This is why the little girl, even more so than her brothers, is preoccupied with sexual mysteries; of course boys are interested as well, just as passionately; but in their future, their role of husband and father is not what concerns them the most; marriage and motherhood put in question the little girl’s whole destiny; and as soon as she begins to perceive their secrets, her body seems odiously threatened to her. The magic of motherhood has faded: whether she has been informed early or not, she knows, in a more or less coherent manner, that a baby does not appear by chance in the mother’s belly and does not come out at the wave of a magic wand; she questions herself anxiously. Often it seems not extraordinary at all but rather horrible that a parasitic body should proliferate inside her body; the idea of this monstrous swelling frightens her. And how will the baby get out? Even if she was never told about the cries and suffering of childbirth, she has overheard things, she has read the words in the Bible: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”; she has the presentiment of tortures she cannot even imagine; she invents strange operations around her navel; she is no less reassured if she supposes that the fetus will be expelled by her anus: little girls have been seen to have nervous constipation attacks when they thought they had discovered the birthing process. Accurate explanations will not bring much relief: images of swelling, tearing, and hemorrhaging will haunt her. The more imaginative she is, the more sensitive the little girl will be to these visions; but no girl could look at them without shuddering. Colette relates how her mother found her in a faint after reading Zola’s description of a birth:
[The author depicted the birth] with a rough-and-ready, crude wealth of detail, an anatomical precision, and a lingering over colours, postures and cries, in which I recognized none of the tranquil, knowing experience on which I as a country girl could draw. I felt credulous, startled and vulnerable in my nascent femininity … Other words, right in front of my eyes, depicted flesh splitting open, excrement and sullied blood … The lawn rose to welcome me … like one of those little hares that poachers sometimes brought, freshly killed, into the kitchen.*
The reassurance offered by grown-ups leaves the child worried; growing up, she learns not to trust the word of adults; often it is on the very mysteries of her conception that she has caught them in lies; and she also knows that they consider the most frightening things normal; if she has ever experienced a violent physical shock—tonsils removed, tooth pulled, whitlow lanced—she will project the remembered anxiety onto childbirth.
The physical nature of pregnancy and childbirth suggests as well that “something physical” takes place between the spouses. The often-encountered word “blood” in expressions like “same-blood children,” “pure blood,” and “mixed blood” sometimes orients the childish imagination; it is supposed that marriage is accompanied by some solemn transfusion. But more often the “physical thing” seems to be linked to the urinary and excremental systems; in particular, children think that the man urinates into the woman. This sexual operation is thought of as dirty. This is what overwhelms the child for whom “dirty” things have been rife with the strictest taboos: How, then, can it be that they are integrated into adults’ lives? The child is first of all protected from scandal by the very absurdity he discovers: he finds there is no sense to what he hears around him, what he reads, what he writes; everything seems unreal to him. In Carson McCullers’s charming book The Member of the Wedding, the young heroine surprises two neighbors in bed nude; the very anomaly of the story keeps her from giving it too much importance:
It was a summer Sunday and the hall door of the Marlowes’ room was open. She could see only a portion of the room, part of the dresser and only the footpiece of the bed with Mrs. Marlowe’s corset on it. But there was a sound in the quiet room she could not place, and when she stepped over the threshold she was startled by a sight that, after a single glance, sent her running to the kitchen, crying: Mr. Marlowe is having a fit! Berenice had hurried through the hall, but when she looked into the front room, she merely bunched her lips and banged the door … Frankie had tried to question Berenice and find out what was the matter. But Berenice had only said that they were common people and added that with a certain party in the house they ought at least to know enough to shut a door. Though Frankie knew she was the certain party, still she did not understand. What kind of a fit was it? she asked. But Berenice would only answer: Baby, just a common fit. And Frankie knew from the voice’s tones that there was more to it than she was told. Later she only remembered the Marlowes as common people.
When children are warned against strangers, when a sexual incident is described to them, it is often explained in terms of sickness, maniacs, or madmen; it is a convenient explanation; the little girl fondled by her neighbor at the cinema or the girl who sees a man expose himself thinks that she is dealing with a crazy man; of course, encountering madness is unpleasant: an epileptic attack, hysteria, or a violent quarrel upsets the adult world order, and the child who witnesses it feels in danger; but after all, just as there are homeless, beggars, and injured people with hideous sores in harmonious society, there can also be some abnormal ones without its base disintegrating. It is when parents, friends, and teachers are suspected of celebrating black masses that the child really becomes afraid.
When I was first told about sexual relations between man and woman, I declared that such things were impossible since my parents would have had to do likewise, and I thought too highly of them to believe it. I said that it was much too disgusting for me ever to do it. Unfortunately, I was to be disabused shortly after when I heard what my parents were doing … that was a fearful moment; I hid my face under the bedcovers, stopped my ears, and wished I were a thousand miles from there.35
How to go from the image of dressed and dignified people, these people who teach decency, reserve, and reason, to that of naked beasts confronting each other? Here is a contradiction that shakes their pedestal, darkens the sky. Often the child stubbornly refuses the odious revelation. “My parents don’t do that,” he declares. Or he tries to give coitus a decent image. “When you want a child,” said a little girl, “you go to the doctor; you undress, you cover your eyes, because you mustn’t watch; the doctor ties the parents together and helps them so that it works right”; she had changed the act of love into a surgical operation, rather unpleasant at that, but as honorable as going to the dentist. But despite denial and escape, embarrassment and doubt creep into the child’s heart; a phenomenon as painful as weaning occurs: it is no longer separating the child from the maternal flesh, but the protective universe that surrounds him falls apart; he finds himself without a roof over his head, abandoned, absolutely alone before a future as dark as night. What adds to the little girl’s anxiety is that she cannot discern the exact shape of the equivocal curse that weighs on her. The information she gets is inconsistent, books are contradictory; even technical explanations do not dissipate the heavy shadow; a hundred questions arise: Is the sexual act painful? Or delicious? How long does it last? Five minutes or all night? Sometimes you read that a woman became a mother with one embrace, and sometimes you remain sterile after hours of sexual activity. Do people “do that” every day? Or rarely? The child tries to learn more by reading the Bible, consulting dictionaries, asking friends, and he gropes in darkness and disgust. An interesting document on this point is the study made by Dr. Liepmann; here are a few responses given to him by young girls about their sexual initiation:
I continued to stray among my nebulous and twisted ideas. No one broached the subject, neither my mother nor my schoolteacher; no book treated the subject fully. Little by little a sort of perilous and ugly mystery was woven around the act, which at first had seemed so natural to me. The older girls of twelve used crude jokes to bridge the gap between themselves and our classmates. All that was still so vague and disgusting; we argued about where the baby was formed, if perhaps the thing only took place once for the man since marriage was the occasion for so much fuss. My period
at fifteen was another new surprise. It was my turn to be caught up, in a way, in the round.
… Sexual initiation! An expression never to be mentioned in our parents’ house!… I searched in books, but I agonized and wore myself out looking for the road to follow … I went to a boys’ school: for my schoolteacher the question did not even seem to exist … Horlam’s work, Little Boy and Little Girl, finally brought me the truth. My tense state and unbearable overexcitement disappeared, although I was very unhappy and took a long time to recognize and understand that eroticism and sexuality alone constitute real love.
Stages of my initiation: (1) First questions and a few vague notions (totally unsatisfactory). From three and a half to eleven years old … No answers to the questions I had in the following years. When I was seven, right there feeding my rabbit, I suddenly saw little naked ones underneath her … My mother told me that in animals and people little ones grow in their mother’s belly and come out through the loins. This birth through the loins seemed unreasonable to me … a nursemaid told me about pregnancy, birth, and menstruation … Finally, my father replied to my last question about his true function with obscure stories about pollen and pistil. (2) Some attempts at personal experimentation (eleven to thirteen years old). I dug out an encyclopedia and a medical book … It was only theoretical information in strange gigantic words. (3) Testing of acquired knowledge (thirteen to twenty): (a) in daily life, (b) in scientific works.
At eight, I often played with a boy my age. One day we broached the subject. I already knew, because my mother had already told me, that a woman has many eggs inside her … and that a child was born from one of these eggs whenever the mother strongly desired it … Giving this same answer to my friend, I received this reply: “You are completely stupid! When our butcher and his wife want a baby, they go to bed and do dirty things.” I was indignant … We had then (around twelve and a half) a maid who told me all sorts of scandalous tales. I never said a word to Mama, as I was ashamed; but I asked her if sitting on a man’s knees could give you a baby. She explained everything as best she could.
At school I learned where babies emerged, and I had the feeling that it was something horrible. But how did they come into the world? We both formed a rather monstrous idea about the thing, especially since one winter morning on the way to school together in the darkness we met a certain man who showed us his sexual parts and asked us, “Don’t they seem good enough to eat?” Our disgust was inconceivable, and we were literally nauseated. Until I was twenty-one, I thought babies were born through the navel.
A little girl took me aside and asked me: “Do you know where babies come from?” Finally she decided to speak out: “Goodness! How foolish you are! Kids come out of women’s stomachs, and for them to be born, women have to do completely disgusting things with men!” Then she went into details about how disgusting. But I had become totally transformed, absolutely unable to believe that such things could be possible. We slept in the same room as our parents … One night later I heard take place what I had thought was impossible, and, yes, I was ashamed, I was ashamed of my parents. All of this made of me another being. I went through horrible moral suffering. I considered myself a deeply depraved creature because I was now aware of these things.
It should be said that even coherent instruction would not resolve the problem; in spite of the best will of parents and teachers, the sexual experience could not be put into words and concepts; it could only be understood by living it; all analysis, however serious, will have a comic side and will fail to deliver the truth. When, from the poetic loves of flowers to the nuptials of fish, by way of the chick, the cat, or the kid, one reaches the human species, the mystery of conception can be theoretically elucidated: that of voluptuousness and sexual love remains total. How would one explain the pleasure of a caress or a kiss to a dispassionate child? Kisses are given and received in a family way, sometimes even on the lips: Why do these mucus exchanges in certain encounters provoke dizziness? It is like describing colors to the blind. As long as there is no intuition of the excitement and desire that give the sexual function its meaning and unity, the different elements seem shocking and monstrous. In particular, the little girl is revolted when she understands that she is virgin and sealed, and that to change into a woman a man’s sex must penetrate her. Since exhibitionism is a widespread perversion, many little girls have seen the penis in an erection; in any case, they have observed the sexual organs of animals, and it is unfortunate that the horse’s so often draws their attention; one imagines that they would be frightened by it. Fear of childbirth, fear of the male sex organ, fear of the “crises” that threaten married couples, disgust for dirty practices, derision for actions devoid of signification, all of this often leads a young girl to declare: “I will never marry.”36 Therein lies the surest defense against pain, folly, and obscenity. It is useless to try to explain that when the day comes, neither deflowering nor childbirth would seem so terrible, that millions of women resign themselves to it and are none the worse for it. When a child fears an outside occurrence, he is relieved of the fear, but not by predicting that, later, he will accept it naturally: it is himself he fears meeting in the far-off future, alienated and lost. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar, through chrysalis and into butterfly, brings about a deep uneasiness: Is it still the same caterpillar after this long sleep? Does she recognize herself beneath these brilliant wings? I knew little girls who were plunged into an alarming reverie at the sight of a chrysalis.
And yet the metamorphosis takes place. The little girl herself does not understand the meaning, but she realizes that in her relations with the world and her own body something is changing subtly: she is sensitive to contacts, tastes, and odors that previously left her indifferent; baroque images pass through her head; she barely recognizes herself in mirrors; she feels “funny,” and things seem “funny”; such is the case of little Emily, described by Richard Hughes in A High Wind in Jamaica:
Emily, for coolness, sat up to her chin in water, and hundreds of infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths every inch of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing. Anyhow she had lately come to hate being touched—but this was abominable. At last, when she could stand it no longer, she clambered out and dressed.
Even Margaret Kennedy’s serene Tessa feels this strange disturbance:
Suddenly she had become intensely miserable. She stared down into the darkness of the hall, cut in two by the moonlight which streamed in through the open door. She could not bear it. She jumped up with a little cry of exasperation. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “How I hate it all!” … She ran out to hide herself in the mountains, frightened and furious, pursued by a desolate foreboding which seemed to fill the quiet house. As she stumbled up towards the pass she kept murmuring to herself: “I wish I could die! I wish I was dead!”
She knew that she did not mean this; she was not in the least anxious to die. But the violence of such a statement seemed to satisfy her.*
This disturbing moment is described at length in Carson McCullers’s previously mentioned book, The Member of the Wedding:
This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie. She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad. Besides being too mean to live, she was a criminal … Then the spring of that year had been a long queer season. Things began to change … There was something about the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize that she ought to leave the town … She ought to leave the town and go to some place far away. For the late spring, that year, was lazy and too sweet. The long afternoons flowered and lasted and the green sweetness sickened her … Many things made Frankie suddenly wish to cry. Very early in the morning she would sometimes go out into the yard and stand for a long time looking at the sunrise sky. And it was as though a question came into
her heart, and the sky did not answer. Things she had never noticed much before began to hurt her: home lights watched from the evening sidewalks, an unknown voice from an alley. She would stare at the lights and listen to the voice, and something inside her stiffened and waited. But the lights would darken, the voice fall silent, and though she waited, that was all. She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. She was afraid, and there was a queer tightness in her chest …
She went around town, and the things she saw and heard seemed to be left somehow unfinished, and there was the tightness in her that would not break. She would hurry to do something, but what she did was always wrong … After the long twilights of this season, when Frankie had walked around the sidewalks of the town, a jazz sadness quivered her nerves and her heart stiffened and almost stopped.
What is happening in this troubled period is that the child’s body is becoming a woman’s body and being made flesh. Except in the case of glandular deficiency where the subject remains fixed in the infantile stage, the puberty crisis begins around the age of twelve or thirteen.37 This crisis begins much earlier for girls than for boys, and it brings about far greater changes. The little girl approaches it with worry and displeasure. As her breasts and body hair develop, a feeling is born that sometimes changes into pride, but begins as shame; suddenly the child displays modesty, she refuses to show herself nude, even to her sisters or her mother, she inspects herself with surprise mixed with horror, and she observes with anxiety the swelling of this hard core, somewhat painful, appearing under nipples that until recently were as inoffensive as a navel. She is worried to discover a vulnerable spot in herself: undoubtedly this pain is slight compared with a burn or a toothache; but in an accident or illness, pain was always abnormal, while the youthful breast is normally the center of who knows what indefinable resentment. Something is happening, something that is not an illness, but that involves the very law of existence and is yet struggle and suffering. Of course, from birth to puberty the little girl grew up, but she never felt growth; day after day, her body was present like an exact finished thing; now she is “developing”: the very word horrifies her; vital phenomena are only reassuring when they have found a balance and taken on the stable aspect of a fresh flower, a polished animal; but in the blossoming of her breasts, the little girl feels the ambiguity of the word “living.” She is neither gold nor diamond, but a strange matter, moving and uncertain, inside of which impure chemistries develop. She is used to a free-flowing head of hair that falls like a silken skein; but this new growth under her arms, beneath her belly, metamorphoses her into an animal or alga. Whether she is more or less prepared for it, she foresees in these changes a finality that rips her from her self; thus hurled into a vital cycle that goes beyond the moment of her own existence, she senses a dependence that dooms her to man, child, and tomb. In themselves, her breasts seem to be a useless and indiscreet proliferation. Arms, legs, skin, muscles, and even the round buttocks she sits on, all have had until now a clear usefulness; only the sex organ defined as urinary was a bit dubious, though secret and invisible to others. Her breasts show through her sweater or blouse, and this body that the little girl identified with self appears to her as flesh; it is an object that others look at and see. “For two years I wore capes to hide my chest, I was so ashamed of it,” a woman told me. And another: “I still remember the strange confusion I felt when a friend of my age, but more developed than I was, stooped to pick up a ball, I noticed by the opening in her blouse two already heavy breasts: this body so similar to mine, on which my body would be modeled, made me blush for myself.” “At thirteen, I walked around bare legged, in a short dress,” another woman told me. “A man, sniggering, made a comment about my fat calves. The next day, my mother made me wear stockings and lengthen my skirt, but I will never forget the shock I suddenly felt in seeing myself seen.” The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment, she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh.