Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
The little girl is more wholly under the control of her mother; her claims on her daughter are greater. Their relations assume a much more dramatic character. The mother does not greet a daughter as a member of the chosen caste: she seeks a double in her. She projects onto her all the ambiguity of her relationship with her self; and when the alterity of this alter ego affirms itself, she feels betrayed. The conflicts we have discussed become all the more intensified between mother and daughter.
There are women who are satisfied enough with their lives to want to reincarnate themselves in a daughter, or at least welcome her without disappointment; they would like to give their child the same chances they had, as well as those they did not have: they will give her a happy youth. Colette traced the portrait of one of those well-balanced and generous mothers; Sido cherishes her daughter in her freedom; she fulfills her without ever making demands in return because her joy comes from her own heart. It can happen that in devoting herself to this double in whom she recognizes and transcends herself, the mother ends up totally alienating herself in her; she renounces herself, her only care is for her child’s happiness; she will even be egotistical and hard toward the rest of the world; she runs the danger of becoming annoying to the one she adores, as did Mme de Sévigné for Mme de Grignan; the disgruntled daughter will try to rid herself from such tyrannical devotion; often she is unsuccessful, and she lives her whole life as a child, frightened of responsibilities because she has been too “sheltered.” But it is especially a certain masochistic form of motherhood that risks weighing heavily on the young daughter. Some women feel their femininity as an absolute curse: they wish for or accept a daughter with the bitter pleasure of finding another victim; and at the same time they feel guilt
at having brought her into the world; their remorse and the pity they feel for themselves through their daughter are manifested in endless anxieties; they will never take a step away from the child; they will sleep in the same bed for fifteen or twenty years; the little girl will be destroyed by the fire of this disquieting passion.
Most women both claim and detest their feminine condition; they experience it in resentment. The disgust they feel for their sex could incite them to give their daughters a virile education: they are rarely generous enough to do so. Irritated at having given birth to a female, the mother accepts her with this ambiguous curse: “You will be a woman.” She hopes to redeem her inferiority by turning this person she considers a double into a superior being; and she also has a tendency to inflict on her the defect she has had to bear. At times she tries to impose exactly her own destiny on her child: “What was good enough for me is good enough for you; this is the way I was brought up, so you will share my lot.” And at times, by contrast, she fiercely forbids her to resemble her: she wants her own experience to be useful, it is a way to get even. The courtesan will send her daughter to a convent, the ignorant woman will give her an education. In
In the Prison of Her Skin
, the mother who sees the hated consequence of a youthful error in her daughter tells her with fury:
Try to understand. If such a thing happened to you, I would disown you. I did not know a thing. Sin! A vague idea, sin! If a man calls you, don’t go. Go on your way. Don’t turn back. Do you hear me? You’ve been warned, this must not happen to you, and if it happened, I would have no pity, I would leave you in the gutter.
We have seen that Mrs. Mazzetti, because she wanted to spare her daughter from her own error, precipitated it. Stekel recounts a complex case of “maternal hatred” of a daughter:
I know a mother who disliked at birth her fourth daughter, a quiet charming girl … She claimed that this child had inherited, in concentrated measure, all her father’s unpleasant traits … The child was born to her during the year when this exalted, dreamy woman had fallen passionately in love with another man, a poet, who was courting her … during her husband’s embraces she permitted her mind to dwell on the poet, hoping that the child would thus become endowed with her beloved’s traits—as in Goethe’s
Elective Affinities
. However, the child looked so much like its father, from the
moment of its birth, that its paternity was obvious … She saw in the child a reflection of herself—a reflection of the dreamy, tender, yielding, sensual side of herself. She despised these qualities, scorned them in herself. She would have preferred to have been strong, unyielding, vigorous, prudish, and energetic. Thus she hated herself even more than she hated her husband through her hatred of the child.
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It is when the girl grows up that real conflicts arise; we have seen that she wishes to affirm her autonomy from her mother: this is, in her mother’s eyes, a mark of detestable ingratitude; she obstinately tries to “tame” this determination that is lurking; she cannot accept that her double becomes
an other
. The pleasure man savors in women—feeling absolutely superior—is something a woman experiences only toward her children, and her daughters in particular; she feels frustration if she renounces these privileges and her authority. Whether she is a passionate or a hostile mother, her child’s independence ruins her hopes. She is doubly jealous: of the world that takes her daughter, and of her daughter who, in conquering part of the world, robs her of it. This jealousy first involves the father-daughter relationship; sometimes the mother uses the child to keep her husband home: if this fails, she is vexed, but if her maneuver succeeds, she is sure to revive her infantile complex in an inverted form: she becomes irritated by her daughter as she was once by her own mother; she sulks, she feels abandoned and misunderstood. A French woman, married to a foreigner who loved his daughters very much, angrily said one day: “I’ve had enough of living with these ‘wogs’!” Often the eldest daughter, the father’s favorite, is the target of the mother’s persecution. The mother heaps the worst chores on her, demands a seriousness beyond her age: since she is a rival, she will be treated as an adult; she too will learn that “life is not a storybook romance, everything is not rosy, you can’t do whatever you please, you’re not on earth to have fun.” Very often, the mother strikes the child for no reason, simply “to teach her a lesson”; she wants to show her she is still in charge: for what vexes her the most is that she does not have any real superiority to set against a girl of eleven or twelve; the latter can already perform household tasks perfectly well, she is “a little woman”; she even has a liveliness, curiosity, and lucidity that, in many regards, make her superior to adult women. The mother likes to rule over her feminine universe without
competition; she wants to be unique, irreplaceable; and yet here her young assistant reduces her to the pure generality of her function. She scolds her daughter sternly if, after being away for two days, she finds her household in disorder; but she goes into fits of anger if it so happens that family life continued along well without her. She cannot accept that her daughter will really become her double, a substitute of herself. Yet it is still more intolerable that she should boldly assert herself as an other. She systematically detests the girlfriends in whom her daughter seeks succor against family oppression, friends who “spur her on”; she criticizes them, prevents her daughter from seeing them too often, or even uses the pretext of their “bad influence” to radically forbid her to be with them. All influence that is not her own is bad; she has a particular animosity toward women of her own age—teachers, girlfriends’ mothers—toward whom her daughter turns her affection: she declares these sentiments absurd or unhealthy. At times, gaiety, silliness, or children’s games and laughter are enough to exasperate her; she more readily accepts this of boys; they are exercising their male privilege, as is natural, and she has long given up this impossible competition. But why should this other woman enjoy advantages that she has been refused? Imprisoned in the snares of seriousness, she envies all occupations and amusements that wrench her daughter from the boredom of the household; this escape makes a sham of all the values to which she has sacrificed herself. The older the child gets, the more this bitterness eats at the mother’s heart; every year brings the mother closer to her decline; from year to year the youthful body develops and flourishes; this future opening up to her daughter seems to be stolen from the mother; this is why some mothers become irritated when their daughters first get their period: they begrudge their consecration from now on as newly become women. This new woman is offered still-indefinite possibilities in contrast to the repetition and routine that are the lot of the older woman: these chances are what the mother envies and detests; not able to take them herself, she tries to diminish or suppress them: she keeps her daughter home, watches over her, tyrannizes her, dresses her like a frump on purpose, refuses her all pastimes, goes into rages if the adolescent puts on makeup, if she “goes out”; she turns all her own rage toward life against this young life who is embarking on a new future; she tries to humiliate the young girl, she ridicules her ventures, she bullies her. Open war is often declared between them, and it is usually the younger woman who wins as time is on her side; but victory has a guilty taste: her mother’s attitude gives rise to both revolt and remorse; her mother’s presence alone makes her the guilty one: we have seen how this sentiment can seriously affect her future. Willy-nilly, the mother accepts her defeat in the end; when her daughter
becomes an adult, they reestablish a more or less distressed friendship. But one of them will forever be disappointed and frustrated; the other will often be haunted by a curse.
We will return later to the older woman’s relations with her adult children: but it is clear that for their first twenty years they occupy a most important place in the mother’s life. A dangerous misconception about two currently accepted preconceived ideas strongly emerges from the descriptions we have made. The first is that motherhood is enough in all cases to fulfill a woman: this is not at all true. Many are the mothers who are unhappy, bitter, and unsatisfied. The example of Sophia Tolstoy, who gave birth more than twelve times, is significant; she never stops repeating, all through her diary, that everything seems useless and empty in the world and in herself. Children bring a kind of masochistic peace for her. “With the children, I do not feel young anymore. I am calm and happy.” Renouncing her youth, her beauty, and her personal life brings her some calm; she feels old, justified. “The feeling of being indispensable to them is my greatest happiness.” They are weapons enabling her to reject her husband’s superiority. “My only resources, my only weapons to establish equality between us, are the children, energy, joy, health …” But they are absolutely not enough to give meaning to an existence worn down by boredom. On January 25, 1875, after a moment of exaltation, she writes:
I too want and can do everything
.
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But as soon as this feeling goes away, I realize that I don’t want and can’t do anything, except care for my babies, eat, drink, sleep, love my husband and my children, which should really be happiness but which makes me sad and like yesterday makes me want to cry.
And eleven years later:
I devote myself energetically to my children’s upbringing and education and have an ardent desire to do it well. But my God! How impatient and irascible I am, how I yell!… This eternal fighting with the children is so sad.
The mother’s relation with her children is defined within the overall context of her life; it depends on her relations with her husband, her past, her occupations, herself; it is a fatal and absurd error to claim to see a child
as a panacea. This is also Helene Deutsch’s conclusion in the work I have often cited, where she studies phenomena of motherhood on the basis of her experience in psychiatry. She ranks this function highly; she believes woman accomplishes herself totally through it: but under the condition that it is freely assumed and sincerely desired; the young woman must be in a psychological, moral, and material situation that allows her to bear the responsibility; if not, the consequences will be disastrous. In particular, it is criminal to advise having a child as a remedy for melancholia or neuroses; it causes unhappiness for mother and child. Only a balanced, healthy woman, conscious of her responsibilities, is capable of becoming a “good mother.”
I have said that the curse weighing on marriage is that individuals too often join together in their weakness and not in their strength, that each one asks of the other rather than finding pleasure in giving. It is an even more deceptive lure to dream of attaining through a child a plenitude, warmth, and value one is incapable of creating oneself; it can bring joy only to the woman capable of disinterestedly wanting the happiness of another, to the woman who seeks to transcend her own existence without any reward for her. To be sure, a child is an undertaking one can validly aspire to; but like any other undertaking, it does not represent a justification in itself; and it must be desired for itself, not for hypothetical benefits. Stekel quite rightly says:
Children are not substitutes for one’s disappointed love; they are not substitutes for one’s thwarted ideal in life, children are not mere material to fill out an empty existence. Children are a responsibility and an opportunity. Children are the loftiest blossoms upon the tree of untrammeled love … They are neither playthings, nor tools for the fulfillment of parental needs or ungratified ambitions. Children are obligations; they should be brought up so as to become happy human beings.
Such an obligation is not at all
natural:
nature could never dictate a moral choice; this implies an engagement. To have a child is to take on a commitment; if the mother shrinks from it, she commits an offense against human existence, against a freedom; but no one can impose it on her. The relation of parents to children, like that of spouses, must be freely chosen. And it is not even true that the child is a privileged accomplishment for a woman; it is often said that a woman is coquettish, or amorous, or lesbian, or ambitious as a result of “being childless”; her sexual life, her goals, and
the values she pursues are deemed to be substitutes for the child. In fact, from the beginning there is indetermination: one can just as well say that lacking love, an occupation, or the power to satisfy her homosexual tendencies, a woman wants to have a child. A social and artificial morality hides behind this pseudo-naturalism. That the child is the ultimate end for woman is an affirmation worthy of an advertising slogan.