The Second Sex (119 page)

The supreme aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one. The measure of values and the truth of the world are in his own consciousness; that is why serving him is still not enough. The woman tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the paintings and music he prefers, she is only interested in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friends, his enemies, and his opinions; when she questions herself, she endeavors to hear the answer he gives; she wants the air he has already breathed in her lungs; the fruits and flowers she has not received from his hands have neither fragrance nor taste; even her hodological space is upset: the center of the world is no longer where she is but where the beloved is; all roads leave from and lead to his house. She uses his words, she repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. “I
am
Heathcliff,” says Catherine in
Wuthering Heights;
this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is
he
. She lets her own world founder in contingence: she lives in his universe.

The supreme happiness of the woman in love is to be recognized by the beloved as part of him; when he says “we,” she is associated and identified with him, she shares his prestige and reigns with him over the rest of the world; she does not tire of saying—even if it is excessive—this delicious “we.” Necessary to a being who is absolute necessity, who projects himself in the world toward necessary goals, and who reconstitutes the world as
necessity, the woman in love experiences in her resignation the magnificent possession of the absolute. It is this certitude that gives her such great joys; she feels exalted at the right hand of the god; what does it matter that she is always in second place as long as it is
her
place, forever, in a marvelously ordered world? As long as she loves, as she is loved and necessary for the beloved, she feels completely justified: she savors peace and happiness. Such was perhaps Mlle Aïssé’s lot at Knight d’Aydie’s side before religious scruples troubled her soul, of Juliette Drouet’s in Hugo’s shadow.

But this glorious felicity is seldom stable. No man is God. The relations the mystic has with the divine absence depend on his fervor alone: but the deified man—who is not God—is present. That is where the torments of the woman in love stem from. Her most ordinary destiny can be summarized in Julie de Lespinasse’s famous words: “At every instant of my life, my friend, I love you, I suffer, and I await you.” Of course for men too suffering is linked to love; but their heartbreaks either do not last long or are not all consuming; Benjamin Constant wanted to die for Juliette Récamier: in one year, he was cured. Stendhal missed Métilde for years, but it was a regret that enriched his life more than destroying it. In accepting herself as the inessential and as total dependence, the woman creates a hell for herself; all women in love see themselves in Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who, having exchanged her fish tail for a woman’s legs out of love, walked on needles and burning coals. It is not true that the beloved man is unconditionally necessary and that she is not necessary to him; it is not up to him to justify the woman who worships him, and he does not let himself be possessed by her.

An authentic love should take on the other’s contingence, that is, his lacks, limitations, and originary gratuitousness; it would claim to be not a salvation but an inter-human relation. Idolatrous love confers an absolute value on the loved one: this is the first lie strikingly apparent to all outsiders: “He doesn’t deserve so much love,” people whisper around the woman in love; posterity smiles pityingly when evoking the pale figure of Count Guibert. It is a heartrending disappointment for the woman to discover her idol’s weaknesses and mediocrity. Colette—in
The Vagabond
and
Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships
)—often alludes to this bitter agony; this disillusion is even crueler than the child’s at seeing paternal prestige crumble, because the woman herself chose the one to whom she made a gift of her whole being. Even if the chosen one is worthy of the deepest attachment, his truth is earthbound: it is not he whom the woman kneeling before a supreme being loves; she is duped by that spirit of seriousness which refuses to put values “in parentheses,” not recognizing that
they stem from human existence; her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships. She flatters him, she bows down before him, but she is not a friend for him, since she does not realize he is in danger in the world, that his projects and finalities are as fragile as he himself is; considering him the Law and Truth, she misunderstands his freedom, which is hesitation and anguish. This refusal to apply a human measure to the lover explains many feminine paradoxes. The woman demands a favor from the lover, he grants it: he is generous, rich, magnificent, he is royal, he is divine; if he refuses, he is suddenly stingy, mean, and cruel, he is a devilish being or bestial. One might be tempted to counter: If a yes is understood as a superb extravagance, why should one be surprised by a no? If the no manifests such an abject egotism, why admire the yes so much? Between the superhuman and the inhuman is there not room for the human?

A fallen god, then, is not a man: it is an imposture; the lover has no alternative other than to prove he is really the king one adulates or to denounce himself as a usurper. When he is no longer worshipped, he has to be trampled on. In the name of this halo with which the woman in love adorns her beloved, she forbids him all weakness; she is disappointed and irritated if he does not conform to this image she put in his place; if he is tired, confused, if he is hungry or thirsty when he should not be, if he makes a mistake, if he contradicts himself, she decrees he is “not himself,” and she reproaches him for this. Likewise, she will go so far as to reproach him for all the initiatives she does not appreciate; she judges her judge, and in order for him to deserve to remain her master, she refuses him his freedom. Her adoration is sometimes better served by his absence than his presence; there are women, as we have seen, who devote themselves to dead or inaccessible heroes so that they never have to compare them with flesh-and-blood beings; the latter inevitably fail to live up to their dreams. Hence the disillusioned sayings: “You shouldn’t believe in Prince Charming. Men are just poor things.” They would not seem like dwarfs if they were not required to be giants.

This is one of the curses weighing on the passionate woman: her generosity is immediately converted into demands. Being alienated in another, she also wants to salvage herself: she has to annex this other who holds her being. She gives herself to him entirely: but he has to be totally available to receive this gift honorably. She dedicates all her moments to him: he has to be present at every moment; she only wants to live through him: but she wants to live; he has to devote himself to making her live.

Mme d’Agoult writes to Liszt: “I love you sometimes stupidly, and at such times I do not understand that I could not, would not be able to, and
should not be for you the same absorbing thought as you are for me.” She tries to curtail her spontaneous wish: to be everything for him. There is the same appeal in Mlle de Lespinasse’s complaint:

At first, the woman in love is delighted to satisfy her lover’s desire; then—like the legendary fireman who out of love for his job lights fires everywhere—she works at awakening this desire so as to have to satisfy it; if she does not succeed, she feels humiliated, useless to such an extent that the lover will feign passion he does not feel. In making herself a slave, she has found the surest means of subjugating him. This is another lie of love that many men—Lawrence, Montherlant—have resentfully denounced: he takes himself for a gift when he is a tyranny. In
Adolphe
, Benjamin Constant fiercely painted the chains the overly generous passion of a woman entwines around the man. “She did not count her sacrifices because she was busy making me accept them,” he says cruelly about Ellénore. Acceptance is thus a commitment that ties the lover up, without his even having the benefit of appearing to be the one who gives; the woman demands that he graciously welcome the loads she burdens him with. And her tyranny is insatiable. The man in love is authoritarian: but when he has obtained what he wanted, he is satisfied; but there are no limits to the demanding devotion of the woman. A lover who has confidence in his mistress shows no displeasure at her absences or if she is occupied when away from him: sure that she belongs to him, he prefers to possess a freedom more than a thing. By contrast, the absence of the lover is always torture for the woman: he is a gaze, a judge, as soon as he looks at something other than her, he frustrates her; everything he sees, he steals from her; far from him, she is dispossessed both of herself and of the world; even seated at her side, reading, writing, he abandons her, he betrays her. She hates his sleep. Baudelaire is touched by the sleeping woman: “Your beautiful eyes are weary, poor lover.” Proust delights in watching Albertine sleep;
⁹
male jealousy is thus simply the desire for exclusive possession; the woman beloved, when sleep gives her back the disarming candor of childhood, belongs to
no one: for the man, this certitude suffices. But the god, the master, must not abandon himself to the repose of immanence; it is with a hostile look that the woman contemplates this destroyed transcendence; she detests his animal inertia, this body that no longer exists
for her
but
in itself
, abandoned to a contingence whose ransom is her own contingence. Violette Leduc forcefully expressed this feeling:

The god must not sleep, or he becomes clay and flesh; he must not cease to be present, or his creature founders in nothingness. For woman,
man’s sleep is avarice and betrayal. At times the lover wakes his mistress: it is to make love to her; she wakes him simply to keep him from sleeping, to keep him nearby, thinking only of her, there, closed up in the room, in the bed, in her arms—like God in the tabernacle—this is what the woman desires: she is a jailer.

And yet, she does not really consent to have the man be nothing else but her prisoner. Here is one of the painful paradoxes of love: captive, the god sheds his divinity. The woman preserves her transcendence by handing it over to him: but he must bring it to the whole world. If two lovers disappear into the absolute of passion together, all freedom deteriorates into immanence; only death can provide a solution: this is one of the meanings of the Tristan and Isolde myth. Two lovers who are exclusively destined for each other are already dead: they die of boredom. Marcel Arland in
Terres étrangères
(Foreign Lands) described this slow agony of a love that devours itself. The woman understands this danger. Except for cases of jealous frenzy, she herself demands that man be project and action: he has to accomplish exploits to remain a hero. The chevalier who embarks on new feats of prowess offends his lady; but she scorns him if he stays seated at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love; woman wants to
have
man all to herself, but she demands that he go beyond all the givens he could possibly possess; one does not
have
a freedom; she wants to lock up
here
an existent who is, in Heidegger’s words, a “being from afar,” she knows full well that this effort is futile. “My friend, I love you as one should love, with excess, madness, rapture, and despair,” writes Julie de Lespinasse. Idolatrous love, if lucid, can only be hopeless. For the woman in love who asks her lover to be a hero, giant, demigod, demands not to be everything for him, whereas she can find happiness only if she contains him entirely within herself.

Nietzsche says: