The Second Sex (62 page)
Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
I am the little notebook
Nice, pretty, and discreet
Tell me all your secrets
I am the little notebook
.
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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.”
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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.”
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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:
I think of you all day, and dreamed of you last night … I was walking with you in the most wonderful garden, and helping you pick roses, and although we gathered with all our might, the basket was never full. And so all day I pray I may walk with you, and gather roses again, and as night draws on, it pleases me, and I count
impatiently the hours ’tween me and the darkness, and the dream of you and the roses, and the basket never full …
In his work on the adolescent girl’s soul, Mendousse cites a great number of similar letters:
My Dear Suzanne … I would have liked to copy here a few verses from Song of Songs: how beautiful you are, my friend, how beautiful you are! Like the mystical bride, you were like the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley, and like her, you have been for me more than an ordinary girl; you have been a symbol, the symbol of all things beautiful and lofty … and because of this, pure Suzanne, I love you with a pure and unselfish love that hints of the religious.
Another confesses less lofty emotions in her diary:
I was there, my waist encircled by this little white hand, my hand resting on her round shoulder, my arm on her bare, warm arm, pressed against the softness of her breast, with her lovely mouth before me, parted on her dainty teeth … I trembled and felt my face burning.
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In her book
The Adolescent Girl
, Mme Evard also collected a great number of these intimate effusions:
To my beloved fairy, my dearest darling. My lovely fairy. Oh! Tell me that you still love me, tell me that for you I am still the devoted friend. I am sad, I love you so, oh my L.… and I cannot speak to you, tell you enough of my affection for you; there are no words to describe my love.
Idolize
is a poor way to say what I feel; sometimes it seems that my heart will burst. To be loved by you is too beautiful, I cannot believe it.
Oh my dear
, tell, will you love me longer still?
It is easy to slip from these exalted affections into guilty juvenile crushes; sometimes one of the two girlfriends dominates and exercises her power sadistically over the other; but often, they are reciprocal loves without humiliation or struggle; the pleasure given and received remains as
innocent as it was at the time when each one loved alone, without being doubled in a couple. But this very innocence is bland; when the adolescent girl decides to enter into life and becomes the Other, she hopes to rekindle the magic of the paternal gaze to her advantage; she demands the love and caresses of a divinity. She will turn to a woman less foreign and less fearsome than the male, but one who will possess male prestige: a woman who has a profession, who earns her living, who has a certain social base, will easily be as fascinating as a man: we know how many “flames” are lit in schoolgirls’ hearts for professors and tutors. In
Regiment of Women
, Clemence Dane uses a chaste style to describe ardently burning passions. Sometimes the girl confides her great passion to her best friend; they even share it, adding spice to their experience. A schoolgirl writes to her best friend:
I’m in bed with a cold, and can think only of Mlle X.… I never loved a teacher to this point. I already loved her a lot in my first year, but now it is real love. I think that I’m more passionate than you. I imagine kissing her; I half faint and thrill at the idea of seeing her when school begins.
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More often, she even dares admit her feeling to her idol herself:
Dear Mademoiselle, I am in an indescribable state over you. When I do not see you, I would give the world to meet you; I think of you every moment. If I spot you, my eyes fill up with tears, I want to hide; I am so small, so ignorant in front of you. When you chat with me, I am embarrassed, moved, I seem to hear the sweet voice of a fairy and the humming of loving things, impossible to translate; I watch your slightest moves; I lose track of the conversation and mumble something stupid: you must admit, dear Mademoiselle, that this is all mixed up. I do see one thing clearly, that I love you from the depths of my soul.
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The headmistress of a professional school recounts:
I recall that in my own youth, we fought over one of our young professors’ lunch papers and paid up to twenty pfennigs to have it. Her used metro tickets were also objects of our collectors’ rage.
Since she must play a masculine role, it is preferable for the loved woman not to be married; marriage does not always discourage the young admirer, but it interferes; she detests the idea that the object of her adoration could be under the control of a spouse or a lover. Her passions often unfold in secret, or at least on a purely platonic level; but the passage to a concrete eroticism is much easier here than if the loved object is masculine; even if she has had difficult experiences with friends her age, the feminine body does not frighten the girl; with her sisters or her mother, she has often experienced an intimacy where tenderness was subtly penetrated with sensuality, and when she is with the loved one she admires, slipping from tenderness to pleasure will take place just as subtly. When Dorothea Wieck kisses Herta Thiele on the lips in
Girls in Uniform
, this kiss is both maternal and sexual. Between women there is a complicity that disarms modesty; the excitement one arouses in the other is generally without violence; homosexual embraces involve neither defloration nor penetration: they satisfy infantile clitoral eroticism without demanding new and disquieting metamorphoses. The girl can realize her vocation as passive object without feeling deeply alienated. This is what Renée Vivien expresses in her verses, where she describes the relation of “damned women” and their lovers:
