The Second Sex (35 page)

Feminine magic was profoundly domesticated in the patriarchal family. Woman gave society the opportunity to integrate cosmic forces into it. In his work
Mitra-Varuna
, Dumézil points out that in India as in Rome, virile
power asserts itself in two ways: in Varuna and Romulus, and in the Gan-dharvas and the Luperci, it is aggression, abduction, disorder, and hubris; thus, woman is the being to be ravished and violated; if the ravished Sabine women are sterile, they are whipped with goatskin straps, compensating for violence with more violence. But on the contrary, Mitra, Numa, the Brahman women, and the Flamen wives represent reasonable law and order in the city: so the woman is bound to her husband by a ritualistic marriage, and she collaborates with him to ensure his domination over all female forces of nature; in Rome, the
flamen dialis
resigns from his position if his wife dies. In Egypt as well, Isis, having lost her supreme power as Mother Goddess, remains nonetheless generous, smiling, benevolent, and obedient, Osiris’s magnificent spouse. But when woman is thus man’s partner, his complement, his other half, she is necessarily endowed with a consciousness and a soul; he could not so deeply depend on a being who would not participate in the human essence. It has already been seen that the Laws of Manu promised a legal wife the same paradise as her spouse. The more the male becomes individualized and claims his individuality, the more he will recognize an individual and a freedom in his companion. The Oriental man who is unconcerned with his own destiny is satisfied with a female who is his pleasure object; but Western man’s dream, once elevated to consciousness of the singularity of his being, is to be recognized by a foreign and docile freedom. The Greek man cannot find the peer he wants in a woman who was prisoner of the gynaeceum: so he confers his love on male companions, whose flesh, like his own, is endowed with a consciousness and a freedom, or else he gives his love to hetaeras, whose independence, culture, and spirit made them near equals. But when circumstances permit, the wife best satisfies man’s demands. The Roman citizen recognizes a person in the matron; in Cornelia or in Arria, he possesses his double. Paradoxically, it was Christianity that was to proclaim the equality of man and woman on a certain level. Christianity detests the flesh in her; if she rejects the flesh, she is, like him, a creature of God, redeemed by the Savior: here she can take her place beside males, among those souls guaranteed celestial happiness. Men and women are God’s servants, almost as asexual as the angels, who, together with the help of grace, reject earth’s temptations. If she agrees to renounce her animality, woman, from the very fact that she incarnated sin, will also be the most radiant incarnation of the triumph of the elect who have conquered sin.
¹⁹
Of course, the divine Savior who brings about Redemption is male; but humanity must cooperate in its own salvation, and perversely it will be called upon to manifest its submissive goodwill in its most humiliated
figure. Christ is God; but it is a woman, the Virgin Mother, who reigns over all human creatures. Yet only marginal sects restore the great goddesses’ ancient privileges to the woman. The Church expresses and serves a patriarchal civilization where it is befitting for woman to remain annexed to man. As his docile servant, she will also be a blessed saint. Thus the image of the most perfected woman, propitious to men, lies at the heart of the Middle Ages: the face of the Mother of Christ is encircled in glory. She is the inverse figure of the sinner Eve; she crushes the serpent under her foot; she is the mediator of salvation, as Eve was of damnation.

It is as Mother that the woman was held in awe; through motherhood she has to be transfigured and subjugated. Mary’s virginity has above all a negative value: she by whom the flesh has been redeemed is not carnal; she has been neither touched nor possessed. Neither was the Asiatic Great Mother assumed to have a husband: she had engendered the world and reigned over it alone; she could be lascivious by impulse, but her greatness as Mother was not diminished by imposed wifely servitudes. Likewise, Mary never experienced the stain connected with sexuality. Related to the woman warrior Minerva, she is an ivory tower, a citadel, an impregnable fortress. Like most Christian saints, the priestesses of antiquity were virgins: the woman devoted to good should be devoted with the splendor of her strength intact; she must conserve the principle of her femininity in its unbroken wholeness. One rejects in Mary her character as wife in order to more fully exalt in her the Woman-Mother. But she will be glorified only by accepting the subservient role assigned to her. “I am the handmaiden of the Lord.” For the first time in the history of humanity, the mother kneels before her son; she freely recognizes her inferiority. The supreme masculine victory is consummated in the cult of Mary: it is the rehabilitation of woman by the achievement of her defeat. Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele were cruel, capricious, and lustful; they were powerful; the source of death as well as life, in giving birth to men, they made them their slaves. With Christianity, life and death now depended on God alone, so man, born of the maternal breast, escaped it forever, and the earth gets only his bones; his soul’s destiny is played out in regions where the mother’s powers are abolished; the sacrament of baptism makes ceremonies that burned or drowned the placenta insignificant. There is no longer any place on earth for magic: God alone is king. Nature is originally bad, but powerless when countered with grace. Motherhood as a natural phenomenon confers no power. If woman wishes to overcome the original stain in herself, her only alternative is to bow before God, whose will subordinates her to man. And by this submission she can assume a new role in masculine mythology. As a vassal, she will be honored, whereas she was beaten and trampled underfoot when she
saw herself as dominator or as long as she did not explicitly abdicate. She loses none of her primitive attributes; but their meanings change; from calamitous they become auspicious; black magic turns to white magic. As a servant, woman is entitled to the most splendid apotheosis.

And since she was subjugated as Mother, she will, as Mother first, be cherished and respected. Of the two ancient faces of maternity, modern man recognizes only the benevolent one. Limited in time and space, possessing only one body and one finite life, man is but one individual in the middle of a foreign Nature and History. Limited like him, similarly inhabited by the spirit, woman belongs to Nature, she is traversed by the infinite current of Life, she thus appears as the mediator between the individual and the cosmos. When the mother image became reassuring and holy, it is understandable that the man turned to her with love. Lost in nature, he seeks escape, but separated from her, he aspires to return to her. Solidly settled in the family and society, in accord with laws and customs, the mother is the very incarnation of the Good: the nature in which she participates becomes Good; she is no longer the spirit’s enemy; and though she remains mysterious, it is a smiling mystery, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonnas. Man does not wish to be woman, but he longs to wrap himself in everything that is, including this woman he is not: in worshipping his mother, he tries to appropriate her riches so foreign to him. To recognize himself as his mother’s son, he recognizes the mother in him, integrating femininity insofar as it is a connection to the earth, to life, and to the past. In Vittorini’s
Conversations in Sicily
, that is what the hero goes to find from his mother: his native land, its scents and its fruits, his childhood, his ancestors’ past, traditions, and the roots from which his individual existence separated him. It is this very rootedness that exalts man’s pride in going beyond; he likes to admire himself breaking away from his mother’s arms to leave for adventure, the future, and war; this departure would be less moving if there were no one to try to hold him back: it would look like an accident, not a hard-won victory. And he also likes to know that these arms are ready to welcome him back. After the tension of action, the hero likes to taste the restfulness of immanence again, by his mother’s side: she is refuge, slumber; by her hand’s caress he sinks into the bosom of nature, lets himself be lulled by the vast flow of life as peacefully as in the womb or in the tomb. And if tradition has him die calling on his mother, it is because under the maternal gaze death itself, like birth, is tamed, symmetrical with birth, indissolubly linked with his whole carnal life. The mother remains connected to death as in ancient Parcae mythology; it is she who buries the dead, who mourns. But her role is precisely to integrate death with life, with society, with the good. And so the cult of “heroic mothers” is systematically encouraged: if society
persuades mothers to surrender their sons to death, then it thinks it can claim the right to assassinate them. Because of the mother’s hold on her sons, it is useful for society to make her part of it: this is why the mother is showered with signs of respect, why she is endowed with all virtues, why a religion is created around her from which it is forbidden to stray under severe risk of sacrilege and blasphemy; she is made the guardian of morality; servant of man, servant of the powers that be, she fondly guides her children along fixed paths. The more resolutely optimistic the collectivity and the more docilely it accepts this loving authority, the more transfigured the mother will be. The American “Mom” has become the idol described by Philip Wylie in
Generation of Vipers
, because the official American ideology is the most stubbornly optimistic. To glorify the mother is to accept birth, life, and death in both their animal and their social forms and to proclaim the harmony of nature and society. Auguste Comte makes the woman the divinity of future Humanity because he dreams of achieving this synthesis. But this is also why all rebels assail the figure of the mother; in holding her up to ridicule, they reject the given claims supposedly imposed on them through the female guardian of morals and laws.
²⁰

The aura of respect around the Mother and the taboos that surround her repress the hostile disgust that mingles spontaneously with the carnal tenderness she inspires. However, lurking below the surface, the latent horror of motherhood survives. In particular, it is interesting that in France since the Middle Ages, a secondary myth has been forged, freely expressing this repugnance: that of the Mother-in-Law. From fabliau to vaudeville, there are no taboos on man’s ridicule of motherhood in general through his wife’s mother. He hates the idea that the woman he loves was conceived: the mother-in-law is the clear image of the decrepitude that she doomed her daughter to by giving her life, and her obesity and her wrinkles forecast the obesity and wrinkles that the future so sadly prefigures for the young bride; at her mother’s side she is no longer an individual but an example of a species; she is no longer the desired prey or the cherished companion, because her individual existence dissolves into universality. Her individuality is mockingly contested by generalities, her spirit’s autonomy by her being rooted in the past and in the flesh: this is the derision man objectifies as a grotesque character; but through the rancor of his laughter, he knows that the fate of his wife is the same for all human beings; it is his own. In every country, legends and tales have also personified the cruel side of motherhood in the stepmother. She is the cruel mother who tries to kill Snow White. The ancient Kali with the necklace of severed heads lives on in the mean stepmother—Mme Fichini whipping Sophie throughout Mme de Ségur’s books.

Yet behind the sainted Mother crowds the coterie of white witches who provide man with herbal juices and stars’ rays: grandmothers, old women with kind eyes, good-hearted servants, sisters of charity, nurses with magical hands, the sort of mistress Verlaine dreamed of:

They are ascribed the pure mystery of knotted vines, of freshwater; they dress and heal wounds; their wisdom is life’s silent wisdom, they understand without words. In their presence man forgets his pride; he understands the sweetness of yielding and becoming a child, because between him and her there is no struggle for prestige: he could not resent the inhuman virtues of nature; and in their devotion, the wise initiates who care for him recognize they are his servants; he submits to their benevolent powers because he knows that while submitting to them, he remains their master. Sisters, childhood girlfriends, pure young girls, and all future mothers
belong to this blessed troupe. And the wife herself, when her erotic magic fades, is regarded by many men less as a lover than as the mother of their children. Once the mother is sanctified and servile, she can safely be with a woman friend, she being also sanctified and submissive. To redeem the mother is to redeem the flesh, and thus carnal union and the wife.

Deprived of her magic weapons by nuptial rites, economically and socially dependent on her husband, the “good wife” is man’s most precious treasure. She belongs to him so profoundly that she shares the same nature with him:
“Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia”;
she has his name and his gods, and she is his responsibility: he calls her his other half. He takes pride in his wife as in his home, his land, his flocks, and his wealth, and sometimes even more; through her he displays his power to the rest of the world: she is his yardstick and his earthly share. For Orientals, a wife should be fat: everyone sees that she is well fed and brings respect to her master.
²¹
A Muslim is all the more respected if he possesses a large number of flourishing wives. In bourgeois society, one of woman’s assigned roles is
to represent:
her beauty, her charm, her intelligence, and her elegance are outward signs of her husband’s fortune, as is the body of his car. If he is rich, he covers her with furs and jewels. If he is poorer, he boasts of her moral qualities and her housekeeping talents; most deprived, he feels he owns something earthly if he has a wife to serve him; the hero of
The Taming of the Shrew
summons all his neighbors to show them his authority in taming his wife. A sort of King Candaules resides in all men: he exhibits his wife because he believes she displays his own worth.