Most of the feminine attributes we have referred to are found in these invocations. The Virgin is fertility, dew, and the source of life; many of the images show her at the well, the spring, or the fountain; the expression “Fountain of Life” was one of the most common; she was not a creator, but she nourishes, she brings to the light of day what was hidden in the earth. She is the deep reality hidden under the appearance of things: the Core, the Marrow. Through her, passions are tempered; she is what is given to man to satiate him. Wherever life is threatened, she saves and restores it: she heals and strengthens. And because life emanates from God, she as the intermediary between man and life is likewise the intermediary between humanity and God. “The devil’s gateway,” said Tertullian. But transfigured, she is heaven’s portal; paintings represent her opening the gate or the window onto paradise or raising a ladder from earth to the heavens. More straightforward, she becomes an advocate, pleading beside her Son for the salvation of men: many tableaux of the Last Judgment have her baring her breast in supplication to Christ in the name of her glorious motherhood. She protects men’s children in the folds of her cloak; her merciful love follows them through dangers over oceans and battlefields. She moves Divine Justice in the name of charity: the “Virgins of the Scales” are seen, smiling, tilting the balance where souls are weighed to the side of the Good.
This merciful and tender role is one of the most important of all those granted to woman. Even integrated into society, the woman subtly exceeds its boundaries because she possesses the insidious generosity of Life. This distance between the males’ intended constructions and nature’s contingency seems troubling in some cases; but it becomes beneficial when the woman, too docile to threaten men’s work, limits herself to enriching and softening their too sharp edges. Male gods represent Destiny; on the goddesses’ side are found arbitrary benevolence and capricious favor. The Christian God has the rigors of Justice; the Virgin has gentleness and charity. On earth, men are the defenders of laws, reason, and necessity; woman knows the original contingency of man himself and of the necessity he believes in; from this comes her supple generosity and the mysterious irony that touches her lips. She gives birth in pain, she heals males’ wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace. Her power over men comes from her tenderly recalling a modest consciousness of their authentic condition; it is the secret of her illusionless, painful, ironic, and loving wisdom. Even frivolity, whimsy, and ignorance are charming virtues in her because they thrive beneath and beyond the world where man chooses to live but where he does not want to feel confined. Confronted with arrested meaning and utilitarian instruments, she upholds the mystery of intact things; she brings the breath of poetry into city streets and plowed fields. Poetry attempts to capture that which exists above everyday prose: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be. She incarnates the Dream; for man, the dream is the most intimate and the most foreign presence, what he does not want, what he does not do, which he aspires to but cannot attain; the mysterious Other who is profound immanence and far-off transcendence will lend him her traits. Thus it is that Aurélia visits Nerval in a dream and gives him the whole world in a dream. “She began to grow in a bright ray of light so that little by little the garden took on her form, and the flower beds and the trees became the rosettes and festoons of her dress; while her face and her arms impressed their shape upon the reddened clouds in the sky. I was losing sight of her as she was being transfigured, for she seemed to be vanishing into her own grandeur. ‘Oh flee not from me!’ I cried; ‘for nature dies with you.’ ”
Being the very substance of man’s poetic activities, woman is understandably his inspiration: the Muses are women. The Muse is the conduit between the creator and the natural springs he draws from. It is through woman’s spirit deeply connected to nature that man will explore the depths of silence and the fertile night. The Muse creates nothing on her own; she is a wise sibyl making herself the docile servant of a master. Even in concrete and practical spheres, her counsel will be useful. Man wishes to attain the goals he sets without the help of his peers, and he would find another man’s opinion inopportune; but he supposes that the woman speaks to him in the name of other values, in the name of a wisdom that he does not claim to have, more instinctive than his own, more immediately in accord with the real; these are the “intuitions” that Egeria uses to counsel and guide; he consults her without fear for his self-esteem as he consults the stars. This “intuition” even enters into business or politics: Apasia and Mme de Maintenon still have flourishing careers today.25
There is another function that man willingly entrusts to woman: being the purpose behind men’s activities and the source of their decisions, she is also the judge of values. She is revealed as a privileged judge. Man dreams of an Other not only to possess her but also to be validated by her; to be validated by men who are his peers entails constant tension on his part: that is why he wants an outside view conferring absolute value on his life, on his undertakings, on himself. God’s gaze is hidden, foreign, disquieting: even in periods of faith, only a few mystics felt its intensity. This divine role often devolved on the woman. Close to the man, dominated by him, she does not posit values that are foreign to him: and yet, as she is other, she remains exterior to the world of men and can thus grasp it objectively. It is she who will denounce the presence or absence of courage, of strength, and of beauty while confirming from the outside their universal value. Men are too busy in their cooperative or combative relations to be an audience for each other: they do not think about each other. Woman is removed from their activities and does not take part in their jousts and combats: her entire situation predestines her to play this role of onlooker. The chevalier jousts in tournaments for his lady; poets seek woman’s approval. When Rastignac sets out to conquer Paris, he thinks first of having women, less about possessing their bodies than enjoying that reputation that only they are capable of creating for a man. Balzac projected the story of his own youth onto his young heroes: his education began with older mistresses; and the woman played the role of educator not only in Le lys dans la vallée (The Lily in the Valley); she was also assigned this role in L’Education sentimental (Sentimental Education), in Stendhal’s novels, and in numerous other coming-of-age novels. It has already been observed that the woman is both physis and anti-physis; she personifies Society as well as Nature; through her the civilization of a period and its culture is summed up, as can be seen in courtly poetry, in the Decameron, and in L’Astrée; she launches fashions, presides over salons, directs and reflects opinion. Fame and glory are women. “The crowd is woman,” said Mallarmé. In the company of women the young man is initiated into the “world,” and into this complex reality called life. She is one of the privileged prizes promised to heroes, adventurers, and individualists. In ancient times, Perseus saved Andromeda, Orpheus went to rescue Eurydice from hades, and Troy fought to keep the beautiful Helen. Novels of chivalry recount barely any prowess other than delivering captive princesses. What would Prince Charming do if he did not wake up Sleeping Beauty, or lavish gifts on Donkey Skin? The myth of the king marrying a shepherdess flatters the man as much as the woman. The rich man needs to give, or else his useless wealth remains an abstract object: he needs someone to give to. The Cinderella myth, indulgently described by Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers, thrives in prosperous countries; it is more powerful in America than anywhere else because men are more embarrassed by their wealth: How would they spend this money for which they work their whole lives if they did not dedicate it to a woman? Orson Welles, among others, personifies the imperialism of this kind of generosity in Citizen Kane: Kane chooses to smother an
obscure singer with gifts and impose her on the public as a great opera singer all for his own affirmation of power; in France there are plenty of small-time Citizen Kanes. In another film, The Razor’s Edge, when the hero returns from India having acquired absolute wisdom, the only use he finds for it is to rescue a prostitute. Clearly man wants woman’s enslavement when fantasizing himself as a benefactor, liberator, or redeemer; if Sleeping Beauty is to be awakened, she must be sleeping; to have a captive princess, there must be ogres and dragons. And the greater man’s taste for difficult undertakings, the greater his pleasure in granting woman independence. Conquering is more fascinating than rescuing or giving. The average Western male’s ideal is a woman who freely submits to his domination, who does not accept his ideas without some discussion, but who yields to his reasoning, who intelligently resists but yields in the end. The tougher his pride, the more he relishes dangerous adventure; it is far better to tame Penthesilea than to marry a consenting Cinderella. The “warrior” loves danger and plays, says Nietzsche. “For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” The man who loves danger and play is not displeased to see woman change into an Amazon as long as he keeps the hope of subjugating her:26 what he demands in his heart of hearts is that this struggle remain a game for him, while for woman it involves her very destiny: therein lies the true victory for man, liberator, or conqueror—that woman freely recognize him as her destiny.
Thus the expression “to have a woman” conceals a double meaning: the object’s functions are not dissociated from those of the judge. The moment woman is viewed as a person, she can only be conquered with her consent; she must be won. Sleeping Beauty’s smile fulfills Prince Charming: the captive princesses’ tears of happiness and gratitude give meaning to the knights’ prowess. On the other hand, her gaze is not a masculine, abstract, severe one—it allows itself to be charmed. Thus heroism and poetry are modes of seduction: but in letting herself be seduced, the woman exalts heroism and poetry. She holds an even more essential privilege for the individualist: she appears to him not as the measure of universally recognized values but as the revelation of his particular merits and of his very being. A man is judged by his fellow men by what he does, objectively and according to general standards. But certain of his qualities, and among others his vital qualities, can only interest woman; his virility, charm, seduction, tenderness, and cruelty only pertain to her: if he sets a value on these most secret virtues, he has an absolute need of her; through her he will experience the miracle of appearing as an other, an other who is also his deepest self. Malraux admirably expresses what the individualist expects from the woman he loves in one of his texts. Kyo wonders:
“We hear the voices of others with our ears, our own voices with our throats.” Yes. “One hears his own life, too, with his throat, and those of others?… To others, I am what I have done.” To May alone, he was not what he had done; to him alone, she was something altogether different from her biography. The embrace by which love holds beings together against solitude did not bring its relief to man; it brought relief only to the madman, to the incomparable monster, dear above all things, that every being is to himself and that he cherishes in his heart. Since his mother had died, May was the only being for whom he was not Kyo Gisors, but an intimate partner … Men are not my kind, they are those who look at me and judge me; my kind are those who love me and do not look at me, who love me in spite of everything, degradation, baseness, treason—me, and not what I have done or shall do—who would love me as long as I would love myself—even to suicide.27
What makes Kyo’s attitude human and moving is that it implies reciprocity and that he asks May to love him in his authenticity, not to send back an indulgent reflection of himself. For many men, this demand is diluted: instead of a truthful revelation, they seek a glowing image of admiration and gratitude, deified in the depths of a woman’s two eyes. Woman has often been compared to water, in part because it is the mirror where the male Narcissus contemplates himself: he leans toward her, with good or bad faith. But in any case, what he wants from her is to be, outside of him, all that he cannot grasp in himself, because the interiority of the existent is only nothingness, and to reach himself, he must project himself onto an object. Woman is the supreme reward for him since she is his own apotheosis, a foreign form he can possess in the flesh. It is this “incomparable monster,” himself, that he embraces when he holds in his arms this being who sums up the World and onto whom he has imposed his values and his laws. Uniting himself, then, with this other whom he makes his own, he hopes to reach himself. Treasure, prey, game, and risk, muse, guide, judge, mediator, mirror, the woman is the Other in which the subject surpasses himself without being limited, who opposes him without negating him; she is the Other who lets herself be annexed to him without ceasing to be the Other. And for this she is so necessary to man’s joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have had to invent her.
They did invent her.28
But she also exists without their invention. This is why she is the failure of their dream at the same time as its incarnation. There is no image of woman that does not invoke the opposite figure as well: she is Life and Death, Nature and Artifice, Light and Night. Whatever the point of view, the same fluctuation is always found, because the inessential necessarily returns to the essential. In the figures of the Virgin Mother and of Beatrice lie Eve and Circe.
“Through woman,” wrote Kierkegaard, “ideality enters into life and what would man be without her? Many a man has become a genius through a young girl,… but none has become a genius through the young girl he married …
“It is only by a negative relation to her that man is rendered productive in his ideal endeavors. Negative relations with woman can make us infinite … positive relations with woman make the man finite to a far greater extent.”29 This means that woman is necessary as long as she remains an Idea into which man projects his own transcendence; but she is detrimental as objective reality, existing for herself and limited to herself. In refusing to marry his fiancée, Kierkegaard believes he has established the only valid relation with woman. And he is right in the sense that the myth of woman posited as infinite Other immediately entails its opposite.
Because she is faux Infinite, Ideal without truth, she is revealed as finitude and mediocrity and thus as falsehood. That is how she appears in Laforgue: throughout his work he expresses rancor against a mystification he blames on man as much as woman. Ophelia and Salome are nothing but “little women.” Hamlet might think: “Thus would Ophelia have loved me as her ‘possession’ and because I was socially and morally superior to her girlish friends’ possessions. And those little remarks about comfort and well-being that slipped out of her at lamp-lighting time!” Woman makes man dream, yet she is concerned with comfort and stews; one speaks to her about her soul, but she is only a body. And the lover, believing he is pursuing the Ideal, is the plaything of nature that uses all these mystifications for the ends of reproduction. She represents in reality the everydayness of life; she is foolishness, prudence, mediocrity, and ennui. Here is an example of how this is expressed, in a poem titled “Notre petite compagne” (Our Little Companion):
I have the talent of every school
I have souls for all tastes
Pick the flower of my faces
Drink my mouth and not my voice
And do not look for more:
Not even I can see clearly
Our loves are not equal
For me to hold out my hand
You are merely naive males
I am the eternal feminine!
My fate loses itself in the Stars!
I am the Great Isis!
No one has lifted my veil
Dream only of my oases …
Man succeeded in enslaving woman, but in doing so, he robbed her of what made possession desirable. Integrated into the family and society, woman’s magic fades rather than transfigures itself; reduced to a servant’s co
ndition, she is no longer the wild prey incarnating all of nature’s treasures. Since the birth of courtly love, it has been a commonplace that marriage kills love. Either too scorned, too respected, or too quotidian, the wife is no longer a sex object. Marriage rites were originally intended to protect man against woman; she becomes his property: but everything we possess in turn possesses us; marriage is a servitude for the man as well; he is thus caught in the trap laid by nature: to have desired a lovely young girl, the male must spend his whole life feeding a heavy matron, a dried-out old woman; the delicate jewel intended to embellish his existence becomes an odious burden: Xanthippe is one of those types of women that men have always referred to with the greatest horror.30 But even when the woman is young, there is mystification in marriage because trying to socialize eroticism only succeeds in killing it. Eroticism implies a claim of the instant against time, of the individual against the collectivity; it affirms separation against communication; it rebels against all regulation; it contains a principle hostile to society. Social customs are never bent to fit the rigor of institutions and laws: love has forever asserted itself against them. In its sensual form it addresses young people and courtesans in Greece and Rome; both carnal and platonic, courtly love is always directed at another’s wife. Tristan is the epic of adultery. The period around 1900 that re-creates the myth of the woman is one where adultery becomes the theme of all literature. Certain writers, like Bernstein, in the supreme defense of bourgeois institutions, struggle to reintegrate eroticism and love into marriage; but there is more truth in Porto-Riche’s Amoureuse (A Loving Wife), which shows the incompatibility of these two types of values. Adultery can disappear only with marriage itself. For the aim of marriage is to immunize man against his own wife: but other women still have a dizzying effect on him; it is to them he will turn. Women are accomplices. For they rebel against an order that tries to deprive them of their weapons. So as to tear woman from nature, so as to subjugate her to man through ceremonies and contracts, she was elevated to the dignity of a human person; she was granted freedom. But freedom is precisely what escapes all servitude; and if it is bestowed on a being originally possessed by malevolent forces, it becomes dangerous. And all the more so as man stopped at half measures; he accepted woman into the masculine world only by making her a servant, in thwarting her transcendence; the freedom she was granted could only have a negative use; it only manifests itself in refusal. Woman became free only in becoming captive; she renounces this human privilege to recover her power as natural object. By day she treacherously plays her role of docile servant, but by night she changes into a kitten, a doe; she slips back into a siren’s skin, or riding on her broomstick, she makes her satanic rounds. Sometimes she exercises her nocturnal magic on her own husband; but it is wiser to conceal her metamorphoses from her master; she chooses strangers as her prey; they have no rights over her, and she remains for them a plant, wellspring, star, or sorceress. So there she is, fated to infidelity: it is the only concrete form her freedom could assume. She is unfaithful over and above her own desires, her thoughts, or her consciousness; because she is seen as an object, she is given up to any subjectivity that chooses to take her; it is still not sure that locked in harems, hidden behind veils, she does not arouse desire in some person: to inspire desire in a stranger is already to fail her husband and society. But worse, she is often an accomplice in this fate; it is only through lies and adultery that she can prove that she is nobody’s thing, that she refutes male claims on her. This is why man’s jealousy is so quick to awaken, and in legends woman can be suspected without reason, condemned on the least suspicion, as were Geneviève de Brabant and Desdemona; even before any suspicion, Griselda is subjected to the worst trials; this tale would be absurd if the woman were not suspected beforehand; there is no case presented against her: it is up to her to prove her innocence. This is also why jealousy can be insatiable; it has already been shown that possession can never be positively realized; even if all others are forbidden to draw from the spring, no one possesses the thirst-quenching spring: the jealous one knows this well. In essence, woman is inconstant, just as water is fluid; and no human force can contradict a natural truth. Throughout all literature, in The Thousand and One Nights as in the Decameron, woman’s ruses triumph over man’s prudence. But it is more than simply individualistic will that makes him a jailer: society itself, in the form of father, brother, and husband, makes him responsible for the woman’s behavior. Chastity is imposed upon her for economic and religious reasons, every citizen having to be authenticated as the son of his own father. But it is also very important to compel woman to conform exactly to the role society devolves on her. Man’s double demand condemns woman to duplicity: he wants the woman to be his own and yet to remain foreign to him; he imagines her as servant and sorceress at the same time. But he admits publicly only to the former desire; the latter is a deceitful demand hidden in the depths of his heart and flesh; it goes against morality and society; it is evil like the Other, like rebel Nature, like the “bad woman.” Man is not wholly devoted to the Good he constructs and attempts to impose; he maintains a shameful connivance with the Bad. But whenever the Bad imprudently dares to show its face openly, he goes to war against it. In the darkness of night, man invites woman to sin. But in the light of day, he rejects sin and her, the sinner. And women, sinners themselves in the mysteries of the bed, show all the more passion for the public worship of virtue. Just as in primitive society the male sex is secular and woman’s is laden with religious and magic qualities, today’s modern societies consider man’s failings harmless peccadilloes; they are often lightly dismissed; even if he disobeys community laws, the man continues to belong to it; he is merely an enfant terrible, not a profound threat to the collective order. If, on the other hand, the woman deviates from society, she returns to Nature and the devil, she triggers uncontrollable and evil forces within the group. Fear has always been mixed with the blame for licentious behavior. If the husband cannot keep his wife virtuous, he shares her fault; his misfortune is, in society’s eyes, a dishonor, and there are civilizations so strict that it is necessary to kill the criminal to dissociate him from her crime. In others, the complaisant husband will be punished by noisy demonstrations or led around naked on a donkey. And the community will take it upon itself to punish the guilty woman in his place: because she offended the group as a whole and not only her husband. These customs were particularly brutal in superstitious and mystical Spain, sensual and terrorized by the flesh. Calderón, Lorca, and Valle-Inclán made it the theme of many plays. In Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba the village gossips want to punish the seduced young girl by burning her with live coal “in the place where she sinned.” In Valle-Inclán’s Divine Words, the adulteress appears as a witch who dances with the devil: her fault discovered, the whole village assembles to tear off her clothes and drown her. Many traditions reported that the sinner was stripped; then she was stoned, as told in the Gospel, and she was buried alive, drowned, or burned. The meaning of these tortures is that she was thus returned to Nature after being deprived of her social dignity; by her sin she had released bad natural emanations: the expiation was carried out as a kind of sacred orgy where the women stripped, beat, and massacred the guilty one, releasing in turn their mysterious but beneficial fluids since they were acting in accordance with society.