The fundamental reason for this defeatism is that the adolescent girl does not consider herself responsible for her future; she judges it useless to demand much of herself since her lot in the end will not depend on her. Far from destining herself to man because she thinks she is inferior to him, it is because she is destined for him that, in accepting the idea of her inferiority, she constitutes it.
In fact, she will gain value in the eyes of males not by increasing her human worth but by modeling herself on their dreams. When she is inexperienced, she is not always aware of this. She sometimes acts as aggressively as boys; she tries to conquer them with a brusque authority, a proud frankness: this attitude is almost surely doomed to failure. From the most servile to the haughtiest, girls all learn that to please, they must give in to them. Their mothers urge them not to treat boys like companions, not to make advances to them, to assume a passive role. If they want to flirt or initiate a friendship, they should carefully avoid giving the impression they are taking the initiative; men do not like tomboys, nor bluestockings, nor thinking women; too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them. In most novels, as George Eliot observes, it is the dumb, blond heroine who outshines the virile brunette; and in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie tries in vain to reverse the roles; in the end she dies and it is blond Lucy who marries Stephen. In The Last of the Mohicans, vapid Alice wins the hero’s heart and not valiant Cora; in Little Women kindly Jo is only a childhood friend for Laurie; he vows his love to curly-haired and insipid Amy. To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile. The girl is supposed not only to primp and dress herself up but also to repress her spontaneity and substitute for it the grace and charm she has been taught by her elder sisters. Any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness. A young man’s venture into existence is relatively easy, as his vocations of human being and male are not contradictory; his childhood already predicted this happy fate. It is in accomplishing himself as independence and freedom that he acquires his social value and, concurrently, his manly prestige: the ambitious man, like Rastignac, targets money, glory, and women all at once; one of the stereotypes that stimulates him is that of the powerful and famous man adored by women. For the girl, on the contrary, there is a divorce between her properly human condition and her feminine vocation. This is why adolescence is such a difficult and decisive moment for woman. Until then, she was an autonomous individual: she now has to renounce her sovereignty. Not only is she torn like her brothers, and more acutely, between past and future, but in addition a conflict breaks out between her originary claim to be subject, activity, and freedom, on the one hand and, on the other, her erotic tendencies and the social pressure to assume herself as a passive object. She spontaneously grasps herself as the essential: How will she decide to become the inessential? If I can accomplish myself only as the Other, how will I renounce my Self? Such is the agonizing dilemma the woman-to-be must struggle with. Wavering from desire to disgust, from hope to fear, rebuffing what she invites, she is still suspended between the moment of childish independence and that of feminine submission: this is the incertitude that, as she grows out of the awkward age, gives her the bitter taste of unripe fruit.
The girl reacts to her situation differently depending on her earlier choices. The “little woman,” the matron-to-be, can easily resign herself to her metamorphosis; but she may also have drawn a taste for authority from her condition as “little woman” that lets her rebel against the masculine yoke: she is ready to establish a matriarchy, not to become an erotic object and servant. This will often be the case of those older sisters who took on important responsibilities at a young age. The “tomboy,” upon becoming a woman, often feels a burning disappointment that can drive her directly to homosexuality; but what she was looking for in independence and intensity was to possess the world: she may not want to renounce the power of her femininity, the experiences of maternity, a whole part of her destiny. Generally, with some resistance, the girl consents to her femininity: already at the stage of childish coquetry, in front of her father, in her erotic fantasies, she understood the charm of passivity; she discovers the power in it; vanity is soon mixed with the shame that her flesh inspires. That hand that moves her, that glance that excites her, they are an appeal, an invitation; her body seems endowed with magic virtues; it is a treasure, a weapon; she is proud of it. Her coquetry, which often has disappeared during her years of childhood autonomy, is revived. She tries makeup, hairstyles; instead of hiding her breasts, she massages them to make them bigger; she studies her smile in the mirror. The link is so tight between arousal and seduction that in all cases where erotic sensibility lies dormant, no desire to please is observed in the subject. Experiments have shown that patients suffering from a thyroid deficiency, and thus apathetic and sullen, can be transformed by an injection of glandular extracts: they begin to smile; they become gay and simpering. Psychologists imbued with materialistic metaphysics have boldly declared flirtatiousness an “instinct” secreted by the thyroid gland; but this obscure explanation is no more valid here than for early childhood. The fact is that in all cases of organic deficiency—lymphatism, anemia, and such—the body is endured as a burden; foreign, hostile, it neither hopes for nor promises anything; when it recovers its equilibrium and vitality, the subject at once recognizes it as his, and through it he transcends toward others.
For the girl, erotic transcendence consists in making herself prey in order to make a catch. She becomes an object; and she grasps herself as object; she is surprised to discover this new aspect of her being: it seems to her that she has been doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with her self, here she is existing outside of her self. Thus in Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz, Olivia discovers an unknown face in the mirror: it is she-object suddenly rising up opposite herself; she experiences a quickly fading but upsetting emotion:
Nowadays a peculiar emotion accompanied the moment of looking in the mirror: fitfully, rarely a stranger might emerge: a new self.
It had happened two or three times already … She looked in the glass and saw herself … Well, what was it?… But this was something else. This was a mysterious face; both dark and glowing; hair tumbling down, pushed back and upwards, as if in currents of fierce energy. Was it the frock that did it? Her body seemed to assemble itself harmoniously within it, to become centralized, to expand, both static and fluid; alive. It was the portrait of a young girl in pink. All the room’s reflected objects seemed to frame, to present her, whispering: Here are You.
What astonishes Olivia are the promises she thinks she reads in this image in which she recognizes her childish dreams and which is herself; but the girl also cherishes in her carnal presence this body that fascinates her as if it were someone else’s. She caresses herself, she embraces the curve of her shoulder, the bend of her elbow, she contemplates her bosom, her legs; solitary pleasure becomes a pretext for reverie, in it she seeks a tender self-possession. For the boy adolescent, there is an opposition between love of one’s self and the erotic movement that thrusts him toward the object to be possessed: his narcissism generally disappears at the moment of sexual maturity. Instead of the woman being a passive object for the lover as for herself, there is a primitive blurring in her eroticism. In one complex step, she aims for her body’s glorification through the homage of men for whom this body is intended; and it would be a simplification to say that she wants to be beautiful in order to charm, or that she seeks to charm to assure herself that she is beautiful: in the solitude of her room, in salons where she tries to attract the gaze of others, she does not separate man’s desire from the love of her own self. This confusion is manifest in Marie Bashkirtseff.* It has already been seen that late weaning disposed her more deeply than any other child to wanting to be gazed at and valorized by others; from the age of five until the end of adolescence, she devotes all her love to her image; she madly admires her hands, her face, her grace, and she writ
es: “I am my own heroine.” She wants to become an opera singer to be gazed at by a dazzled public so as to look back with a proud gaze; but this “autism” expresses itself through romantic dreams; from the age of twelve, she is in love: she wants to be loved, and the adoration that she seeks to inspire only confirms that which she devotes to herself. She dreams that the Duke of H., with whom she is in love without having ever spoken to him, prostrates himself at her feet: “You will be dazzled by my splendor and you will love me … You are worthy only of such a woman as I intend to be.” The same ambivalence is found in Natasha in War and Peace:
“Even mama doesn’t understand. It’s astonishing how intelligent I am and how … sweet she is,” she went on, speaking of herself in the third person and imagining that it was some very intelligent man saying it about her, the most intelligent and best of men …
“There’s everything in her, everything,” this man went on, “she’s extraordinarily intelligent, sweet, and then, too, pretty, extraordinarily pretty, nimble—she swims, she’s an excellent horsewoman, and the voice! One may say, an astonishing voice!” …
That morning she returned again to her favorite state of love and admiration for herself. “How lovely that Natasha is!” she said of herself again in the words of some collective male third person. “Pretty, a good voice, young, and doesn’t bother anybody, only leave her in peace.”
Katherine Mansfield (in “Prelude”) has also described, in the character of Beryl, a case in which narcissism and the romantic desire for a woman’s destiny are closely intermingled:
In the dining-room, by the flicker of a wood fire, Beryl sat on a hassock playing the guitar … She played and sang half to herself, for she was watching herself playing and singing. The firelight gleamed on her shoes, on the ruddy belly of the guitar, and on her white fingers …
“If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I really would be rather struck,” thought she. Still more softly she played the accompaniment—not singing now but listening …
“… The first time that I ever saw you, little girl—oh, you had no idea that you were not alone—you were sitting with your little feet upon a hassock, playing the guitar. God, I can never forget …” Beryl flung up her head and began to sing again:
Even the moon is aweary …
But there came a loud bang at the door. The servant girl’s crimson face popped through … But no, she could not stand that fool of a girl. She ran into the dark drawing-room and began walking up and down … Oh, she was restless, restless. There was a mirror over the mantel. She leaned her arms along and looked at her pale shadow in it. How beautiful she looked, but there was nobody to see, nobody …
Beryl smiled, and really her smile was so adorable that she smiled again.
This cult of the self is not only expressed by the girl as the adoration of her physical person; she wishes to possess and praise her entire self. This is the purpose of these diaries into which she freely pours her whole soul: Marie Bashkirtseff’s is famous, and it is a model of the genre. The girl speaks to her notebook the way she used to speak to her dolls, as a friend, a confidante, and addresses it as if it were a person. Recorded in its pages is a truth hidden from parents, friends, and teachers, and which enraptures the author when she is all alone. A twelve-year-old girl, who kept a diary until she was twenty, wrote the inscription:
I am the little notebook
Nice, pretty, and discreet
Tell me all your secrets
I am the little notebook.2
Others announce: “To be read after my death,” or “To be burned when I die.” The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Lenéru, or simply that singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognize in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. She has always loved to dream: she gives herself up to this penchant more than ever; she uses poetic clichés to mask a universe that intimidates her, she sanctifies the male sex with moonlight, rose-colored clouds, velvet nights; she turns her body into a marble, jasper, or mother-of-pearl temple; she tells herself foolish fairy tales. She sinks so often into such nonsense because she has no grasp on the world; if she had to act, she would be forced to see clearly, whereas she can wait in the fog. The young man dreams as well: he dreams especially of adventures where he plays an active role. The girl prefers wonderment to adventure; she spreads a vague magic light on things and people. The idea of magic is that of a passive force; because she is doomed to passivity and yet wants power, the adolescent girl must believe in magic: her body’s magic that will bring men under her yoke, the magic of destiny in general that will fulfill her without her having to do anything. As for the real world, she tries to forget it:
“In school I sometimes escape, I know not how, the subject being explained and fly away to dreamland …,” writes a young girl. “I am thus so absorbed in delightful chimeras that I completely lose the notion of reality. I am nailed to my bench and, when I awake, I am amazed to find myself within four walls.”
“I like to daydream much more than doing my verses,” writes another, “to dream up nice, nonsensical stories or make up fairy tales when looking at mountains in the starlight. This is much more lovely because it is more vague and leaves the impression of repose, of refreshment.”3
Daydreaming can take on a morbid form and invade the whole existence, as in the following case:
Marie B.… an intelligent and dreamy child, entering puberty at fourteen, had a psychic crisis with delusions of grandeur. “She suddenly announces to her parents that she is the queen of Spain, assumes haughty airs, wraps herself in a curtain, laughs, sings, commands, and orders.” For two years, this state is repeated during her periods, then for eight years she leads a normal life but is dreamy, loves luxury, and often says bitterly, “I’m an employee’s daughter.” Toward twenty-three she grows apathetic, hateful of her surroundings, and manifests ambitious ideas; she gets worse to the point of being interned in Sainte-Anne asylum, where she spends eight months; she returns to her family, where, for three years she remains in bed, “disagreeable, mean, violent, capricious, unoccupied, and a burden to all those around her.” She is taken back to Sainte-Anne for good and does not come out again. She remains in bed, interested in nothing. At certain periods—seeming to correspond to menstrual periods—she gets up, drapes herself in her bedcovers, strikes theatrical attitudes, poses, smiles at doctors, or looks at them ironically … Her comments often express a certain eroticism, and her regal attitude expresses megalomaniac concepts.
She sinks further and further into her dreamworld, where smiles of satisfaction appear on her face; she is careless of her appearance and even dirties her bed. “She adorns herself with bizarre ornaments, shirtless, often naked, with a tinfoil diadem on her head and string or ribbon bracelets on her arms, her wrists, her shoulders, her ankles. Similar rings adorn her fingers.” Yet at times she makes lucid comments on her condition. “I recall the crisis I had before. I knew deep down that it was not real. I was like a child who plays with dolls and who knows that her doll is not alive but wants to convince herself … I fixed my hair; I draped myself. I was having fun, and then little by little, as if in spite of myself, I became bewitched; it was like a dream I was living … I was like an actress who would play a role. I was in an imaginary world. I lived several lives at a time and in each life, I was the principal player … Ah! I had
so many different lives; once I married a handsome American who wore golden glasses … We had a grand hotel and a room for each of us. What parties I gave!… I lived in the days of cavemen … I was wild in those days. I couldn’t count how many men I slept with. Here people are a little backward. They don’t understand why I go naked with a gold bracelet on my thigh. I used to have friends that I liked a lot. We had parties at my house. There were flowers, perfume, ermine fur. My friends gave me art objects, statues, cars … When I get into my sheets naked, it reminds me of old times. I admired myself in mirrors, as an artist … In my bewitched state, I was anything I wanted. I was even foolish. I took morphine, cocaine. I had lovers … They came to my house at night. They came two at a time. They brought hairdressers and we looked at postcards.” She was also the mistress of two of her doctors. She says she had a three-year-old daughter. She has another six-year-old, very rich, who travels. Their father is a very chic man. “There are ten other similar stories. Every one is a feigned existence that she lives in her imagination.”4
Clearly this morbid daydreaming was essentially to satiate the girl’s narcissism, as she feels that her life was inadequate and is afraid to confront the reality of her existence. Marie B. merely carried to the extreme a compensation process common to many adolescents.
Nonetheless, this self-provided solitary cult is not enough for the girl. To fulfill herself, she needs to exist in another consciousness. She often turns to her friends for help. When she was younger, her best girlfriend provided support for her to escape the maternal circle, to explore the world and in particular the sexual world; now her friend is both an object wrenching her to the limits of her self and a witness who restores that self to her. Some young girls exhibit their nudity to each other, they compare their breasts: an example would be the scene in Girls in Uniform that shows the daring games of boarding-school girls;* they exchange random or particular caresses. As Colette recounts in Claudine à l’école (Claudine at School) and Rosamond Lehmann less frankly in Dusty Answer, nearly all girls have lesbian tendencies; these tendencies are barely distinguishable from narcissistic delights: in the other, it is the sweetness of her own skin, the form of her own curves, that each of them covets; and vice versa, implicit in her self-adoration is the cult of femininity in general. Sexually, man is subject; men are thus normally separated by the desire that drives them toward an object different from them selves; but woman is an absolute object of desire; this is why “special friendships” flourish in lycées, schools, boarding schools, and workshops; some are purely spiritual and others deeply carnal. In the first case, it is mainly a matter of friends opening their hearts to each other, exchanging confidences; the most passionate proof of confidence is to show one’s intimate diary to the chosen one; short of sexual embraces, friends exchange extreme signs of tenderness and often give to each other, in indirect ways, a physical token of their feelings: thus Natasha burns her arm with a red-hot ruler to prove her love for Sonya; mostly they call each other thousands of affectionate names and exchange ardent letters. Here is an example of a letter written by Emily Dickinson, a young New England puritan, to a beloved female friend:
The Second Sex Page 49