The Second Sex (86 page)

Very often, the wife persists in her pretense through morality, hypocrisy, pride, or timidity. “Often, an aversion for the dear husband will go unnoticed for a whole life: it is called melancholia or some other name,” says Chardonne.
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But the hostility is no less felt even though it is not named. It is expressed with more or less violence in the young wife’s effort to refuse her husband’s domination. After the honeymoon and the period of confusion that often follows, she tries to win back her autonomy. This is not an easy undertaking. The fact that her husband is often older than she is, that he possesses in any case masculine prestige, and that he is the “head of the family” according to the law means he bears moral and social superiority; very often he also possesses—or at least appears to—an intellectual superiority. He has the advantage of culture or at least professional training over his wife; since adolescence, he has been interested in world affairs: they are his affairs; he knows a little law, he follows politics, he belongs to a party, a union, clubs; worker and citizen, his thinking is connected to action; he knows that one cannot cheat reality: that is, the average man has the technique of reasoning, the taste for facts and experience, a certain critical sense; here is what many girls lack; even if they have read, listened to lectures, touched upon the fine arts, their knowledge amassed here and there does not constitute culture; it is not because of an intellectual defect that they have not learned to reason: it is because they have not had to practice it; for them thinking is more of a game than an instrument; lacking intellectual training, even intelligent, sensitive, and sincere women do not know how to present their opinions and draw conclusions from them. That is why a husband—even if far more mediocre—will easily take the lead over them; he knows how to prove himself right, even if he is
wrong. Logic in masculine hands is often violence. Chardonne explained this kind of sly oppression well in
Epithalamium
. Older, more cultivated, and more educated than Berthe, Albert uses this pretext to deny any value to opinions of his wife that he does not share; he untiringly
proves
he is right; for her part she becomes adamant and refuses to accept that there is any substance in her husband’s reasoning: he persists in his ideas, and that is the end of it. Thus a serious misunderstanding deepens between them. He does not try to understand feelings or deep-rooted reactions she cannot justify; she does not understand what lives behind her husband’s pedantic and overwhelming logic. He even goes so far as to become irritated by the ignorance she never hid from him, and challenges her with questions about astronomy; he is flattered, nonetheless, to tell her what to read, to find in her a listener he can easily dominate. In a struggle where her intellectual shortcomings condemn her to losing every time, the young wife has no defense other than silence, or tears, or violence:

Sometimes a wife will fight back. But often, with good or bad will, like Nora in
A Doll’s House
,
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she lets her husband think for her; it is he who will be the couple’s consciousness. Through timidity, awkwardness, or laziness, she leaves it up to the man to formulate their common opinions on all general and abstract subjects. An intelligent woman, cultivated and independent but who, for fifteen years, had admired a husband she deemed
superior, told me how, after his death she was obliged, to her dismay, to have her own convictions and behavior: she is still trying to guess what he would have thought and decided in each situation. The husband is generally comfortable in this role of mentor and chief.
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In the evening after a difficult day dealing with his equals and obeying his superiors, he likes to feel absolutely superior and dispense incontestable truths.
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Happy to find in his wife a double who shores up his self-confidence, he tells her about the day’s events, tells her how he wins over his adversaries; he comments on the daily paper and the political news, he gladly reads aloud to his wife so that even her connection with culture should not be her own. To increase his authority, he likes to exaggerate feminine incapacity; she accepts this subordinate role with more or less docility. We have seen the surprised pleasure of women who, sincerely regretting their husbands’ absence, discover in themselves at such times unsuspected possibilities; they run businesses, bring up children, decide and administer without help. They suffer when their husbands return and doom them again to incompetence.

Marriage incites man to a capricious imperialism: the temptation to dominate is the most universal and the most irresistible there is; to turn over a child to his mother or to turn over a wife to her husband is to cultivate tyranny in the world; it is often not enough for the husband to be supported and admired, to give counsel and guidance; he gives orders, he plays the sovereign; all the resentments accumulated in his childhood, throughout his life, accumulated daily among other men whose existence vexes and wounds him, he unloads at home by unleashing his authority over his wife;
he acts out violence, power, intransigence; he issues orders in a severe tone, or he yells and hammers the table: this drama is a daily reality for the wife. He is so convinced of his rights that his wife’s least show of autonomy seems a rebellion to him; he would keep her from breathing without his consent. She, nonetheless, rebels. Even if she started out recognizing masculine prestige, her dazzlement is soon dissipated; one day the child recognizes his father is but a contingent individual; the wife soon discovers she is not before the grand Suzerain, the Chief, the Master, but a man; she sees no reason to be subjugated to him; in her eyes, he merely represents unjust and unrewarding duty. Sometimes she submits with a masochistic pleasure: she takes on the role of victim, and her resignation is only a long and silent reproach; but she often fights openly against her master as well, and begins tyrannizing him back.

Man is being naive when he imagines he will easily make his wife bend to his wishes and “shape” her as he pleases. “A wife is what her husband makes her,” says Balzac; but he says the opposite a few pages further on. In the area of abstraction and logic, the wife often resigns herself to accepting male authority; but when it is a question of ideas and habits she really clings to, she opposes him with covert tenacity. The influence of her childhood and youth is deeper for her than for the man, as she remains more closely confined in her own personal history. She usually does not lose what she acquires during these periods. The husband will impose a political opinion on his wife, but he will not change her religious convictions, nor will he shake her superstitions: this is what Jean Barois saw, he who imagined having a real influence on the devout little ninny who shared his life. Overcome, he says: “A little girl’s brain, conserved in the shadows of a provincial town: all the assertions of ignorant stupidity: this can’t be cleaned up.” In spite of opinions she has learned and principles she reels off like a parrot, the wife retains her own vision of the world. This resistance can render her incapable of understanding a husband smarter than herself; or, on the contrary, she will rise above masculine seriousness like the heroines in Stendhal or Ibsen. Sometimes, out of hostility toward the man—either because he has sexually disappointed her or, on the contrary, because he dominates her and she wants revenge—she will clutch on to values that are not his; she relies on the authority of her mother, father, brother, or some masculine personality who seems “superior” to her, a confessor, or a sister to prove him wrong. Or rather than opposing him with anything positive, she continues to contradict him systematically, attack him, insult him; she strives to instill in him an inferiority complex. Of course, if she has the necessary capacity, she will delight in outshining her husband, imposing
her advice, opinions, directives; she will seize all moral authority. In cases where it is impossible to contest her husband’s intellectual superiority, she will try to take her revenge on a sexual level. Or she will refuse him, as Halévy tells us about Mme Michelet:

Either she stiffens in his arms and inflicts the insult of her frigidity on him; or she shows herself to be capricious and coquettish, imposing on him the attitude of suppliant; she flirts, she makes him jealous, she is unfaithful to him: in one way or another, she tries to humiliate him in his virility. While caution prevents her from pushing him too far, at least she preciously keeps in her heart the secret of her haughty coldness; she confides sometimes to her diary, more readily to her friends: many married women find it amusing to share “tricks” they use to feign pleasure they claim not to feel; and they laugh wildly at the vain naïveté of their dupes; these confidences are perhaps another form of playacting: between frigidity and willful frigidity, the boundaries are uncertain. In any case, they consider themselves to be unfeeling and satisfy their resentment this way. There are women—ones likened to the praying mantis—who want to triumph night and day: they are cold in embrace, contemptuous in conversations, and tyrannical in their behavior. This is how—according to Mabel Dodge’s testimony—Frieda behaved with Lawrence. Unable to deny his intellectual superiority, she attempted to impose her own vision of the world on him where only sexual values counted:

Nonetheless, she bitterly and ceaselessly needs to prove this need he has for her; she demands he take care of her without respite: if he does not do it spontaneously, she corners him:

Married life had become for them a series of scenes repeated over and over in which neither of them would give in, turning the least quarrel into a titanic duel between Man and Woman.

In a very different way, the same untamed will to dominate is found in Jouhandeau’s Élise, driving her to undermine her husband as much as possible:

To posit themselves before the male as essential subjects, Frieda and Élise make use of a tactic men have often denounced: they try to deny them their transcendence. Men readily suppose that woman entertains dreams of castration against them; in fact, her attitude is ambiguous: she desires to humiliate the masculine sex rather than suppress it. Far more exact, she wishes to damage man in his projects, his future. She is triumphant when her husband or child is ill, tired, reduced to a bodily presence. They then appear to be no more than an object among others in the house over which she reigns; she treats them with a housewife’s skill; she bandages them like she glues together a broken dish, she cleans them as one cleans a pot; nothing resists her angelic hands, friends of peelings and dishwater. In speaking about Frieda, Lawrence told Mabel Dodge, “You cannot imagine what it is to feel the hand of that woman on you if you are sick … The heavy, German hand of the flesh …” Consciously, the woman imposes her hand with all its weight to make the man feel he also is no more than a being of flesh. This attitude cannot be pushed further than it is with Jouhandeau’s Élise: