The Second Sex (95 page)
Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
On the other hand, some women think it is a relatively easy ordeal to bear. A small number experience sensual pleasure in it. One woman writes:
I am so strongly sexed that even childbirth means to me a sexual act … I had a very pretty “madame” for a nurse. She bathed me and gave me my vaginal douches. This was enough for me—it kept me in such a high state of sexual agitation that I trembled.
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Some women say they felt creative power during childbirth; they truly accomplished a voluntary and productive piece of work; many others feel passive, a suffering and tortured instrument.
The mother’s first relations with the newborn vary as well. Some women suffer from this emptiness they now feel in their bodies: it seems to them that someone has stolen their treasure. Cécile Sauvage writes:
I am the hive without speech
Whose swarm has flown into the air
No longer do I bring back the beakful
Of my blood to your frail body
My being is a closed-up house
From which they have removed a body
.
And more:
No longer are you mine alone. Your head
Already reflects other skies
.
And also:
He is born, I have lost my young beloved
Now that he is born, I am alone, I feel
Terrifying within me the void of my blood
.
*
Yet, at the same time, there is a wondrous curiosity in every young mother. It is a strange miracle to see, to hold a living being formed in and coming out of one’s self. But what part has the mother really had in the extraordinary event that brings a new existence into the world? She does not know. The being would not exist without her, and yet he escapes her. There is a surprising sadness in seeing him outside, cut off from herself. And there is almost always a disappointment. The woman would like to
feel him
hers
as surely as her own hand: but everything he feels is closed up inside him, he is opaque, impenetrable, apart; she does not even recognize him, since she does not know him; she lived her pregnancy without him: she has no common past with this little stranger; she expected to be familiar right away; but no, he is a newcomer, and she is stupefied by the indifference with which she receives him. In her pregnancy reveries he was an image, he was infinite, and the mother mentally played out her future motherhood; now he is a tiny, finite individual, he is really there, contingent, fragile, demanding. The joy that he is finally here, quite real, is mingled with the regret that this is all he is.
After the initial separation, many young mothers regain an intimate animal relationship with their children through nursing; this is a more stressful fatigue than that of pregnancy, but it allows the nursing mother to prolong the “vacation” state of peace and plenitude she relished in pregnancy. Colette Audry says of one of her heroines:
When the baby was suckling, there was really nothing else to do, and it could last for hours; she did not even think of what would come after. She could only wait for him to release her breast like a big bee.
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But there are women who cannot nurse, and in whom the surprising indifference of the first hours continues until they regain concrete bonds with the child. This was the case, among others, with Colette, who was not able to nurse her daughter and who describes her first maternal feelings with her customary sincerity:
The outcome is the contemplation of a new person who has entered the house without coming in from outside … Did I devote enough love to my contemplation? I should not like to say so. True, I had the capacity—I still have—for wonder. I exercised it on that assembly of marvels which is the newborn. Her nails, resembling in their transparency the convex scale of the pink shrimp—the soles of her feet, which have reached us without touching the ground … The light plumage of her lashes, lowered over her cheek, interposed between the scenes of earth and the bluish dream of her eye … The small sex, a barely incised almond, a bivalve precisely closed, lip to lip … But the meticulous admiration I devoted to my daughter—I
did not call it, I did not feel it as love. I waited … I did not derive from these scenes, so long awaited in my life, the vigilance and emulation of besotted mothers. When, then, would be vouchsafed to me the sign that was to mark my second, more difficult, violation? I had to accept that an accumulation of warnings, of furtive, jealous outbursts, of false premonitions—and even of real ones—the pride in managing an existence of which I was the humble creditor, the somewhat perfidious awareness of giving the other love a lesson in modesty, would eventually change me into an ordinary mother. Yet I only regained my equanimity when intelligible speech blossomed on those ravishing lips, when recognition, malice, and even tenderness turned a run-of-the-mill baby into a little girl, and a little girl into my daughter!
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There are also many mothers who are terrified of their new responsibilities. During pregnancy, they had only to abandon themselves to their flesh; no initiative was demanded of them. Now in front of them is a person who has rights to them. Some women happily caress their babies while they are still in the hospital, still gay and carefree, but upon returning home, they start to regard them as burdens. Even nursing brings them no joy, and, on the contrary, they worry about ruining their breasts; they resent feeling their cracked breasts, their painful glands; the baby’s mouth hurts them: he seems to be sucking their strength, life, and happiness from them. He inflicts a harsh servitude on them, and he is no longer part of his mother: he is like a tyrant; she feels hostility for this little individual who threatens her flesh, her freedom, her whole self.
Many other factors are involved. The woman’s relations with her mother are still of great importance. Helene Deutsch cites the case of a young nursing mother whose milk dried up whenever her mother came to see her; she often solicits help, but is jealous of the care someone else gives to the baby and feels depressed about this. Her relations with the infant’s father and the feelings he himself fosters also have a strong influence. A whole set of economic and sentimental considerations define the infant as a burden, a shackle, or a liberation, a jewel, a form of security. There are cases where hostility becomes outright hatred resulting in extreme neglect or bad treatment. Most often the mother, conscious of her duties, combats this hostility; she feels remorse that gives rise to anxieties prolonging the
apprehensions of pregnancy. All psychoanalysts agree that mothers who are obsessed about harming their children, or who imagine horrible accidents, feel an enmity toward them they force themselves to repress. What is nonetheless remarkable and distinguishes this relationship from all other human relationships is that in the beginning the child himself does not play a part: his smiles, his babbling, have no meaning other than the one his mother gives them; it depends on her, not him, whether he seems charming, unique, bothersome, ordinary, or obnoxious. This is why cold, unsatisfied, melancholic women who expect a child to be a companion, or to provide warmth and excitement that draw them out of themselves, are always deeply disappointed. Like the “passage” into puberty, sexual initiation, and marriage, motherhood generates morose disappointment for subjects who are waiting for an external event to renew and justify their lives. This is the sentiment found in Sophia Tolstoy. She writes:
“These past nine months have been practically the worst in my life,” to say nothing of the tenth.
*
She tries in vain to express a conventional joy; we are struck by her sadness and fear of responsibilities:
It is all over, the baby has been born and my ordeal is at last at an end. I have risen from my bed and am gradually entering into life again, but with a constant feeling of fear and dread about my baby and especially my husband. Something within me seems to have collapsed, and I sense that whatever it is it will always be there to torment me; it is probably the fear of not doing my duty towards
my family …
I have become insincere, for I am frightened by the womb’s vulgar love for its offspring, and frightened by my somewhat unnatural love for my husband … I sometimes comfort myself with the thought that most people see this love of one’s husband and children as a virtue … But how strong these maternal feelings are!… He is Lyovochka’s child, that’s why I love him.
But we know very well that she only exhibits so much love for her husband because she does not love him; this antipathy marks the child conceived in embraces that disgusted her.
Katherine Mansfield describes the hesitation of a young mother who loves her husband but is repulsed by his caresses. For her children she feels tenderness and at the same time has an impression of emptiness she sadly interprets as complete indifference. Linda, resting in the garden next to her newborn, thinks about her husband, Stanley:
Well, she was married to him. And what was more she loved him. Not the Stanley whom everyone saw, not the everyday one; but a timid, sensitive, innocent Stanley who knelt down every night to say his prayers … But the trouble was … she saw her Stanley so seldom. There were glimpses, moments, breathing spaces of calm, but all the rest of the time it was like living in a house that couldn’t be cured of the habit of catching on fire, on a ship that got wrecked every day. And it was always Stanley who was in the thick of the danger. Her whole time was spent in rescuing him, and restoring him, and calming him down, and listening to his story. And what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children … It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children. It wasn’t true. She, for one, could prove that wrong. She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone, through childbearing. And what made it doubly hard to bear was, she did not love her children. It was useless pretending … No, it was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys; she had no warmth left to give them. As to the boy—well, thank Heaven, mother had taken him; he was mother’s, or Beryl’s, or anybody’s who wanted him. She had hardly held him in her arms. She was so indifferent about him that as he lay there … Linda glanced down … There was something so quaint, so unexpected about that smile that Linda smiled herself. But she checked herself and said to the boy coldly, “I don’t like babies.” “Don’t like babies?” The boy couldn’t believe her. “Don’t like me?” He waved his arms foolishly at his mother. Linda dropped off her chair on to the grass. “Why do you keep on smiling?” she said severely. “If you knew what I was thinking about, you wouldn’t” … Linda was so astonished at the confidence of this little creature … Ah no, be sincere. That was not what she felt; it was something far different, it was something so new, so … The tears danced in her eyes; she breathed in a small whisper to the boy, “Hallo, my funny!”
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These examples all prove that there is no such thing as maternal “instinct”: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it. It is, as we have seen, extremely variable.
But the fact is that if circumstances are not positively unfavorable, the mother will find herself enriched by a child. “It was like a response to the reality of her own existence … through him she had a grasp on all things and on herself to begin with,” wrote Colette Audry about a young mother.
And she has another character say these words:
He was heavy in my arms, and on my breast, like the heaviest thing in the world, to the limit of my strength. He buried me in silence and darkness. All at once he had put the weight of the world on my shoulders. That was indeed why I wanted him. I was too light myself. Alone, I was too light.
While some women are “breeders” rather than mothers and lose interest in their child as soon as it is weaned, or as soon as it is born, and only desire another pregnancy, many others by contrast feel that it is the separation itself that gives them the child; it is no longer an indistinct part of themselves but a piece of the world; it no longer secretly haunts the body but can be seen, touched; after the melancholy of delivery, Cécile Sauvage expresses the joy of possessive motherhood:
Here you are my little lover
On your mother’s big bed
I can kiss you, hold you
,
Feel the weight of your fine future;
Good day my little statue
Of blood, of joy and naked flesh
,
My little
double,
my excitement …
It has been said again and again that woman happily finds an equivalent of the penis in the infant: this is completely wrong. In fact, the adult man no longer sees his penis as a wonderful toy: his organ is valued in relation to the desirable objects it allows him to possess; by the same token, the adult woman envies the male for the prey he acquires, not the instrument of this acquisition; the infant satisfies this aggressive eroticism that the male embrace does not fulfill: the infant is homologous to this mistress that she is for the male and that he is not for her; of course there is no exact correspondence; every relation is unique; but the mother finds in the child—like
the lover in the beloved—a carnal plenitude, not in surrender but in domination; she grasps in the child what man seeks in woman: an other, both nature and consciousness, who is her prey, her
double
. He embodies all of nature. Audry’s heroine tells us she found in her child:
The skin that was for my fingers to touch, that fulfilled the promise of all little kittens, all flowers …
His skin has that sweetness, that warm elasticity that, as a little girl, the woman coveted in her mother’s flesh and, later, everywhere in the world. He is plant and animal, he holds rains and rivers in his eyes, the azure of the sky and the sea, his fingernails are coral, his hair a silky growth, he is a living doll, a bird, a kitten; my flower, my pearl, my chick, my lamb … His mother murmurs words almost of a lover and uses, like a lover, the possessive adjective; she uses the same words of appropriation: caresses, kisses; she hugs the infant to her body, she envelops him in the warmth of her arms, of her bed. At times these relations have a clearly sexual cast. Thus in the confession collected by Stekel I have already cited, we read: