The Second Sex (120 page)

In any case, the woman will be able to find her joy in this enrichment she brings to her loved one; she is not All for him: but she will try to believe herself indispensable; there are no degrees in necessity. If he cannot “get along without her,” she considers herself the foundation of his precious existence, and she derives her own worth from that. Her joy is to serve him: but he must gratefully recognize this service; giving becomes demand according to the customary dialectic of devotion.
¹²
And a woman of scrupulous mind asks herself: Is it really
me
he needs? The man cherishes her, desires her with singular tenderness and desire: But would he not have just as singular feelings for another? Many women in love let themselves be deluded; they want to ignore the fact that the general is enveloped in the particular, and the man facilitates this illusion because he shares it at first; there is often in his desire a passion that seems to defy time; at the moment he desires this woman, he desires her with passion, he wants only her: and certainly the moment is an absolute, but a momentary absolute. Duped, the woman passes into the eternal. Deified by the embrace of the master, she believes she has always been divine and destined for the god: she alone. But male desire is as fleeting as it is imperious; once satisfied, it dies rather quickly, while it is most often after love that the woman becomes his prisoner. This is the theme of a whole type of shallow literature and songs. “A young man was passing by, a girl was singing … A young man was singing, a girl was crying.” And even if the man is seriously attached to the woman, it still does not mean that she is necessary to him. Yet this is what she demands: her abdication only saves her if it reinstates her empire; one cannot escape the play of reciprocity. So she must suffer or lie to herself. Most often she clutches first at the lie. She imagines the man’s love as the exact counterpart of the love she bears him; with bad faith, she takes desire for love, an erection for desire, love for religion. She forces the man to lie to her. Do you love me? As much as yesterday? Will you always love me? She cleverly asks the questions just when there is not enough time to give nuanced and sincere answers or when circumstances prevent them; imperiously she asks her questions during lovemaking, at the moment of convalescence, when sobbing, or on a railway station platform; she makes trophies of the answers she extorts; and in the absence of responses, she interprets the silences; every genuine woman in love is more or less paranoid. I remember a woman friend who, when faced with the long silence from a far-off lover, declared, “When one wants to break up, one writes to
announce it”; then upon receiving an unambiguous letter: “When one really wants to break up, one doesn’t write.” It is often very difficult to decide where pathological delirium begins when hearing such confidences. Described by the panicking woman in love, the man’s behavior always seems extravagant: he’s neurotic, sadistic, repressed, a masochist, a devil, unstable, cowardly, or all of these together; he defies the most subtle psychological explanations. “X.… adores me, he’s wildly jealous, he wants me to wear a mask when I go out; but he’s such a strange being and so suspicious of love that he keeps me in the hallway and doesn’t invite me in when I ring his bell.” Or: “Z.… adored me. But he was too proud to ask me to go to Lyon, where he lives: I went there, I moved in with him. After eight days, without an argument, he threw me out. I saw him twice afterward. The third time I called him and he hung up in the middle of the conversation. He’s a neurotic.” These mysterious stories become clearer when the man explains: “I absolutely did not love her,” or “I liked her well enough, but I could not have lived one month with her.” Bad faith in excess leads to the mental asylum: one of the constants of erotomania is that the lover’s behavior seems enigmatic and paradoxical; from this slant, the patient’s delirium always succeeds in breaking down the resistance of reality. A normal woman sometimes finally realizes the truth, recognizing that she is no longer loved. But as long as her back is not to the wall, she always cheats a little. Even in reciprocal love, there is a fundamental difference between the lovers’ feelings that she tries to hide. The man must of course be capable of justifying himself without her since she hopes to be justified through him. If he is necessary to her, it is because she is fleeing her freedom: but if he assumes the freedom without which he would be neither a hero nor simply man, nothing and no one will be necessary for him. The dependence woman accepts comes from her weakness: How could she find a reciprocal dependence in the man she loves in his strength?

A passionately demanding soul cannot find tranquillity in love, because she sets her sights on a contradictory aim. Torn and tormented, she risks being a burden to the one for whom she dreamed of being a slave; she becomes importunate and obnoxious for want of feeling indispensable. Here is a common tragedy. Wiser and less intransigent, the woman in love resigns herself. She is not all, she is not necessary: it is enough for her to be useful; another can easily take her place: she is satisfied to be the one who is there. She recognizes her servitude without asking for reciprocity. She can thus enjoy modest happiness; but even in these limits, it will not be cloudless. Far more painfully than the wife, the woman in love waits. If the wife herself is exclusively a woman in love, the responsibilities of the home,
motherhood, her occupations, and her pleasures will have little value in her eyes: it is the presence of her husband that lifts her out of the limbo of ennui. “When you are not there, it seems not even worthwhile to greet the day; everything that happens to me seems lifeless, I am no more than a little empty dress thrown on a chair,” writes Cécile Sauvage early in her marriage.
¹³
And we have seen that, very often, it is outside marriage that passionate love arises and blooms. One of the most remarkable examples of a life entirely devoted to love is Juliette Drouet’s: it is an endless wait. “I must always come back to the same starting point, meaning eternally waiting for you,” she writes to Victor Hugo. “I wait for you like a squirrel in a cage.” “My God! How sad it is for someone with my nature to wait from one end of life to another.” “What a day! I thought it would never end waiting for you, and now I feel it went too quickly since I did not see you.” “I find the day eternal.” “I wait for you because after all I would rather wait than believe you are not coming at all.” It is true that Hugo, after having made her break off from her rich protector, Prince Demidoff, confined Juliette to a small apartment and forbade her to go out alone for twelve years, to prevent her from seeing her former friends. But even when her lot—she called herself “your poor cloistered victim”—had improved, she still continued to have no other reason to live than her lover and not to see him very much. “I love you, my dearest Victor,” she wrote in 1841, “but my heart is sad and full of bitterness; I see you so little, so little, and the little I see you, you belong to me so little that all these littles make a whole of sadness that fills my heart and mind.” She dreams of reconciling independence and love. “I would like to be both independent and slave, independent through a state that nourishes me and slave only to my love.” But having totally failed in her career as an actress, she had to resign herself to being no more than a lover “from one end of life to the other.” Despite her efforts to be of service to her idol, the hours were too empty: the seventeen thousand letters she wrote to Hugo at the rate of three to four hundred every year are proof of this. Between visits from the master, she could only kill time. The worst horror of woman’s condition in a harem is that her days are deserts of boredom: when the male is not using this object that she is for him, she is absolutely nothing. The situation of the woman in love is analogous: she only wants to be this loved woman, and nothing else has value in her eyes. For her to exist, then, her lover must be by her side, taken care of by her; she awaits his return, his desire, his waking; and as soon as
he leaves her, she starts again to wait for him. Such is the curse that weighs on the heroines of
Back Street
¹⁴
and
The Weather in the Streets
,
¹⁵
priestesses and victims of pure love. It is the harsh punishment inflicted on those who have not taken their destiny in their own hands.

Waiting can be a joy; for the woman who watches for her loved one, knowing he is hurrying to her, that he loves her, the wait is a dazzling promise. But over and above the confident intoxication of love that changes absence itself into presence, the torment of worry gets confused with the emptiness of absence: the man might never return. I knew a woman who greeted her lover with surprise each time they met: “I thought you would never return,” she would say. And if he asked her why: “Because you
could
never return; when I wait, I always have the impression that I will never see you again.” Above all, he may cease to love her: he may love another woman. The vehemence with which she tries to fool herself by saying “He loves me madly, he can love no one but me” does not exclude the torture of jealousy. It is characteristic of bad faith that it allows passionate and contradictory affirmations. Thus the madman who stubbornly takes himself for Napoleon does not mind admitting he is also a barber. The woman rarely consents to ask herself, does he really love me? but asks herself a hundred times: Does he love another? She does not accept that her lover’s fervor could have dimmed little by little, nor that he gives less value to love than she does: she immediately invents rivals. She considers love both a free feeling and a magic spell; and she assumes that “her” male continues to love her in his freedom while being “snared” or “tricked” by some clever schemer. The man grasps the woman as being assimilated to him, in her immanence; here is why he easily plays the Boubouroche; he cannot imagine that she too could be someone who slips away from him; jealousy for him is ordinarily just a passing crisis, like love itself: the crisis may be violent and even murderous, but rarely does it last long in him. Jealousy for him mainly appears derivative: when things go badly for him or when he feels threatened by life, he feels derided by his wife.
¹⁶
By contrast, a woman loving a man in his alterity and transcendence feels in danger at every moment. There is no great distance between betrayal by absence and infidelity. As soon as she feels unloved, she becomes jealous: given her demands, it is always more or less true; her
reproaches and her grievances, whatever their pretexts, are converted into jealous scenes: this is how she will express her impatience, the ennui of waiting, the bitter feeling of her dependence, the regret of having only a mutilated existence. Her whole destiny is at stake in every glance her lover casts at another woman since she has alienated her entire being in him. And she becomes irritated if for one instant her lover turns his eyes to another woman; if he reminds her that she has just been dwelling on a stranger for a long time, she firmly answers: “It’s not the same thing.” She is right. A man looked at by a woman receives nothing: giving begins only at the moment when the feminine flesh becomes prey. But the coveted woman is immediately metamorphosed into a desirable and desired object; and the neglected woman in love “returns to ordinary clay.” Thus she is always on the lookout. What is he doing? At whom is he looking? To whom is he talking? What one smile gave her, another smile can take back from her; an instant is enough to hurl her from “the pearly light of immortality” to everyday dusk. She has received everything from love; she can lose everything by losing it. Vague or definite, unfounded or justified, jealousy is frightening torture for the woman because it is a radical contestation of love: if the betrayal is certain, it is necessary to either renounce making a religion of love or renounce that love; it is such a radical upheaval that one can understand how the woman in love, both doubting and deceived, can be obsessed by the desire and fear of discovering the mortal truth.

Being both arrogant and anxious, the woman is often constantly jealous but wrongly so: Juliette Drouet had pangs of suspicion toward all the women who came near Hugo, only forgetting to fear Léonie Biard, who was his mistress for eight years. When unsure, every woman is a rival and a danger. Love kills friendship insofar as the woman in love encloses herself in the universe of the loved man; jealousy exasperates her solitude, thus constricting her dependence even more. But she finds there recourse against boredom; keeping a husband is work; keeping a lover is a kind of vocation. The woman who, lost in happy adoration, neglected her personal appearance begins to worry about it again the moment she senses a threat. Dressing, caring for her home, or social appearances become moments of combat. Fighting is stimulating activity; as long as she is fairly certain to win, the woman warrior finds a poignant pleasure in it. But the tormented fear of defeat transforms the generously consented gift into a humiliating servitude. The man attacks in defense. Even a proud woman is forced to be gentle and passive; maneuvers, prudence, trickery, smiles, charm, and docility are her best weapons. I still see this young woman whose bell I unexpectedly rang; I had just left her two hours before, badly made up,
sloppily dressed, her eyes dull; but now she was waiting for
him;
when she saw me, she put on her ordinary face again, but for an instant I had the time to see her, prepared for him, her face contracted in fear and hypocrisy, ready for any suffering behind her breezy smile; her hair was carefully coiffed, special makeup brightened her cheeks and lips, and she was dressed up in a sparkling white lace blouse. Party clothes, fighting clothes. The masseuse, beauty consultant, and “aesthetician” know how tragically serious their women clients are about treatments that seem useless; new seductions have to be invented for the lover, she has to become that woman he wishes to meet and possess. But all effort is in vain: she will not resurrect in herself that image of the Other that first attracted him, that might attract him to another. There is the same duplicitous and impossible imperative in the lover as in the husband; he wants his mistress absolutely his and yet another; he wants her to be the answer to his dreams and still be different from anything his imagination could invent, a response to his expectations and an unexpected surprise. This contradiction tears the woman apart and dooms her to failure. She tries to model herself on her lover’s desire; many women who bloomed at the beginning of a love affair that reinforced their narcissism become frightening in their maniacal servility when they feel less loved; obsessed and diminished, they irritate their lover; giving herself blindly to him, the woman loses that dimension of freedom that made her fascinating at first. He was looking for his own reflection in her: but if he finds it too faithful, he becomes bored. One of the misfortunes of the woman in love is that her love itself disfigures her, demolishes her; she is no more than this slave, this servant, this too-docile mirror, this too-faithful echo. When she realizes it, her distress reduces her worth even more; she ends up losing all attraction with her tears, demands, and scenes. An existent is what he does; to be, she has to put her trust in a foreign consciousness and give up doing anything. “I only know how to love,” writes Julie de Lespinasse.
I who am only love:
this title of a novel is the motto of the woman in love;
¹⁷
she is only love, and when love is deprived of its object, she is nothing.