The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  She is not satisfied with marveling from afar at this precious childhood: she tries to revive it in her. She tries to convince herself that her tastes, ideas, and feelings have kept their exceptional freshness. Perplexed, quizzical, and playing with her necklace or twisting her ring, she murmurs: “That’s funny … That’s just how I am … You know? Water fascinates me … Oh! I adore the countryside.” Each preference seems like an eccentricity, each opinion a challenge to the world. Dorothy Parker captured this widespread true-to-life characteristic:

  She liked to think of herself as one for whom flowers would thrive, who must always have blossoms about her, if she would be truly happy … She told people, in little bursts of confidence, that she loved flowers. There was something almost apologetic in her way of uttering her tender avowal, as if she would beg her listeners not to consider her too bizarre in her taste. It seemed rather as though she expected the hearer to fall back, startled, at her words, crying, “Not really! Well, what are we coming to?” She had other little confessions of affection … always with a little hesitation, as if understandably delicate about baring her heart, she told her love for color, the country, a good time, a really interesting play, nice materials, well-made clothes, and sunshine. But it was her fondness for flowers that she acknowledged oftenest. She seemed to feel that this, even more than her other predilections, set her apart from the general.*

  The woman eagerly tries to confirm these analyses in her behavior; she chooses a color: “Green is really my color”; she has a favorite flower, perfume, musician, superstitions, and fetishes that she treats with respect; she does not have to be beautiful to express her personality in her outfits and home. The character she portrays is more or less coherent and original according to her intelligence, obstinacy, and depth of alienation. Some women just randomly put together a few sparse and mismatched traits; others systematically create a figure whose role they consistently play: it has already been said that women have trouble differentiating this game from the truth. Around this heroine, life goes on like a sad or marvelous novel, always somewhat strange. Sometimes it is a novel already written. I do not know how many girls have told me they see themselves in Judy of “Dust.”†

  I remember an old, very ugly lady who used to say: “Read The Lily in the Valley.‡ it’s my story”; as a child I used to contemplate this wilted lily for hours. Others, more vaguely, murmur: “My life is a novel.” A good or bad star hovers over them. “Things like this only happen to me,” they say. Rotten luck dogs them, or good luck smiles on them: in any case, they have a destiny. Cécile Sorel writes with the naïveté that characterizes her Mémoires: “This is how I made my debut in the world. My first friends were genius and beauty.” And in The Book of My Life, a fabulous narcissistic monument, Mme de Noailles writes:

  The governesses disappeared one day: chance took their place. It mistreated the creature both powerful and weak as much as it had satisfied it, it kept it from shipwrecks, where it was like a combative Ophelia, saving her flowers and whose voice ever rises. It asked the creature to hope that this final promise be kept: The Greeks use death.

  This other example of narcissistic literature must be cited:

  From the sturdy little girl I was with delicate but rounded arms and legs and healthy cheeks, I acquired a more frail physique, more evanescent that made me a pathetic adolescent, in spite of the source of life that can spring forth from my desert, my famine, and my brief and mysterious deaths as strangely as Moses’s rock. I will not boast of my courage as I have the right to. It is part of my strengths, my luck. I could describe it as one says: I have green eyes, black hair, a small and powerful hand.

  And these lines too:

  Today I can recognize that, bolstered by my soul and its harmonious powers, I have lived to the sound of my voice.

  Without beauty, brilliance, or happiness, woman will choose the character of a victim; she will obstinately embody the mater dolorosa, the misunderstood wife, she will be “the unhappiest woman in the world.” This is the case of this melancholic woman Stekel describes:

  Each time around Christmas, Mrs. H.W. appears at my office, palefaced, clad in somber black and complains of her fate. She relates a sad story while tears stream down her face. A thwarted existence, an unfortunate marriage!… The first time I was moved to tears and would have almost wept with her … Two years have since flown* … but she is still at the threshold of her hopes, still bewailing her misspent life … her face begins to show the early signs of the disintegration brought on by age. She thus has an additional reason for bemoaning her fate … “What has become of me! I was once so beautiful and so much admired” … Her complaints are cumulative; she stresses her despair. Her friends … are well familiar with her sad plight … She makes herself a nuisance to everybody with her perpetual complaints … this in turn again furnishes her the opportunity to feel herself lonely, abandoned, not understood … This woman found her satisfaction in the tragic role. The thought that she was the unhappiest woman on earth intoxicated her … All attempts to awaken her interest in the active current life ended in failure.3

  A trait shared by young Mrs. Weldon, stunning Anna de Noailles, Stekel’s unfortunate patient, and the multitude of women marked by an exceptional destiny is that they feel misunderstood; their family and friends do not recognize—or inadequately recognize—their singularity; they transform this ignorance, this indifference of others, into the positive idea that they hold a secret inside them. The fact is that many have silently buried childhood and youthful memories that had a great importance for them; they know their official biography is not to be confused with their real history. But above all, because she has not realized herself in her life, the heroine cherished by the narcissist is merely an imaginary character; her unity does not come from the concrete world: it is a hidden principle, a kind of “strength,” “virtue” as obscure as phlogistonism; the woman believes in its presence, but if she wanted to show it to others, she would be as bothered as the psychasthenic determined to confess to intangible crimes. In both cases, the “secret” is reduced to the empty conviction of possessing in one’s deepest self a key to decipher and justify feelings and behavior. It is their abulia and inertia that give this illusion to psychasthenics; and it is because of her inability to express herself in daily action that woman believes an inexpressible mystery inhabits her: the famous myth of the eternal feminine encourages her in this and is thus, in turn, confirmed.

  Enriched by these misunderstood treasures, whether she be under a lucky or an unlucky star, woman, in her own eyes, adopts the tragic hero’s need to be governed by destiny. Her whole life is transfigured into a sacred drama. In her solemnly chosen dress emerges both a priestess clothed in holy garb and an idol attired by faithful hands, offered for the adoration of devotees. Her home becomes her temple of worship. Marie Bashkirtseff gives as much care to the decoration she places around her as to her dresses:

  Near the desk, an old-style armchair, so that upon entering, I need make only a small movement in the chair to find myself facing the people … near the pedantic-looking desk with books in the background, in between, paintings and plants, legs and feet visible instead of being cut in two as before by this black wood. Hanging above the divan are two mandolins and the guitar. Put a blond and white girl with fine small blue-veined hands in the middle of this.

  When she parades in salons, when she abandons herself on the arm of a lover, the woman accomplishes her mission: she is Venus dispensing the treasures of her beauty to the world. It is not she herself, it is Beauty that Cécile Sorel defended when she broke the glass covering Bib’s caricature of her; one can see in her Mémoires that she invited mortals to the cult of Art at each moment of her life. Likewise, Isadora Duncan, as she depicts herself in My Life:

  After a performance, in my tunic, with my hair crowned with roses, I was so lovely. Why should not this loveliness be enjoyed?… A man who labours all day with his brain … why should he not be taken in those bea
utiful arms and find comfort for his pain and a few hours of beauty and forgetfulness?

  The narcissist’s generosity is profitable to her: better than in mirrors, it is in others’ admiring eyes she sees her double haloed in glory. Without a complaisant audience, she opens her heart to a confessor, doctor, or psychoanalyst; she will consult chiromancers, mediums. “It’s not that I believe in it,” said an aspiring starlet, “but I love it so much when I’m spoken about!” She talks about herself to her women friends; more avidly than in anything else, she seeks a witness in the lover. The woman in love quickly forgets herself; but many women are incapable of real love, precisely because they never forget themselves. They prefer the wider stage to the privacy of the bedroom. Thus the importance of society life for them: they need gazes to contemplate them, ears to listen to them; they need the widest possible audience for their personage. Describing her room once more, Marie Bashkirtseff reveals: “Like this, I am on stage when someone enters and finds me writing.” And further on: “I decided to buy myself a considerable mise en scène. I am going to build a more beautiful townhouse and grander workshops than Sarah’s.”

  And Mme de Noailles writes:

  I loved and love the agora … And so I have often reassured my friends who apologized for the many guests they feared I would be importuned by with this sincere admission: I don’t like to play to empty seats.

  Dressing up and conversation largely satisfy this feminine taste for display. But an ambitious narcissist wants to exhibit herself in a more recherché and varied way. In particular, making her life a play offered to public applause, she will take delight in really staging herself. In Corinne, Mme de Staël recounts at length how she charmed Italian crowds by reciting poems that she accompanied on a harp. At Coppet, one of her favorite pastimes was to declaim tragic roles; playing Phaedra, she would readily make ardent declarations to young lovers whom she dressed up as Hippolytus. Mme Krüdener specialized in the dance of the shawl that she describes in Valérie:

  Valérie required a dark blue muslin shawl, she took her hair away from her forehead; she put the shawl on her head; it went down along her temples and shoulders; her forehead appeared in an antique manner, her hair disappeared, her eyelids lowered, her usual smile faded little by little: her head bent, her shawl fell softly on her crossed arms, on her bust, and this blue piece of clothing and this pure and gentle figure seem to have been drawn by Correggio to express tranquil resignation; and when her eyes looked up, and her lips dared a smile, one could say that one was seeing, as Shakespeare described it, Patience smiling at Pain in front of a monument …

  One has to see Valérie. She is simultaneously timid, noble, and profoundly sensitive, and she troubles, leads, moves, draws tears, and makes the heart beat as it beats when dominated by a great ascendant; it is she who possesses this charming grace that cannot be taught but that nature secretly reveals to some superior beings.

  If circumstances allow it, nothing will give the narcissist deeper satisfaction than devoting herself publicly to the theater. “The theatre,” says Georgette Leblanc, “provided me what I had sought in it: a reason for exaltation. Today, it is for me the caricature of action, something indispensable for excessive temperaments.” The expression she uses is striking: if she cannot take action, the woman invents substitutes for action; the theater represents a privileged substitute for some women. The actress can have very different aims. For some, acting is a means of earning one’s living, a simple profession; for others, it is access to fame that will be exploited for amorous aims; for still others, the triumph of their narcissism; the greatest—Rachel, Eleonora Duse—are authentic artists who transcend themselves in the roles they create; the ham, by contrast, cares not for what she accomplishes but for the glory that will cascade over her; she seeks above all to put herself in the limelight. The stubborn narcissist will be as limited in art as in love because she does not know how to give herself.

  This failing will be seriously felt in all her activities. She will be tempted by all roads leading to glory; but she will never unreservedly take any. Painting, sculpture, and literature are disciplines requiring strict training and demanding solitary work; many women try such work but quickly abandon it if they are not driven by a positive desire to create; and many of those who persevere never do more than “play” at working. Marie Bashkirtseff, so avid for glory, spent hours in front of her easel; but she loved herself too much to seriously love to paint. She admits it herself after years of bitterness. “Yes, I don’t take the trouble to paint, I watched myself today, I cheat.” When a woman succeeds, like Mme de Staël or Mme de Noailles, in building a body of work, it is because she is not exclusively absorbed by self-worship: but one of the burdens that weighs on many women writers is a self-indulgence that hurts their sincerity, limits and diminishes them.

  Many women imbued with a feeling of superiority, however, are not able to show it to the world; their ambition will thus be to use a man whom they convince of their worth as their means of intervention; they do not aim for specific values through free projects; they want to attach ready-made values to their egos; they will thus turn—by becoming muses, inspiration, and stimulation—to those who hold influence and glory in the hope of being identified with them. A striking example is Mabel Dodge in her relations with Lawrence:

  I wanted to seduce his spirit so that I could make him carry out certain things … It was his soul I needed for my purpose, his soul, his will, his creative imagination, and his lighted vision. The only way to obtain the ascendancy over these essential tools was by way of the blood … I was always trying to get things done: I didn’t often even try to do anything myself. I seemed to want to use all my power upon delegates to carry out the work. This way—perhaps a compensation for that desolate and barren feeling of having nothing to do!—I achieved a sense of fruitfulness and activity vicariously.*

  And further on:

  I wanted Lawrence to understand things for me. To take my experience, my material, my Taos, and to formulate it all into a magnificent creation.

  In a similar way, Georgette Leblanc wanted to be “food and flame” for Maeterlinck; but she also wanted to see her name inscribed in the poet’s book. This is not, here, a question of ambitious women having chosen personal aims and using men to reach them—as did Mme de Staël and the princesse des Ursins—but rather of women animated by a wholly subjective desire for importance, with no objective aim, trying to appropriate for themselves the transcendence of another. They do not always succeed—far from it—but they are skillful in hiding their failure and in persuading themselves that they are endowed with irresistible seduction. Knowing they are lovable, desirable, and admirable, they feel certain of being loved, desired, and admired. Bélise is wholly narcissistic. Even the innocent Brett, devoted to Lawrence, invents for herself a little personage she endows with weighty seduction:

  I raise my eyes and see that you are looking at me with your mischievous faun-like air, a provocative gleam in your eyes, Pan. I stare back at you with a solemn and dignified air until the gleam goes out of your face.

  These illusions can give rise to real derangement; Clérambault had good reason to consider erotomania “a kind of professional derangement”; to feel like a woman is to feel like a desirable object, to believe oneself desired and loved. It is significant that nine out of ten patients with “illusions of being loved” are women. They are clearly seeking in their imaginary lover the apotheosis of their narcissism. They want him to be endowed with unconditional distinction: priest, doctor, lawyer, superior man; and the unquestionable truth his behavior reveals is that his ideal mistress is superior to all other women, that she possesses irresistible and sovereign virtues.

  Erotomania can be part of various psychoses; but its content is always the same. The subject is illuminated and glorified by the love of an admirable man who was suddenly fascinated by her charms—though she expected nothing from him—and displays his feelings in a circuitous but imperious way; this r
elation at times remains ideal and at other times assumes a sexual form; but what characterizes it essentially is that the powerful and glorious demigod loves more than he is loved and he displays his passion in bizarre and ambiguous behavior. Among the great number of cases reported by psychiatrists, here is a typical one adapted from Ferdière.4 It concerns a forty-eight-year-old woman, Marie-Yvonne, who makes the following confession:

  This is about Mr. Achille, Esq., former deputy and undersecretary of state, member of the bar and the Conseil de l’Ordre. I have known him since May 12, 1920; the evening before, I tried to meet him at the courts; from afar I had noticed his strong stature, but I did not know who he was; it sent chills up my spine … Yes, there is an affair of feeling between us, a reciprocal feeling: our eyes, our gazes, met. From the moment I saw him, I had a liking for him; it is the same for him … In any case, he declared his feeling first: it was early in 1922; he received me in his home, always alone; one day he even sent his son out … One day … he got up and came toward me, carrying on with his conversation. I understood right away that it was a sentimental surge … His words made me understand. By various kindnesses he made me understand we had reciprocal feelings. Another time, once again in his office, he approached me saying: “It is you, it is you alone and no one else, Madam, you understand clearly.” I was so taken aback that I did not know what to answer; I simply said, “Thank you, sir!” Then another time he accompanied me from his office to the street; he even got rid of a man who was with him, he gave him twenty sous in the staircase and told him: “Leave me, my boy, you see I am with Madam!” All of that was to accompany me and be alone with me. He always shook my hands tightly. During his first court pleading, he made a comment to let me know he was a bachelor.