The Second Sex (88 page)

It is sometimes claimed this very silence is the sign of an intimacy deeper than any word; and obviously no one dreams of denying that conjugal life creates intimacy: this is true of all family relations, even those that include hatreds, jealousies, and resentments. Jouhandeau strongly emphasizes the difference between this intimacy and a real human fraternity, writing:

He says elsewhere:

Still more:

Advocates of conjugal love readily admit it is not love, which is precisely what makes it marvelous.
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For in recent years the bourgeoisie has
invented an epic style: routine takes on the allure of adventure, faithfulness that of sublime madness, boredom becomes wisdom, and family hatreds are the deepest form of love. In truth, that two individuals hate each other without, however, being able to do without each other is not at all the truest, the most moving of all human relations; it is one of the most pitiful. The ideal would be, on the contrary, that each human being, perfectly self-sufficient, be attached to another by the free consent of their love alone. Tolstoy admires the fact that the link between Natasha and Pierre is something “indefinable, but firm, solid, as was the union of his own soul with his body.” If one accepts the dualist hypothesis, the body represents only a pure facticity for the soul; so in the conjugal union, each one would have for the other the inevitable weight of contingent fact; one would have to assume and love the other as an absurd and unchosen presence as the necessary condition for and very matter of existence. There is a deliberate confusion between these two words—“assuming” and “loving”—and the mystification stems from this: one does not love what one assumes. One assumes one’s body, past, and present situation: but love is a movement toward an other, toward an existence separated from one’s own, toward a finality, a future; the way to assume or take on a load or a tyranny is not to love it but to revolt. A human relation has no value if it is lived in the immediacy; children’s relations with their parents, for example, only have value when they are reflected in a consciousness; one cannot admire conjugal relations that degenerate into the immediate in which the spouses squander their freedom. One claims to respect this complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness, and hypocrisy called conjugal love only because it serves as an alibi. But what is true of friendship is true of physical love: for friendship to be authentic, it must first be free. Freedom does not mean whim: a feeling is a commitment that goes beyond the instant; but it is up to the individual alone to compare his general will to his personal behavior so as either to uphold his decision or, on the contrary, to break it; feeling is free when it does not depend on any outside command, when it is lived in sincerity without fear. The message of “conjugal love” is an invitation, by contrast, to all kinds of repression and lies. And above all it keeps the husband and wife from genuinely knowing each other. Daily intimacy creates neither understanding nor sympathy. The husband respects his wife too much to be interested in the metamorphoses of her psychological life: that would mean recognizing in her a secret autonomy that could prove to be bothersome, dangerous; does she really get pleasure in bed? Does she really love her husband? Is she really happy to obey him? He prefers not to question himself; these questions
even seem shocking to him. He married a “good woman”; by nature she is virtuous, devoted, faithful, pure, and happy, and she thinks what she should think. A sick man, after thanking his friends, his family, and his nurses, says to his young wife, who, for six months, had not left his bedside: “I do not have to thank you, you merely did your duty.” He gives her no credit for any of her good qualities: they are guaranteed by society, they are implied by the very institution of marriage; he does not notice that his wife does not come out of a book by Bonald, that she is an individual of flesh and blood; he takes for granted her faithfulness to the orders she imposes on herself: he takes no account of the fact that she might have temptations to overcome, that she might succumb to them, that in any case, her patience, her chastity, and her decency might be difficult conquests; he ignores even more completely her dreams, her fantasies, her nostalgia, and the emotional climate in which she spends her days. Thus Chardonne shows us in
Eva
a husband who has for years kept a journal of his conjugal life: he speaks of his wife with delicate nuances; but only of his wife as he sees her, as she is for him without ever giving her dimensions as a free individual: he is stunned when he suddenly learns she does not love him, that she is leaving him. One often speaks of the naive and loyal man’s disillusionment in the face of feminine perfidy: the husbands in Bernstein are scandalized to discover that the women in their lives are fickle, mean or adulterous; they take it with a virile courage, but the author does not fail to make them seem generous and strong: they seem more like boors to us, without sensitivity and goodwill; man criticizes women for their duplicity, but he must be very complacent to let himself be duped with so much constancy. Woman is doomed to immorality because morality for her consists in embodying an inhuman entity: the strong woman, the admirable mother, the virtuous woman, and so on. As soon as she thinks, dreams, sleeps, desires, and aspires without orders, she betrays the masculine ideal. This is why so many women do not let themselves “be themselves” except in their husbands’ absence. Likewise, the woman does not know her husband: she thinks she perceives his true face because she grasps it in its daily contingency: but the man is first what he
does
in the world among other men. Refusing to understand the movement of his transcendence is denaturing it. “One marries a poet,” says Élise, “and when one is his wife, the first thing she notices is he forgets to flush the toilet.”
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He nevertheless remains a poet, and the wife who is not interested in his works knows him
less than a remote reader. It is often not the wife’s fault that this complicity is forbidden to her: she cannot share her husband’s affairs, she lacks the experience and the necessary culture to “follow” him: she fails to join him in the projects that are far more essential for him than the monotonous repetition of everyday life. In certain privileged cases the wife can succeed in becoming a real companion for her husband: she discusses his plans, gives him advice, participates in his work. But she is deluding herself if she thinks she can accomplish work of her own like that: he alone remains the active and responsible freedom. To find joy in serving him, she must love him; if not she will experience only vexation because she will feel frustrated by the fruit of her efforts. Men—faithful to the advice given by Balzac to treat the wife as a slave while persuading her she is queen—exaggerate to the utmost the importance of the influence women wield; deep down, they know well they are lying. Georgette Leblanc was duped by this mystification when she demanded of Maeterlinck that he write their two names on the book they had, or so she thought, written together; in the preface to the singer’s
Souvenirs
, Grasset bluntly explains that any man is ready to hail the woman who shares his life as an associate and an inspiration but that he nevertheless still regards his work as belonging to him alone; rightfully. In any action, any work, what counts is the moment of choice and decision. The wife generally plays the role of the crystal ball clairvoyants use: another would do just as well. And the proof is that often the man welcomes another adviser, another collaborator, with the same confidence. Sophia Tolstoy copied her husband’s manuscripts and put them in order: he later gave the job to one of his daughters; she understood that even her zeal had not made her indispensable. Only autonomous work can assure the wife an authentic autonomy.
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Conjugal life takes different forms depending on the case. But for many wives, the day begins approximately in the same way. The husband leaves his wife hurriedly in the morning: she is happy to hear the door close after him; she likes to find herself free, without duties, sovereign in her home. The children in turn leave for school: she will stay alone all day; the baby squirming in his crib or playing in his playpen is not company. She spends more or less time getting dressed, doing the housework; if she has a
maid, she gives her instructions, lingers a little in the kitchen while chatting; or else she will stroll in the market, exchanging comments on the cost of living with her neighbors or shopkeepers. If her husband and children come home for lunch, she cannot take advantage of their presence very much; she has too much to do to get the meal ready, serve, and clean up; most often, they do not come back for lunch. In any case, she has a long, empty afternoon in front of her. She takes her youngest children to the public park and knits or sews while keeping an eye on them; or, sitting at the window at home, she does her mending; her hands work, but her mind is not occupied; she ruminates over her worries; she makes plans; she daydreams, she is bored; none of her occupations suffices in itself; her thoughts are directed toward her husband and her children, who will wear these shirts, who will eat the meal she is preparing; she lives for them alone; and are they at all grateful to her? Little by little her boredom changes into impatience; she begins to wait for their return anxiously. The children come back from school, she kisses them, questions them; but they have homework to do, they want to have fun together, they escape, they are not a distraction. And then they have bad grades, they have lost a scarf, they are noisy, messy, they fight with each other: she almost always has to scold them. Their presence annoys the mother more than it soothes her. She waits for her husband more and more urgently. What is he doing? Why is he not home already? He has worked, seen the world, chatted with people, he has not thought of her; she starts ruminating nervously that she is stupid to sacrifice her youth to him; he is not grateful to her. The husband making his way toward the house where his wife is closed up feels vaguely guilty; early in the marriage, he would bring a bunch of flowers, a little gift, as an offering; but this ritual soon loses any meaning; now he arrives empty-handed, and he is even less in a hurry when he anticipates the usual greeting. Indeed, the wife often takes revenge with a scene of boredom, of the daily wait; this is how she wards off the disappointment of a presence that does not satisfy the expectation of her waiting. Even if she does not express her grievances, her husband too is disappointed. He has not had a good time at his office, he is tired; he has a contradictory desire for stimulation and for rest. His wife’s too familiar face does not free him from himself; he feels she would like to share his worries with him, that she also expects distraction and relaxation from him: her presence weighs on him without satisfying him, he does not find real abandon with her. Nor do the children bring entertainment or peace; during the meal and the evening there is a vague bad mood; reading, listening to the radio, chatting idly, each one under the cover of intimacy, will remain alone. Yet the wife wonders with
an anxious hope—or a no less anxious apprehension—if tonight—finally! again!—something will happen. She goes to sleep disappointed, irritated, or relieved; she will be happy to hear the door slam shut tomorrow. The lot of wives is even harsher if they are poor and overburdened with chores; it lightens when they have both leisure and distractions. But this pattern—boredom, waiting, and disappointment—is found in many cases.

There are some escapes available to the wife;
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but in practice they are not available to all. The chains of marriage are heavy, particularly in the provinces; a wife has to find a way of coming to grips with a situation she cannot escape. Some, as we have seen, are puffed up with importance and become tyrannical matrons and shrews. Others take refuge in the role of the victim, they make themselves their husbands’ and children’s pathetic slaves and find a masochistic joy in it. Others perpetuate the narcissistic behavior we have described in relation to the young girl: they also suffer from not realizing themselves in any undertaking, and, being able to do nothing, they are nothing; undefined, they feel undetermined and consider themselves misunderstood; they worship melancholy; they take refuge in dreams, playacting, illnesses, fads, scenes; they create problems around them or close themselves up in an imaginary world; the “smiling Mme Beudet” that Amiel depicted is one of these. Shut up in provincial monotony with a boorish husband, with no chance to act or to love, she is devoured by the feeling of her life’s emptiness and uselessness; she tries to find compensation in romantic musings, in the flowers she surrounds herself with, in her clothes, her person: her husband interferes even with these games. She ends up trying to kill him. The symbolic behavior into which the wife escapes can bring about perversions, and these obsessions can lead to crime. There are conjugal crimes dictated less by interest than by pure hatred. Thus, Mauriac shows us Thérèse Desqueyroux trying to poison her husband as Mme Lafarge did previously. A forty-year-old woman who had endured an odious husband for twenty years was recently acquitted for having coldly strangled her husband with the help of her elder son. There had been no other way for her to free herself from an intolerable situation.