Crane’s letters are vivid in every respect—responsive, humorous, beautifully written, fresh—everything and more. The sheer power of mind they reveal is dazzling; his comments upon his reading, his contemporaries, his own work, even the landscape, are always interesting and usually brilliant. It is impossible to think of him, after this, as a natural who knows not what he doeth. What is so appealing about his mind is the utter absence of cant, artiness, and fear—all those things Sherwood Anderson seemed to think were the “copy” a literary man was obliged to wring out of his skin. Even when Crane is wounded in his vanity—self-justifying and “true to human nature” as he will be in his explanation of lapses—there is always something solid and shrewd in the way he goes about reclaiming himself. One can see in him certainly a “neurotic need for affection” but there is also astonishing independence and balance. His melancholy is as short as his enjoyment of things is long. Very near the end, before he jumped into the sea, if he did jump, he is writing about the glorious Mexican Easter and the wonderful singers in the cafés (“has the old Hawaiian gurgling backed off the map”) and detailing his incredibly funny difficulties with a drunken servant, Daniel. “I took the opportunity to talk to him about sobriety—meanwhile pouring him glass after glass of Tenampe. . . .”
Reading these letters it is hard to remember the withered and anesthetized tragedy we thought Crane had become. Yet you cannot easily account for the amount of joy in them and the joy you receive from getting close again to Crane’s life. Perhaps it is his magical freedom from true disgust that makes you think this “doomed” poet was, after all, under the protection of a charm.
1953
THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
VASSAL, slave, inferior, other, thing, victim, dependent, parasite, prisoner—oh, bitter, raped, child-swollen flesh doomed to immanence! Sisyphean goddess of the dust pile! Demeter, Xantippe, Ninon de Lenclos, Marie Bashkirtsev, and “a friend of mine . . .” From cave to café, boudoir to microscope, from the knitting needles to the short story: they are all here in a potency of pages, a foreshortened and exaggerated, a mysterious and too clear relief, an eloquent lament and governessy scolding, a poem and a doctoral thesis. I suppose there is bound to be a little laughter in the wings at the mere thought of this madly sensible and brilliantly obscure tome on women by Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
Still the more one sinks into this very long book, turning page after page, the more clearly it seems to lack a subject with reasonable limitations and concreteness, a subject on which offered illustrations may wear some air of finality and conviction. The theme of the work is that women are not simply “women,” but are, like men, in the fullest sense human beings. Yet one cannot easily write the history of people! This point may appear trivial; nevertheless, to take on this glorious and fantastic book is not like reading at all—from the first to the last sentence one has the sensation of playing some breathlessly exciting and finally exhausting game. You gasp and strain and remember; you point out and deny and agree, trying always to find some way of taking hold, of confining, defining, and understanding. What is so unbearably whirling is that the author too goes through this effort to include nearly every woman and attitude that has ever existed. There is no difference of opinion, unless it be based upon a fact of which she may be ignorant, she has not thought of also. She makes her own points and all one’s objections too, often in the same sentence. The effort required for this work must have been killing. No discredit to the donkey-load undertaking is meant when one imagines Simone de Beauvoir at the end may have felt like George Eliot when she said she began Romola as a young woman and finished it an old one. (This touching remark did not refer to the time spent in composition, but to the wrinkling weight of the task.)
I quote a sentence about the promises the Soviet Union made to women: “. . . pregnancy leaves were to be paid for by the State, which would assume charge of the children, signifying not that they would be taken away from their parents, but that they would not be abandoned to them.” There is majesty here and the consolations of philosophy, perhaps also, in this instance, a bit of willful obfuscation; but that kind of strangeness occurs endlessly, showing, for purposes of argument at least, an oversensitivity to difficulties. A devastating dialogue goes on at this author’s desk. After she has written, “the State, which would assume charge of the children,” there is a comma pause. In that briefest of grammatical rests, voices assault her intelligence saying, “But suppose people don’t want their children taken away by the State?” If all these disputing voices are admitted, one on top of the other, you are soon lost in incoherence and fantasy. Another instance: “It is understandable, in this perspective, that women take exception to masculine logic. Not only is it inapplicable to her experience, but in his hands, as she knows, masculine reasoning becomes an underhanded form of force.” A few pages on: “One can bank on her credulity. Woman takes an attitude of respect and faith toward the masculine universe . . .”
I take up the bewildering inclusiveness of this book, because there is hardly a thing I would want to say contrary to her thesis that Simone de Beauvoir has not said herself, including the fact, mentioned in the preface, that problems peculiar to women are not particularly pressing at the moment and that, by and large, “we have won.” These acknowledgments would seem of tremendous importance, but they are a mere batting of the eye in this eternity of “oppression.”
In spite of all positions being taken simultaneously, there is an unmistakable drift to the book. Like woman’s life, The Second Sex is extremely repetitious and some things are repeated more often than others, although nearly every idea is repeated more than once. One is justified, then, in assuming what is repeated most often is most profoundly felt. The diction alone is startling and stabs the heart with its vigor in finding phrases of abjection and debasement. It is as though one had lived forever in that intense, shady, wretched world of Wozzeck, where the humor draws tears, the gaiety is fearful and children skip rope neither knowing nor caring their mother has been murdered. “Conjugal slavery, annihilation, servant, devaluation, tyranny, passive, forbidden, doomed, abused, trapped, prey, domineer, helpless, imprisoned,” and so on. This immediately suggests a masochistic view of life, reinforced by the fact that for the male quite an opposite vocabulary has dug into this mind like a tick: “free, busy, active, proud, arrogant, master, existent, liberty, adventure, daring, strength, courage . . .”
Things being as they are, it is only fair to say that Simone de Beauvoir, in spite of her absorbing turn of phrase, miraculously does not give to me, at least, the impression of being a masochist, a Lesbian, a termagant, or a man-hater, and that this book is not “the self-pitying cry of one who resents being born a woman,” as one American housewife-reviewer said. There is a nervous, fluent, rare aliveness on every page and the writer’s more “earnest” qualities, her discipline, learning and doggedness, amount not only to themselves, that is, qualities which certainly help one to write long books, but to a kind of “charm” that ought to impress the most contented woman. This book is an accomplishment; on the other hand, if one is expecting something truly splendid and unique like The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, to mention another woman, he will be disappointed.
•
The Second Sex begins with biological material showing that in nature there are not always two sexes and reproduction may take place asexually. I have noticed in the past that many books strongly presenting feminine claims begin in this manner, as if under a compulsion to veil the whole idea of sexual differentiation with a buzzing, watery mist of insect habits and unicellular forms of life. This is dramaturgy, meant to put one, after a heavy meal, in a receptive frame of mind. It is the dissonant, ambiguous music as the curtain rises on the all too familiar scene of the man at the hunt and the woman at the steaming pot; the scene looks clear enough, but the music suggests things may not be as they appear. That woman may not have to carry those screaming brats in her womb, after all, but will,
if you don’t watch out, simply “divide”! And the man: it is possible in the atomic age that a pin prick may fertilize the egg and then where will he be? This material is followed by curiosities from anthropology: some primitive societies thought the woman did it all alone and the man was no more important than a dish of herbs or a draft of beet juice.
These biological and anthropological matters are of enormous fascination, but often, and a bit in this present work too, a false and dramatic use is made of them: they carry a weight of mystification and intensity quite unjustified when the subject is the modern woman. They would seem to want to throw doubt upon what is not yet doubtful: the bisexual nature of human reproduction. We are relieved when the dividing amoebas and budding sponges swim out of view.
The claim of The Second Sex is that what we call the feminine character is an illusion and so is feminine “psychology,” both in its loose meaning and in the psychoanalytical view. None of these female traits is “given”—the qualities and incapacities women have shown rather consistently in human history are simply the result of their “situation.” This situation is largely the work of men, the male sex which has sought its own convenience with undeviating purpose throughout history. The female situation does not derive, at least not sufficiently to explain it, from women’s natural physical and psychological difference, but has much of its origin in economics. When man developed the idea of private property, woman’s destiny was “sealed.” At this time women were cut off from the more adventurous activities of war, forays, explorations, to stay at home to protect and maintain what men had achieved by their far-reaching pursuits. The woman was reduced to a state of immanence: stagnation, the doing of repetitive tasks, concerned with the given, with maintaining, keeping, mere functioning. Man, however, is a free being, an existent who makes choices, decisions, has projects which are not confined to securing the present but point to the unknown future; he dares, fails, wanders, grabs, insists. By means of his activities he transcends his mere animal nature. What a man gives, the woman accepts; she decides nothing, changes nothing; she polishes, mends, cleans what he has invented and shaped. The man risks life, the woman merely produces it as an unavoidable function. “That is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but that which kills.” The man imagines, discovers religions; the women worship. He has changed the earth; she arises each morning to an expectation of stove, nursing, scrubbing which has remained nearly as fixed as the course of our planets. Women continue in immanence not out of desire, but from “complicity.” Having been robbed of economic independence, experience, substance, she clings unhappily because she has not been “allowed” to prepare for a different life.
Naturally, it is clear many women do not fit this theory and those who may be said to do so would not describe it in the words of Simone de Beauvoir. These persons’ claims are admitted quite fully throughout the book, but always with the suggestion that the women who seem to be “existents” really aren’t and those who insist they find fulfillment in the inferior role are guilty of “bad faith.”
That is as it may be, but what, one asks at the beginning, about the man who, almost without exception in this work, is a creature of the greatest imagination, love of liberty, devotion to projects; ambitious, potent and disciplined, he scorns a life of mere “love,” refuses to imprison himself in another’s being, but looks toward the world, seeks to transcend himself, change the course of history. This is an exaggeration of course. For every Ophelia one remembers not only Cleopatra but poor Swann, unable, for all his taste and enthusiasm, to write his book on Vermeer, drowning his talent in the pursuit of pure pleasure which can only be given by the “other,” Odette; for every excited Medea who gave up herself, her place, to follow the fickle man you remember not only Joan of Arc but that being of perfect, blowsy immanence, the Duke of Windsor, who abandoned the glories of a complex project for the sweet, repetitive, futureless domesticity of ocean liners and resorts. And Sartre has written a whole book on Baudelaire, a fascinating and immensely belligerent one, that claims Baudelaire resented responsibility for his own destiny, refused his possibilities of transcendence, would not make decisions, define himself, but flowed along on a tepid river of dependence, futility, refusal—like women, fond of scents and costumes, nostalgic, procrastinating, wishful.
It would seem then that men, even some “heroic” ones, often allow themselves to be what women are forced to be. But, of course, with the greatest will in the world a man cannot allow himself to be that most extremely doomed and chained being—the mother who must bear and raise children and whose figure naturally hangs over such a work as The Second Sex like Spanish moss. Simone de Beauvoir’s opinion of the division of labor established in the Garden of Eden, if not as some believe earlier, is very striking:
. . . giving birth and suckling are not activities, they are natural functions; no projects are involved; and that is why woman found in them no reason for a lofty affirmation of her existence—she submitted passively to her biologic fate. The domestic cares of maternity imprisoned her in repetition and immanence; they were repeated from day to day in an identical form, which was perpetuated almost without change from century to century; they produced nothing new.
But what difference does it make that childbearing is not an activity, nor perhaps an instinct; it is a necessity.
•
The Second Sex is so briskly Utopian it fills one with a kind of shame and sadness, like coming upon old manifestoes and committee programs in the attic. It is bursting with an almost melancholy desire for women to take their possibilities seriously, to reject the given, the easy, the traditional. I do not, as most reviewers seem to, think the picture offered here of a woman’s life is entirely false—a lifetime of chores is bad luck. But housework, child rearing, cleaning, keeping, nourishing, looking after—these must be done by someone, or worse by millions of someones day in and day out. In the home at least it would seem “custom” has not been so much capricious as observant in finding that women are fairly well adapted to this necessary routine. And they must keep at it whether they like it or not.
George Orwell says somewhere that reformers hate to admit nobody will do the tedious, dirty work of the world except under “some form of coercion.” Mopping, ironing, peeling, feeding—it is not absurd to call this unvarying routine slavery, Simone de Beauvoir’s word. But its necessity does not vanish by listing the tropical proliferation of open and concealed forms of coercion that may be necessary to make women do it. Bachelors are notoriously finicky, we have all observed. The dust pile is revoltingly real.
Most men, also, are doomed to work of brutalizing monotony. Hardly any intellectuals are willing to undertake a bit of this dreadful work their fellow beings must do, no matter what salary, what working conditions, what degree of “socialist dignity” might be attached to it. If artists could save a man from a lifetime of digging coal by digging it themselves one hour a week, most would refuse. Some would commit suicide. “It’s not the time, it’s the anticipation! It ruins the whole week! I can’t even read, much less write!”
Childbearing and housekeeping may be repetitive and even intellectually stunting. Yet nothing so fills one with despair as those products of misplaced transcendent hope, those millions of stupid books, lunatic pamphlets, absurd editorials, dead canvases, and popular songs which have clogged up the sewers and ashcans of the modern world, representing more wretched labor, dreaming, madness, vanity, and waste of effort than one can bear to think of. There is an annihilating nothingness in these undertakings by comparison with which the production of one stupid, lazy, lying child is an event of some importance. Activity, transcendence, project—this is an optimistic, exhilarating vocabulary. Yet Sartre had to disown the horde of “existents” who fell to like farm hands at the table, but were not themselves able to produce so much as a carrot.
•
Are women “the equal” of men? This is an embarrassing subject.
&nb
sp; Women are certainly physically inferior to men and if this were not the case the whole history of the world would be different. No comradely socialist legislation on woman’s behalf could accomplish a millionth of what a bit more muscle tissue, gratuitously offered by nature, might do for this “second” being.
On the average she is shorter than the male and lighter, her skeleton is more delicate . . . muscular strength is much less in women . . . she has less respiratory capacity, the lungs and trachea being smaller . . . The specific gravity of the blood is lower . . . and there is less hemoglobin; women are therefore less robust and more disposed to anemia than are males. Their pulse is more rapid, the vascular system less stable . . . Instability is strikingly characteristic of woman’s organization in general . . . In comparison with her the male seems infinitely favored.
There is a kind of poetry in this description which might move a flighty person to tears. But it goes on:
These biological considerations are extremely important . . . But I deny that they establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes . . . they do not condemn her to remain in a subordinate role forever.
Why doesn’t this “condemn her to remain in a subordinate role forever”? In my view this poor endowment would seem to be all the answer one needs to why women don’t sail the seven seas, build bridges, conquer foreign lands, lay international cables and trudge up Mount Everest. But forgetting these daring activities, a woman’s physical inferiority to a man is a limiting reality every moment of her life. Because of it women are “doomed” to situations that promise reasonable safety against the more hazardous possibilities of nature which they are too weak and easily fatigued to endure and against the stronger man. Any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch. How can anything be more important than this? The prodigious ramifications could occupy one for an eternity. For instance:
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 5