Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
I remember, for example, Tchang Tsen lice in the beginning of our marriage … I really only became intimate with a woman thanks to it, the day Élise took me naked on her lap to shave me like a sheep, lighting me up with a candle she moved around my body down to my secret parts. Oh, her close inspection of my armpits, my chest, my navel, the skin of my testicles taut like a drum between her fingers, her prolonged pauses along my thighs, between my feet and
the passage of the razor around my asshole: the final drop into the basket a tuft of blond hair where the lice were hiding, and that she burned, giving me over in one fell swoop, delivering me at the same time from the lice and their den, to a new nakedness and to the desert of isolation.
Woman loves man to be passive flesh and not a body that expresses subjectivity. She affirms life against existence, values of the flesh against values of the spirit; she readily adopts Pascal’s humorous attitude to male enterprises; she thinks as well, “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone”; she would gladly keep him shut up at home; all activity that does not directly benefit family life provokes her hostility; Bernard Palissy’s wife is indignant when he burns the furniture to invent a new enamel without which the world had done very well until then; Mme Racine makes her husband take an interest in her red currants and refuses to read his tragedies. Jouhandeau is often peeved in
The Bold Chronicle of a Strange Marriage
because Élise stubbornly considers his literary work merely a source of material profit:
I said to her: My latest story was published this morning. She replied (without in any way wishing to be cynical and merely because it is the only thing that matters to her): That means we shall have at least three hundred francs extra this month.
It happens that these conflicts worsen and then provoke a rupture. But generally the woman wants to “hold on to” her husband as well as to refuse his domination. She struggles against him to defend her autonomy, and she fights against the rest of the world to conserve the “situation” that dooms her to dependence. This double game is difficult to play, which explains in part the worried and nervous state in which multitudes of women spend their lives. Stekel gives a very significant example:
Mrs. Z.T., who never had an orgasm, is married to a very cultivated man. But she cannot bear his superiority and she began to want to be his equal by studying his speciality. As it was too difficult, she gave up her studies as soon as they were engaged.
The very famous man had many students chasing after him. She decides not to partake in this ridiculous cult. In her marriage she was insensitive from the start and she remained that way. She attained an orgasm only through masturbation when her husband had finished,
satisfied, and she would tell him about it. She refused his attempts to excite her by his caresses … Soon she began to ridicule him and undermine her husband’s work. She could not “understand these ninnies who pursued him, she who knew the behind-the-scenes of the great man’s private life.” In their daily quarrels, expressions arose such as: “You can’t put anything over on me with your scribbling!” Or: “You think you can do what you want with me because you’re a little writer.” The husband spent more and more time with his students, she surrounded herself with young men. She continued this way for years until her husband fell in love with another woman. She always stood for his little liaisons, she even made friends of his abandoned “poor idiots”… But then she changed her attitude and gave in, without orgasm, to the first adolescent who came along. She admitted to her husband that she had cheated on him, which he accepted without a problem. They could peacefully separate … She refused the divorce. There followed a long explanation and reconciliation. She broke down in tears and experienced her first intense orgasm.
It is clear that in her struggle against her husband, she never intends to leave him.
There is an art to “catching a husband”: “keeping” him is a profession. It takes a great deal of skill. A prudent sister said to a cranky young wife: “Be careful, making scenes with Marcel will make you lose your
situation
.” The stakes are the highest: material and moral security, a home of one’s own, wifely dignity, a more or less successful substitute for love and happiness. The wife quickly learns that her erotic attraction is the weakest of her weapons; it disappears with familiarity; and there are, alas, other desirable women in the world; so she still works at being seductive and pleasing: she is often torn between the pride that inclines her to frigidity and the notion that her sensual ardor will flatter and keep her husband. She also counts on the force of habit, on the charm he finds in a pleasant home, his taste for good food, his affection for his children; she tries to “make him proud” by her way of entertaining, dressing, and exercising authority over him with her advice and her influence; as much as she can, she will make herself indispensable, either by her social success or by her work. But, above all, a whole tradition teaches wives the art of “how to catch a man”; one must discover and flatter his weaknesses, cunningly use flattery and disdain, docility and resistance, vigilance and indulgence. This last blend is especially subtle. One must not give a husband too much or too little freedom.
If she is too indulgent, the wife finds her husband escaping her; the money and passion he spends on other women are her loss; she runs the risk of having a mistress get enough power over him to seek a divorce or at least take first place in his life. Yet if she forbids him all adventure, if she overwhelms him by her close scrutiny, her scenes, her demands, she can seriously turn him against her. It is a question of knowing how to “make concessions” advisedly; if the husband puts “a few dents in the contract,” she will close her eyes; but at other moments, she must open them wide; in particular the married woman mistrusts young girls who would be only too happy to take over her “position.” To tear her husband from a worrying rival, she will take him on a trip, she will try to distract him; if necessary—following Mme de Pompadour’s model—she will seek out another, less dangerous rival; if nothing succeeds, she will resort to crying, nervous fits, suicide attempts, and such; but too many scenes and recriminations will chase her husband from the house; the wife will make herself unbearable just when she most needs to seduce; if she wants to win her hand, she will skillfully combine touching tears and heroic smiles, blackmail and coquetry. Dissimulate, trick, hate, and fear in silence, bet on the vanity and weakness of a man, learn how to foil him, play him, manipulate him, it is all quite a sad science. The wife’s great excuse is that she is forced to involve her whole self in marriage: she has no profession, no skills, no personal relations, even her name is not her own; she is nothing but her husband’s “other half.” If he abandons her, she will most often find no help, either within or outside of herself. It is easy to cast a stone at Sophia Tolstoy, as A. de Monzie and Montherlant do: But if she had refused the hypocrisy of conjugal life, where could she have gone? What destiny awaited her? True, she seems to have been a contemptible shrew: But could one ask her to love her tyrant and bless her enslavement? For there to be loyalty and friendship between spouses, the
sine qua non
is that both must be free vis-à-vis each other and concretely equal. As long as man alone possesses economic autonomy and holds—by law and custom—privileges conferred on him by his masculinity, it is natural that he should so often appear a tyrant, inciting woman to revolt and duplicity.
No one dreams of denying the tragedies and nastiness of married life: but advocates of marriage defend the idea that spouses’ conflicts arise out of the bad faith of individuals and not out of the institution’s. Tolstoy, among others, describes the ideal couple in the epilogue to
War and Peace:
Pierre and Natasha. She was a coquettish and romantic girl; when married, she astounds those who knew her by giving up her interest in her appearance, society, and pastimes and devoting herself exclusively to her husband and children; she becomes the very epitome of a matron:
In her face there was not, as formerly, that ceaselessly burning fire of animation that had constituted her charm. Now one often saw only her face and body, while her soul was not seen at all. One saw only a strong, beautiful, and fruitful female.
She demands from Pierre a love as exclusive as the one she swears to him; she is jealous of him; he gives up going out, all his old friends, and devotes himself entirely to his family as well.
Pierre’s subjection consisted in his … not daring to go to clubs or dinners … not daring to leave for long periods of time except on business, in which his wife also included his intellectual pursuits, of which she understood nothing, but to which she ascribed great importance.
Pierre is “under the slipper of his wife,” but in return:
At home Natasha put herself on the footing of her husband’s slave … The entire household was governed only by the imaginary orders of the husband, that is, by Pierre’s wishes, which Natasha tried to guess.
When Pierre goes far away from her, Natasha impatiently greets him upon his return because she suffers from his absence; but a wonderful harmony reigns over the couple; they understand each other with barely a few words. Between her children, her home, her loved and respected husband, she savors nearly untainted happiness.
This idyllic tableau merits closer scrutiny. Natasha and Pierre are united, says Tolstoy, like soul and body; but when the soul leaves the body, only one dies; what would happen if Pierre should cease to love Natasha? Lawrence, too, rejects the hypothesis of masculine inconstancy: Don Ramón will always love the little Indian girl Teresa, who gave him her soul. Yet one of the most ardent zealots of unique, absolute, eternal love, André Breton, is forced to admit that at least in present circumstances this love can mistake its object: error or inconstancy, it is the same abandonment for the woman. Pierre, robust and sensual, will be physically attracted to other women; Natasha is jealous; soon the relationship will sour; either he will leave her, which will ruin her life, or he will lie and resent her, which will spoil his life, or they will live with compromises and half measures, which will make them both unhappy. One might object that Natasha will at least have her children: but children are a source of joy only
within a well-balanced structure, where the husband is one of its peaks; for the neglected, jealous wife they become a thankless burden. Tolstoy admires Natasha’s blind devotion to Pierre’s ideas; but another man, Lawrence, who also demands blind devotion from women, mocks Pierre and Natasha; so in the opinion of other men, a man can be a clay idol and not a real god; in worshipping him, one loses one’s life instead of saving it; how is one to know? Masculine claims compete with each other, authority no longer plays a part: the wife must judge and criticize, she cannot be but a feeble echo. Moreover, it is degrading to her to impose principles and values on her that she does not believe in with her own free will; what she might share of her husband’s thinking, she can only share through her own independent judgment; she should not have to accept or refuse what is foreign to her; she cannot borrow her own reasons for existing from another.
The most radical condemnation of the Pierre-Natasha myth comes from the Leon-Sophia couple. Sophia feels repulsion for her husband, she finds him “tedious”; he cheats on her with all the surrounding peasants, she is jealous and bored; she is frustrated by her multiple pregnancies, and her children do not fill the emptiness in her heart or her days; home for her is an arid desert; for him it is hell. And it ends up with an old hysterical woman lying half-naked in the humid night of the forest, with this old hounded man fleeing, renouncing finally the “union” of a whole life.
Of course, Tolstoy’s case is exceptional; there are many marriages that “work well,” that is, where the spouses reach a compromise; they live next to each other without antagonizing each other, without lying to each other too much. But there is a curse they rarely escape: boredom. Whether the husband succeeds in making his wife an echo of himself, or whether each one entrenches himself in his universe, they have nothing else to share with each other after a few months or years. The couple is a community whose members have lost their autonomy without escaping their solitude; they are statically assimilated to each other instead of sustaining a dynamic and lively relation together; this is why they can give nothing to each other, exchange nothing on a spiritual or erotic level. In one of her best short stories, “Too Bad,” Dorothy Parker sums up the sad saga of many conjugal lives; it is night and Mr. Weldon comes home:
Mrs. Weldon opened the door at his ring.
“Well!” she said, cheerily.
They smiled brightly at each other.
“Hel-lo,” he said. “Well! You home?”
They kissed, slightly. She watched with polite interest while he hung up his hat and coat, removed the evening papers from his pocket, and handed one to her.
“Bring the papers?” she said, taking it …
“Well, what have you been doing with yourself today?” he inquired.
She had been expecting the question. She had planned before he came in, how she would tell him all the little events of her day … But now … it seemed to her a long, dull story …
“Oh, nothing,” she said, with a gay little laugh. “Did you have a nice day?”
“Why——” he began … But his interest waned, even as he started to speak. Besides, she was engrossed in breaking off a loose thread from the wool fringe of one of the pillows beside her.
“Oh, pretty fair,” he said …
She could talk well enough to other people …
Ernest, too, seemed to be talkative enough when he was with others …
She tried to remember what they used to talk about before they were married, when they were engaged. It seemed to her that they never had had much to say to each other. But she hadn’t worried about it then … Then, besides, there had been always kissing and things, to take up your mind … And you can’t depend on kisses and all the rest of it to while away the evenings, after seven years.
You’d think that you would get used to it, in seven years, would realize that that was the way it was, and let it go at that. You don’t, though. A thing like that gets on your nerves. It isn’t one of those cozy, companionable silences that people occasionally fall into together. It makes you feel as if you must do something about it, as if you weren’t performing your duty. You have the feeling a hostess has when her party is going badly …
Ernest would read industriously, and along toward the middle of the paper, he would start yawning aloud. Something happened inside Mrs. Weldon when he did this. She would murmur that she had to speak to Delia, and hurry to the kitchen. She would stay there rather a long time, looking vaguely into jars and inquiring half-heartedly about laundry lists, and, when she returned, he would have gone in to get ready for bed.
In a year, three hundred of their evenings were like this. Seven times three hundred is more than two thousand.