The same ambiguity of woman’s feelings for man is found in her general attitude concerning her self and the world; the domain in which she is enclosed is invested by the masculine universe; but it is haunted by obscure forces of which men themselves are the playthings; if she allies herself with these magical virtues, she will, in her turn, acquire power. Society subjugates Nature; but Nature dominates it; the Spirit affirms itself over Life; but it dies if life no longer supports it. Woman uses this ambivalence to assign more truth to a garden than a city, to an illness than an idea, to a birth than a revolution; she tries to reestablish this reign of the earth, of the Mother, imagined by Bachofen, to be able to find herself as the essential facing the inessential. But as she herself is an existent that a transcendence inhabits, she will only be able to valorize this region where she is confined by transfiguring it: she lends it a transcendent dimension. Man lives in a coherent universe that is a thought reality. Woman struggles with a magic reality that does not allow thinking: she escapes through thoughts lacking real content. Instead of assuming her existence, she contemplates in the heavens the pure Idea of her destiny; instead of acting, she erects her statue in her imagination; instead of reasoning, she dreams. From here comes the fact that while being so “physical,” she is also so artificial, while being so terrestrial, she can be so ethereal. Her life is spent scrubbing pots and pans, and it is a marvelous romance; vassal to man, she believes she is his idol; debased in her flesh, she exalts Love. Because she is condemned to know only life’s contingent facticity, she becomes priestess of the Ideal.
This ambivalence is marked by the way woman deals with her body. It is a burden: weakened by the species, bleeding every month, passively propagating, for her it is not the pure instrument of her grasp on the world but rather an opaque presence; it is not certain that it will give her pleasure, and it creates pains that tear her apart; it contains threats: she feels danger in her “insides.” Her body is “hysterical” because of the close connection between endocrine secretions and nervous and sympathetic systems commanding muscles and viscera; it expresses reactions the woman refuses to accept: in sobs, convulsions, and vomiting, her body escapes her, it betrays her; it is her most intimate reality, but it is a shameful reality that she keeps hidden. And yet it is her marvelous double; she contemplates it in the mirror with amazement; it is the promise of happiness, a work of art, a living statue; she shapes it, adorns it, displays it. When she smiles into the mirror, she forgets her carnal contingence; in love’s embrace, in motherhood, her image disappears. But often, dreaming about herself, she is surprised to be both that heroine and that flesh.
Nature symmetrically provides her with a double face: it supplies the stew and incites mystical effusions. In becoming a housewife and mother, woman gave up her free getaways into fields and woods, she preferred the calm cultivation of the kitchen garden, she tamed flowers and put them in vases: yet she is still exalted by moonlights and sunsets. In the terrestrial fauna and flora, she sees food and ornamentation before all; yet a sap flows that is generosity and magic. Life is not only immanence and repetition: it is also a dazzling face of light; in flowering meadows, it is revealed as Beauty. In tune with nature by the fertility of her womb, woman also feels swept by the breath that animates her and is spirit. And insofar as she is unsatisfied and feels like the uncompleted and unlimited girl, her soul will then rush forward on endlessly unwinding roads toward limitless horizons. Slave to her husband, children, and home, she finds it intoxicating to be alone, sovereign on the hillside; she is no longer spouse, mother, housewife, but a human being; she contemplates the passive world: and she recalls that she is a whole consciousness, an irreducible freedom. In front of the mystery of water and the mountain summit’s thrust, male supremacy is abolished; walking through the heather, dipping her hand in the river, she lives not for others but for herself. The woman who maintained her independence through all her servitudes will ardently love her own freedom in Nature. The others will find in it only the pretext for refined raptures, and they will hesitate at twilight between the fear of catching a cold and a swooning soul.
This double belonging to the carnal world and to a “poetic” world defines the metaphysics and wisdom to which the woman more or less explicitly adheres. She tries to combine life and transcendence; this is to say she rejects Cartesianism and all doctrines connected to it; she is comfortable in a naturalism similar to that of the Stoics or Neoplatonists of the sixteenth century: it is not surprising that women, Margaret of Navarre being the first of them, should be attached to such a philosophy, at once so material and so spiritual. Socially Manichaean, the woman has a deep need to be ontologically optimistic: the moralities of action do not suit her, since it is forbidden for her to act; she submits to the given: so the given must be Good; but a Good recognized by reason like that of Spinoza or by calculation like that of Leibniz cannot touch her. She requires a good that is a living Harmony and within which she situates herself by the mere fact of living. The notion of harmony is one of the keys of the feminine universe: it implies perfection in immobility, the immediate justification of each element as part of the whole, and her passive participation in the totality. In a harmonious world, woman thus attains what man will seek in action: she has purchase on the world, she is necessary to it, she cooperates in the triumph of Good. Moments women consider revelations are those where they discover they are in harmony with a reality based on peace with one’s self. These are the moments of luminous happiness that Virginia Woolf—in Mrs. Dalloway, in To the Lighthouse—that Katherine Mansfield, all through her work, grant to their heroines as a supreme recompense. The joy that is a surge of freedom is reserved for the man; what the woman knows is an impression of smiling plenitude.7 One understands that simple ataraxia, in her eyes, can be of utmost importance, as she normally lives in the tension of denial, recrimination, and demands; one could never reproach her for savoring a beautiful afternoon or the sweetness of an evening. But it is a delusion to try to find here the true definition of the hidden soul of the world. Good is not; the world is not harmony, and no individual has a necessary place in it.
There is a justification, a supreme compensation, that society has always been bent on dispensing to woman: religion. There must be religion for women as for the people, for exactly the same reasons: when a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, the mirage of transcendence must be offered to it. It is to man’s total advantage to have God endorse the codes he creates: and specifically because he exercises sovereign authority over the woman, it is only right that this authority be conferred on him by the sovereign being. Among others, for Jews, Muslims, and Christians, man is the master by divine right: fear of God will stifle the slightest inclination of revolt in the oppressed. Their credulity can be counted on. Woman adopts an attitude of respect and faith before the masculine universe: God in his heaven seems barely farther from her than a government minister, and the mystery of Genesis matches that of an electrical power station. But more important, if she throws herself so willingly into religion, it is because religion fills a profound need. In modern civilization, where freedom plays an important role—even for the woman—religion becomes less of an instrument of constraint than of mystification. The woman is less often asked to accept her inferiority in the name of God than to believe, thanks to him, that she is equal to the male lord; even the temptation to revolt is avoided by pretending to overcome injustice. The woman is no longer robbed of her transcendence, since she will dedicate her immanence to God; souls’ merits are judged only in heaven and not according to their terrestrial accomplishments; here below, as Dostoevsky would have said, they are never more than occupations: shining shoes or building a bridge is the same vanity; over and above social discriminations, equality of the sexes is reestablished. This is why the little girl and the adolescent girl throw themselves into devotion with an infinitely greater fervor than their brothers; God’s gaze that transcends his transcendence humiliates the boy: he will forever re
main a child under this powerful guardianship, it is a more radical castration than that with which he feels his father’s existence threatens him. But the “eternal girl child” finds her salvation in this gaze that metamorphoses her into a sister of the angels; it cancels out the privilege of the penis. A sincere faith helps the girl avoid all inferiority complexes: she is neither male nor female, but God’s creature. This is why we find a virile steadfastness in the great female saints: Saint Bridget and Saint Catherine of Siena arrogantly tried to rule the world; they recognized no male authority: Catherine even directed her directors very severely; Joan of Arc and Saint Teresa followed their own paths with an intrepidness surpassed by no man. The Church sees to it that God never authorizes women to escape from male guardianship; it has put these powerful weapons in masculine hands only: refusal of absolution and excommunication; for her obstinate visions, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Nevertheless, even subjected by God’s will to men’s laws, the woman finds a solid recourse against them through him. Masculine logic is refuted by mysteries; males’ pride becomes a sin, their agitation is not only absurd but culpable: Why remodel this world created by God himself? The passivity to which woman is doomed is sanctified. Reciting her rosary by the fire, she knows she is closer to heaven than her husband, who is out at political meetings. There is no need to do anything to save her soul, it is enough to live without disobeying. The synthesis of life and spirit is completed: the mother not only engenders body but also gives God a soul; this is higher work than penetrating the secrets of the atom. With the complicity of the heavenly Father, woman can make a claim to the glory of her femininity against man.
Not only does God thus reestablish the dignity of the feminine sex in general, but every woman will find special support in the celestial absence; as a human person, she carries little weight; but as soon as she acts in the name of divine inspiration, her desires become sacred. Mme Guyon says that, concerning a nun’s illness, she learned “what it meant to command by the Word and obey by the same Word”; thus the devotee camouflages her authority in humble obedience; raising her children, governing a convent, or organizing a charity, she is but a docile tool in supernatural hands; one cannot disobey her without offending God himself. To be sure, men do not disdain this support either; but it loses its force when they encounter other men who make equal claim to it: the conflict finishes by being solved on a human level. Woman invokes divine will to justify her authority absolutely in the eyes of those who are naturally subordinated to her, and to justify it in her own eyes. If this cooperation is useful for her, it is because she is above all concerned with her relations with herself—even when those relations interest others; it is only in these totally interior debates that the Supreme Silence can have the force of law. In truth, woman uses the pretext of religion to satisfy her desires. Frigid, masochistic, or sadistic, she sanctifies herself by renouncing the flesh, playing the victim, stifling every living impulse around her; mutilating and annihilating herself, she rises in the ranks of the chosen; when she martyrs husband and children by depriving them of all terrestrial happiness, she is preparing them for a choice place in paradise; “to punish herself for having sinned,” Margaret of Cortona’s pious biographers recount, she maltreated the child of her sin; she fed him only after feeding all the beggars she passed; we have seen that hatred of the unwanted child is common: it is a godsend to be able to express it in a virtuous rage. On her side, a woman whose morals are loose conveniently makes an arrangement with God; the certainty of being purified from sin by absolution tomorrow often helps the pious woman conquer her scruples now. Whether she has chosen asceticism or sensuality, pride or humility, the concern she has for her salvation encourages her to give in to this pleasure that she prefers over all others: taking care of self; she listens to her heart beat, she watches every quiver of her flesh, justified by the presence of grace within herself, like the pregnant woman with her fruit. Not only does she examine herself with tender vigilance, but she reports to her confessor; in days gone by, she could savor the headiness of public confessions. We are told that Margaret of Cortona, to punish herself for an act of vanity, climbed onto her terrace and began to cry out like a woman in labor: “Wake up, people of Cortona, wake up and bring candles and lanterns and come out to hear the sinner!” She enumerated all her sins, proclaiming her misery to the stars. By this noisy humility, she satisfied this need for exhibitionism, found in so many examples of narcissistic women. For the woman, religion authorizes self-indulgence; it gives her the guide, father, lover, titular divinity she nostalgically needs; it feeds her reveries; it fills her empty hours. But especially, it confirms the world order; it justifies resignation by bringing hope for a better future in an asexual heaven. This is why today women are still a powerful asset in the hands of the Church; it is why the Church is so hostile to any measure that might facilitate their emancipation. Women must have religion; there must be women, “real women,” to perpetuate religion.
It is clear that woman’s whole “character”—her convictions, values, wisdom, morality, tastes, and behavior—is explained by her situation. The fact that she is denied transcendence usually prohibits her from having access to the loftiest human attitudes—heroism, revolt, detachment, invention, and creation—but they are not so common even in men. There are many men who are, like woman, confined within the domain of the intermediary, of inessential means; the worker escapes from it through political action, expressing a revolutionary will; but men from what we precisely call the “middle” class settle in this sphere deliberately; destined like the woman to the repetition of daily tasks, alienated in ready-made values, respecting public opinion, and only seeking vague comforts on earth, the employee, the shopkeeper, and the bureaucrat hold no superiority over their women companions; cooking, washing, running her home, raising her children, the woman shows more initiative and independence than the man enslaved to orders; he must obey his superiors every day, wear a removable collar, and affirm his social rank; she can lie about in a housecoat in her apartment, sing, laugh with her women neighbors; she acts as she pleases, takes small risks, and efficiently tries to attain a few results. She lives much less according to convention and appearances than does her husband. The bureaucratic world described by Kafka—among others—this universe of ceremonies, absurd gestures, meaningless behavior, is essentially masculine; she has greater purchase on reality; when he lines up his figures, or converts sardine boxes into money, he grasps nothing but abstracts; the child content in his cradle, clean laundry, the roast, are more tangible things; yet, just because she feels their contingence—and consequently her own contingence—in the concrete pursuit of these objectives, it often happens that she does not alienate herself in them: she remains available. Man’s undertakings are both projects and escapes: he lets himself be overwhelmed by his career, his personage; he is readily self-important, serious; contesting masculine logic and morality, woman does not fall into these traps: that is what Stendhal appreciated so strongly in her; she does not resort to pride to elude the ambiguity of her condition; she does not hide behind the mask of human dignity; she reveals her undisciplined thoughts, her emotions, her spontaneous reactions with more sincerity. This is why her conversation is far less boring than her husband’s whenever she speaks in her own name and not as her seigneur’s loyal half; he recites so-called general ideas, meaning words and formulas found in the columns of his newspaper or in specialist works; she brings experience, limited but concrete. The famous “feminine sensitivity” is part myth, part theater; but the fact remains that woman is more attentive than man to herself and the world. Sexually, she lives in a crude masculine climate: she compensates by appreciating “pretty things,” which can lead to sentimentality, but also to refinement; because her sphere is limited, the objects she touches are precious to her: by not binding them in concepts or projects, she displays their splendor; her desire for escape is expressed in her taste for festiveness: she enjoys the gratuitousness of a bouquet of f
lowers, a cake, a well-laid table, she is pleased to transform the emptiness of her idle hours into a generous offering; loving laughter, songs, adornment, and knickknacks, she is also ready to welcome everything that palpitates around her: the spectacle of the street, of the sky; an invitation or an excursion offers her new horizons; the man often refuses to participate in these pleasures; when he comes home, joyous voices become silent, and the women in the family assume the bored and proper air expected of them. From the depths of solitude, of separation, the woman finds the sense of the singularity of her life: she has a more intimate experience than the man of the past, death, of time passing; she is concerned with the adventures of her heart, her flesh, her mind, because she knows that on earth she has but one lot; and also, because she is passive, she bears the reality that submerges her in a more passionate manner, with more pathos than the individual absorbed by an ambition or job; she has the leisure and the tendency to abandon herself to her emotions, study her feelings, and draw conclusions from them. When her imagination is not lost in vain dreams, she becomes full of sympathy: she tries to understand the other in his uniqueness and re-create him in herself; regarding her husband, her lover, she is capable of true identification: she makes his projects and his cares her own in a way he could not imitate. She watches anxiously over the whole world; it seems to be an enigma to her: each being, every object, can be a reply; she questions avidly. When she grows older, her disenchanted expectation is converted into irony and an often piquant cynicism; she refuses masculine mystifications, she sees the contingent, absurd, gratuitous reverse side of the imposing structure built by males. Her dependence prohibits detachment for her; but she draws real generosity from her imposed devotion; she forgets herself in favor of her husband, her lover, her child, she ceases to think of herself, she is pure offering, gift. Being poorly adapted to men’s society, she is often forced to invent her own conduct; she is less able to settle for ready-made patterns and clichés; if she is of goodwill, her apprehensions are closer to authenticity than is her husband’s self-confidence.
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