The Second Sex (36 page)

But woman does more than flatter man’s social vanity; she allows him a more intimate pride; he delights in his domination over her; superimposed on the naturalistic images of the plowshare cutting furrows are more spiritual symbols concerning the wife as a person; the husband “forms” his wife not only erotically but also spiritually and intellectually; he educates her, impresses her, puts his imprint on her. One of the daydreams he enjoys is the impregnation of things by his will, shaping their form, penetrating their substance: the woman is par excellence the “clay in his hands” that passively lets itself be worked and shaped, resistant while yielding, permitting masculine activity to go on. A too-plastic material wears out by its softness; what is precious in woman is that something in her always escapes all embraces; so man is master of a reality that is all the more worthy of being mastered as it surpasses him. She awakens in him a being heretofore ignored whom he recognizes with pride as himself; in their safe marital
orgies he discovers the splendor of his animality: he is the Male; and woman, correlatively, the female, but this word sometimes takes on the most flattering implications: the female who broods, who nurses, who licks her young, who defends them, and who risks her life to save them is an example for humans; with emotion, man demands this patience and devotion from his companion; again it is Nature, but imbued with all of the virtues useful to society, family, and the head of the family, virtues he knows how to keep locked in his home. A common desire of children and men is to uncover the secret hidden inside things; but in this, the matter can be deceptive: a doll ripped apart with her stomach outside has no more interiority; the interior of living things is more impenetrable; the female womb is the symbol of immanence, of depth; it delivers its secrets in part as when, for example, pleasure shows on a woman’s face, but it also holds them in; man catches life’s obscure palpitations in his house without the mystery being destroyed by possession. In the human world, woman transposes the female animal’s functions: she maintains life, she reigns over the zones of immanence; she transports the warmth and the intimacy of the womb into the home; she watches over and enlivens the dwelling where the past is kept, where the future is presaged; she engenders the future generation, and she nourishes the children already born; thanks to her, the existence that man expends throughout the world by his work and his activity is re-centered by delving into her immanence: when he comes home at night, he is anchored to the earth; the wife assures the days’ continuity; whatever risks he faces in the outside world, she guarantees the stability of his meals and sleep; she repairs whatever has been damaged or worn out by activity: she prepares the tired worker’s food, she cares for him if he is ill, she mends and washes. And within the conjugal universe that she sets up and perpetuates, she brings in the whole vast world: she lights the fires, puts flowers in vases, and domesticates the emanations of sun, water, and earth. A bourgeois writer cited by Bebel summarizes this ideal in all seriousness as follows: “Man wants not only someone whose heart beats for him, but whose hand wipes his brow, who radiates peace, order, and tranquillity, a silent control over himself and those things he finds when he comes home every day; he wants someone who can spread over everything the indescribable perfume of woman who is the vivifying warmth of home life.”

It is clear how spiritualized the figure of woman became with the birth of Christianity; the beauty, warmth, and intimacy that man wishes to grasp through her are no longer tangible qualities; instead of being the summation of the pleasurable quality of things, she becomes their soul; deeper than carnal mystery, her heart holds a secret and pure presence that reflects
truth in the world. She is the soul of the house, the family, and the home, as well as larger groups: the town, province, or nation. Jung observes that cities have always been compared to the Mother because they hold their citizens in their bosoms: this is why Cybele was depicted crowned with towers; for the same reason the term “mother country” is used and not only because of the nourishing soil; rather, a more subtle reality found its symbol in the woman. In the Old Testament and in the Apocalypse, Jerusalem and Babylon are not only mothers: they are also wives. There are virgin cities and prostitute cities such as Babel and Tyre. France too has been called “the eldest daughter” of the Church; France and Italy are Latin sisters. Woman’s function is not specified, but femininity is, in statues that represent France, Rome, and Germany and those on the Place de la Concorde that evoke Strasbourg and Lyon. This assimilation is not only allegoric: it is affectively practiced by many men.
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Many a traveler would ask woman for the key to the countries he visits: when he holds an Italian or Spanish woman in his arms, he feels he possesses the fragrant essence of Italy or Spain. “When I come to a new city, the first thing I do is to visit a brothel,” said a journalist. If a cinnamon hot chocolate can make Gide discover the whole of Spain, all the more reason kisses from exotic lips will bring to a lover a country with its flora and fauna, its traditions, and its culture. Woman is the summation neither of its political institutions nor of its economic resources; but she is the incarnation of carnal flesh and mystical mana. From Lamartine’s
Graziella
to Loti’s novels and Morand’s short stories, the foreigner is seen as trying to appropriate the soul of a region through women. Mignon, Sylvie, Mireille, Colomba, and Carmen uncover the most intimate truth about Italy, Valois, Provence, Corsica, or Andalusia. When the Alsatian Frederique falls in love with Goethe, the Germans take it as a symbol of Germany’s annexation; likewise, when Colette Baudoche refuses to marry a German, Barrès sees it as Alsace refusing Germany. He personifies Aigues-Mortes and a whole refined and frivolous civilization in the sole person of Berenice; she represents the sensibility of the writer himself. Man recognizes his own mysterious double in her, she who is the soul of nature, cities, and the universe; man’s soul is Psyche, a woman.

Psyche has feminine traits in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume”:

And Mallarmé, at the theater, in a dialogue with “a soul, or else our idea” (that is, divinity present in man’s spirit) called it “a most exquisite abnormal lady [sic].”
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Such is Valéry’s way of hailing her. The Christian world substituted less carnal presences for nymphs and fairies; but homes, landscapes, cities, and individuals themselves are still haunted by an impalpable femininity.

This truth buried in the night of things also shines in the heavens; perfect immanence, the Soul is at the same time the transcendent, the Idea. Not only cities and nations but also entities and abstract institutions are cloaked in feminine traits: the Church, the Synagogue, the Republic, and Humanity are women, as well as Peace, War, Liberty, the Revolution, Victory. Man feminizes the ideal that he posits before him as the essential Other, because woman is the tangible figure of alterity; this is why almost all the allegories in language and in iconography are women.
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Soul and Idea, woman is also the mediator between them: she is the Grace that leads the Christian to God, she is Beatrice guiding Dante to the beyond, Laura beckoning Petrarch to the highest peaks of poetry. She appears in all doctrines assimilating Nature to Spirit as Harmony, Reason, and Truth. Gnostic sects made Wisdom a woman, Sophia; they attributed the world’s redemption to her, and even its creation. So woman is no longer flesh, she is glorious
body; rather than trying to possess her, men venerate her for her untouched splendor; the pale dead of Edgar Allan Poe are as fluid as water, wind, or memory; for courtly love, for
les précieux
, and in all of the gallant tradition, woman is no longer an animal creature but rather an ethereal being, a breath, a radiance. Thus it is that the feminine Night’s opacity is converted into transparence, and obscurity into purity, as in Novalis’s texts:

The downward attraction exercised by woman is inverted; she beckons man no longer earthward, but toward heaven.

proclaimed Goethe at the end of
Faust, Part Two
.

As the Virgin Mary is the most perfected image, the most widely venerated image of the regenerated woman devoted to the Good, it is interesting to see how she appears through literature and iconography. Here are passages from medieval litanies showing how fervent Christians addressed her:

Most of the feminine attributes we have referred to are found in these invocations. The Virgin is fertility, dew, and the source of life; many of the images show her at the well, the spring, or the fountain; the expression “Fountain of Life” was one of the most common; she was not a creator, but she nourishes, she brings to the light of day what was hidden in the earth. She is the deep reality hidden under the appearance of things: the Core, the Marrow. Through her, passions are tempered; she is what is given to man to satiate him. Wherever life is threatened, she saves and restores it: she heals and strengthens. And because life emanates from God, she as the intermediary between man and life is likewise the intermediary between humanity and God. “The devil’s gateway,” said Tertullian. But transfigured, she is heaven’s portal; paintings represent her opening the gate or the window onto paradise or raising a ladder from earth to the heavens. More straightforward, she becomes an advocate, pleading beside her Son for the salvation of men: many tableaux of the Last Judgment have her baring her breast in supplication to Christ in the name of her glorious motherhood. She protects men’s children in the folds of her cloak; her merciful love follows them through dangers over oceans and battlefields. She moves Divine Justice in the name of charity: the “Virgins of the Scales” are seen, smiling, tilting the balance where souls are weighed to the side of the Good.

This merciful and tender role is one of the most important of all those granted to woman. Even integrated into society, the woman subtly exceeds its boundaries because she possesses the insidious generosity of Life. This distance between the males’ intended constructions and nature’s contingency seems troubling in some cases; but it becomes beneficial when the woman, too docile to threaten men’s work, limits herself to enriching and softening their too sharp edges. Male gods represent Destiny; on the goddesses’ side are found arbitrary benevolence and capricious favor. The Christian God has the rigors of Justice; the Virgin has gentleness and charity. On earth, men are the defenders of laws, reason, and necessity; woman knows the original contingency of man himself and of the necessity he believes in; from this comes her supple generosity and the mysterious irony that touches her lips. She gives birth in pain, she heals males’ wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she
contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace. Her power over men comes from her tenderly recalling a modest consciousness of their authentic condition; it is the secret of her illusionless, painful, ironic, and loving wisdom. Even frivolity, whimsy, and ignorance are charming virtues in her because they thrive beneath and beyond the world where man chooses to live but where he does not want to feel confined. Confronted with arrested meaning and utilitarian instruments, she upholds the mystery of intact things; she brings the breath of poetry into city streets and plowed fields. Poetry attempts to capture that which exists above everyday prose: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be. She incarnates the Dream; for man, the dream is the most intimate and the most foreign presence, what he does not want, what he does not do, which he aspires to but cannot attain; the mysterious Other who is profound immanence and far-off transcendence will lend him her traits. Thus it is that Aurélia visits Nerval in a dream and gives him the whole world in a dream. “She began to grow in a bright ray of light so that little by little the garden took on her form, and the flower beds and the trees became the rosettes and festoons of her dress; while her face and her arms impressed their shape upon the reddened clouds in the sky. I was losing sight of her as she was being transfigured, for she seemed to be vanishing into her own grandeur. ‘Oh flee not from me!’ I cried; ‘for nature dies with you.’ ”