jump, laugh, dance; she lets her hair down, lets it loose on her shoulders, sometimes cuts it in places. She would like to lose herself completely in this dream of being a child: It is so unfortunate that she cannot play hide-and-seek, play tricks … in front of everyone … “I would like people to think I am nice, I am afraid of being the ugly duckling, I would like to be liked, talked to, petted, to be constantly told that I am loved as one loves little children … A child is loved for his mischievousness, for his good little heart, for his kindness, and what is asked of him in return? To love you, nothing more. That is what is good, but I cannot say that to my husband, he would not understand me. Look, I would so much like to be a little girl, have a father or a mother who would take me on their lap, caress my hair … but no, I am Madame, a mother; I have to keep the home, be serious, think on my own, oh, what a life!”
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Marriage is often a crisis for man as well: the proof is that many masculine psychoses develop during the engagement period or the early period of conjugal life. Less attached to his family than his sisters are, the young man
belongs to some group: a special school, a university, a guild, a team, something that protects him from loneliness; he leaves it behind to begin his real existence as an adult; he is apprehensive of his future solitude, and it is often to exorcise it that he gets married. But he is fooled by the illusion maintained by the whole community that depicts the couple as a “conjugal
society
.” Except in the brief fire of a passionate affair, two individuals cannot form a world that protects each of them against the world: this is what they both feel the day after the wedding. The wife, soon familiar, subjugated, does not obstruct her husband’s freedom: she is a burden, not an alibi; she does not free him from the weight of his responsibilities, but on the contrary she exacerbates them. The difference of the sexes often means differences in age, education, and situation that do not bring about any real understanding: familiar, the spouses are still strangers. Previously, there was often a real chasm between them: the young girl, raised in a state of ignorance and innocence, had no “past,” while her fiancé had “lived”; it was up to him to initiate her into the reality of life. Some males feel flattered by this delicate role; more lucid, they warily measure the distance that separates them from their future companion. In her novel
The Age of Innocence
, Edith Wharton describes the scruples of a young American of 1870 concerning the woman destined for him:
With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger … What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?… The young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called “the facts of life” … But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product … so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order
that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Today, the gap is not as wide because the young girl is a less artificial being; she is better informed, better armed for life. But she is often much younger than her husband. The importance of this point has not been emphasized enough; the consequences of an unequal maturity are often taken as differences of sex; in many cases the wife is a child not because she is a woman but because she is in fact very young. The seriousness of her husband and his friends overwhelms her. Sophia Tolstoy wrote about one year after her wedding day:
He is old and self-absorbed, whereas I feel young and long to do something wild. I’d like to turn somersaults instead of going to bed. But with whom?
Old age hovers over me; everything here is old. I try to suppress all youthful feelings, for they would seem odd and out of place in this somber environment.
*
As for the husband, he sees a “baby” in his wife; for him she is not the companion he expected, and he makes her feel it; she is humiliated by it. No doubt she likes finding a guide when she leaves her father’s home, but she also wants to be seen as a “grown-up”; she wants to remain a child, she wants to become a woman; her older spouse can never treat her in a way that totally satisfies her.
Even if their age difference is slight, the fact remains that the young woman and young man have generally been brought up very differently; she is the product of a feminine universe where she was inculcated with feminine sagacity and respect for feminine values, whereas he is imbued with the male ethic. It is often very difficult for them to understand each other, and conflicts soon arise.
Because marriage usually subordinates the wife to the husband, the intensity of the problem of conjugal relations rests mainly on her. The paradox of marriage is that it brings into play an erotic function as well as a social one: this ambivalence is reflected in the figure the husband presents to the young wife. He is a demigod endowed with virile prestige and destined to replace her father: protector, overseer, tutor, guide; the wife has to thrive in his shadow; he is the holder of values, the guarantor of truth, the
ethical justification of the couple. But he is also a male with whom she must share an experience often shameful, bizarre, disgusting, or upsetting, and, in any case, contingent; he invites his wife to wallow with him in bestiality while directing her with a strong hand toward the ideal.
One night in Paris—where they had come on their return journey—Bernard made a show of walking out of a nightclub, shocked at the revue: “To think that foreign visitors will see that! What shame! And that’s how they’ll judge us …” Thérèse could only marvel that this so chaste man was the same one who would be making her submit, in less than an hour, to his patient inventions in the dark.
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There are many hybrid forms between mentor and beast. Sometimes man is at once father and lover; the sexual act becomes a sacred orgy, and the loving wife finds ultimate salvation in the arms of her husband, redeemed by total abdication. This love-passion within married life is very rare. And at times the wife will love her husband platonically but will be unable to abandon herself in the arms of a man she respects too much. Such is this woman whose case Stekel reports. “Mrs. D.S., a great artist’s widow, is now forty years old. Although she adored her husband, she was completely frigid with him.” On the contrary, she may experience pleasure with him that she suffers as a common disgrace, killing all respect and esteem she has for him. Besides, an erotic failure relegates her husband to the ranks of a brute: hated in his flesh, he will be reviled in spirit; inversely, we have seen how scorn, antipathy, and rancor doomed the wife to frigidity. What often happens is that the husband remains a respected superior being after the sexual experience, excused of his animalistic weaknesses; it seems that this was the case, among others, of Adèle Hugo. Or else he is a pleasant partner, without prestige. Katherine Mansfield descried one of the forms this ambivalence can take in her short story “Prelude”:
For she really was fond of him; she loved and admired and respected him tremendously. Oh, better than anyone else in the world. She knew him through and through. He was the soul of truth and decency, and for all his practical experience he was awfully simple, easily pleased and easily hurt … If only he wouldn’t jump at her so, and bark so loudly, and watch her with such eager, loving eyes. He
was too strong for her; she had always hated things that rushed at her, from a child. There were times when he was frightening—really frightening—when she just had not screamed at the top of her voice: “You are killing me.” And at those times she had longed to say the most coarse, hateful things … Yes, yes, it was true … For all her love and respect and admiration she hated him … It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment. There were all her feelings for him, sharp and defined, one as true as the other. And there was this other, this hatred, just as real as the rest. She could have done her feelings up in little packets and given them to Stanley. She longed to hand him that last one, for a surprise. She could see his eyes as he opened that.
The young wife rarely admits her feelings to herself with such sincerity. To love her husband and to be happy is a duty to herself and society; this is what her family expects of her; or if her parents were against the marriage, she wants to prove how wrong they were. She usually begins her conjugal life in bad faith; she easily persuades herself that she feels great love for her husband; and this passion takes on a more manic, possessive, and jealous form the less sexually satisfied she is; to console herself for this disappointment that she refuses at first to admit, she has an insatiable need for her husband’s presence. Stekel cites numerous examples of these pathological attachments:
A woman remained frigid for the first years of her marriage, due to childhood fixations. She then developed a hypertrophic love as is frequently found in women who cannot bear to see that their husbands are indifferent to them. She lived only for her husband, and thought only of him. She lost all will. He had to plan her day every morning, tell her what to buy, etc. She carried out everything conscientiously. If he did not tell her what to do, she stayed in her room doing nothing and worried about him. She could not let him go anywhere without accompanying him. She could not stay alone, and she liked to hold his hand … She was unhappy and cried for hours, trembling for her husband and if there were no reasons to tremble, she created them.
My second case concerned a woman closed up in her room as if it were a prison for fear of going out alone. I found her holding her husband’s hands, pleading with him to stay near her … Married for seven years, he was never able to have relations with his wife.
Sophia Tolstoy’s case was similar; it comes out clearly in the passage I have cited and all throughout her diaries that as soon as she was married, she realized she did not love her husband. Sexual relations with him disgusted her; she reproached him for his past, found him old and boring, had nothing but hostility for his ideas; and it seems that greedy and brutal in bed, he neglected her and treated her harshly. To her hopeless cries, her confessions of ennui, sadness, and indifference, were nevertheless added Sophia’s protestations of passionate love; she wanted her beloved husband near her always; as soon as he was away from her, she was tortured with jealousy. She writes:
January 11, 1863: My jealousy is a congenital illness, or it may be because in loving him I have nothing else to love; I have given myself so completely to him that my only happiness is with him and from him.
January 15, 1863:
*
I have been feeling [out of sorts and] angry that he should love everything and everyone, when I want him to love only me … The moment I think fondly of something or someone I tell myself no, I love only Lyovochka. But I absolutely
must
learn to love something else as he loves his
work …
but I hate being alone without him … My need to be near him grows stronger every day.
October 17, 1863: I feel I don’t understand him properly, that’s why I am always jealously following him.
July 31, 1868: It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions—as though I were the unhappiest of women!… Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours? I have been married six years now, but I love him more and more … I still love him with the same passionate, poetic, fevered, jealous love, and his composure occasionally irritates me.
September 16, 1876:
†
I avidly search his diaries for any reference to love, and am so tormented by jealously that I can no longer see anything clearly. I am afraid of my resentment of Lyovochka for leaving me … I choke back the tears, or hide away several times a
day and weep with anxiety. I have a fever every day and a chill at night … “What is he punishing me for?” I keep asking myself. “Why, for loving him so much.”
These pages convey the feeling of a vain effort to compensate for the absence of a real love with moral and “poetic” exaltation; demands, anxieties, jealousy, are expressions of the emptiness in her heart. A great deal of morbid jealousy develops in such conditions; in an indirect way, jealousy conveys a dissatisfaction that woman objectifies by inventing a rival; never feeling fulfillment with her husband, she rationalizes in some way her disappointment by imagining him deceiving her.