The Second Sex (109 page)

Normally, the grandmother overcomes her hostility; sometimes she obstinately sees the newborn as her son’s alone, and she loves it tyrannically; but generally the young mother and her own mother claim it for their own; the jealous grandmother cultivates an ambiguous affection for the baby, where hostility hides in the guise of concern.

The mother’s attitude to her grown daughter is very ambivalent: she seeks a god in her son; in her daughter, she finds a double. The “double” is an ambiguous personage; it assassinates the one from which it emanates, as can be seen in the tales of Poe, in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, and in the story told by Marcel Schwob. Thus the girl condemns her mother to death by becoming a woman; and yet she permits her to survive. The mother’s behavior depends on whether she grasps her child’s healthy development as a promise of ruin or of resurrection.

Many mothers become rigid in hostility; they do not accept being supplanted by the ingrate who owes them her life; we have often pointed out the coquette’s jealousy of the fresh adolescent who denounces her artifices: a woman who has detested a rival in any woman will hate the rival even in her child; she sends her away, hides her, or finds ways to deprive her of opportunities. A woman who took pride in being the Wife and the Mother in an exemplary and unique way will refuse no less fiercely to give up her throne; she continues to affirm that her daughter is merely a child, and she considers her undertakings to be childish games; she is too young to marry, too delicate to give birth; if she insists on wanting a husband, a home, and children, they will never be more than look-alikes; the mother tirelessly criticizes, derides, or prophesies misfortune. If she can, she condemns her daughter to eternal childhood; if not, she tries to ruin this adult life the daughter is trying to lead on her own. We have seen that she often succeeds: many young women remain sterile, have miscarriages, prove incapable of nursing and raising their children or running their homes because of this evil influence. Their conjugal life becomes impossible. Unhappy and isolated, they will find refuge in the sovereign arms of their mothers. If they resist her, a perpetual conflict will pit them against each other; the frustrated mother largely transfers onto her son-in-law the irritation her insolent daughter’s independence provokes in her.

The mother who passionately identifies with her daughter is no less tyrannical; what she wants, having acquired mature experience, is to relive her youth: thus will she save her past while saving herself from it; she herself will choose a son-in-law who conforms to the perfect husband she never had; flirtatious and tender, she will easily imagine somewhere in her heart that it is she he is marrying; through her daughter, she will satisfy her old desires for wealth, success, and glory; such women, who ardently “push” their children along the paths of seduction, cinema, or theater, have often been described; under the pretext of watching over them, they take over their lives: I have been told about some who go so far as to take the girl’s suitor to bed with them. But it is rare for the girl to put up with this
guardianship indefinitely; the day she finds a husband or a serious protector, she will rebel. The mother-in-law who had begun by cherishing her son-in-law then becomes hostile to him; she moans about human ingratitude, takes the role of victim herself; she becomes in her turn an enemy mother. Foreseeing these disappointments, many women feign indifference when they see their children grow up: but they take little joy from it. A mother must have a rare mixture of generosity and detachment to find enrichment in her children’s lives without becoming a tyrant or turning them into her tormentors.

The grandmother’s feelings toward her grandchildren are an extension of those she has for her daughter: she often transfers her hostility onto them. It is not only out of fear of public opinion that so many women force their seduced daughter to have an abortion, to abandon the child, to do away with it: they are only too happy to keep her from motherhood; they obstinately wish to keep the privilege for themselves. They readily advise even a legitimate mother to provoke a miscarriage, not to breast-feed the child, or to rid herself of it. They themselves will deny the existence of this impudent little being by their indifference; or else they will spend their time endlessly scolding the child, punishing him, even mistreating him. By contrast, the mother who identifies with her daughter often welcomes the children more avidly than the young woman does; the daughter is disconcerted by the arrival of the little stranger; the grandmother recognizes him: she goes back twenty years in time, she becomes the young woman giving birth again; all the joys of possession and domination her children long ago ceased to give her are returned to her, all the desires of motherhood she had renounced with menopause are miraculously fulfilled; she is the real mother, she takes charge of the baby with authority, and if the baby is given over to her, she will passionately devote herself to him. Unfortunately for her, the young woman is keen to hold on to her rights: the grandmother is authorized only to play the role of assistant that her elders formerly played with her; she feels dethroned; and besides she has to share this with her son-in-law’s mother, of whom she is naturally jealous. Resentment often distorts the spontaneous love she felt at first for the child. The anxiety often observed in grandmothers expresses the ambivalence of their feelings: they cherish the baby insofar as it belongs to them, they are hostile to the little stranger that he is to them, they are ashamed of this enmity. Yet if the grandmother maintains her warm affection for her grandchildren while giving up the idea of entirely possessing them, she can play the privileged role of guardian angel in their lives: recognizing neither rights nor responsibilities, she loves them out of pure generosity; she does not entertain narcissistic dreams through them, she asks nothing of them,
she does not sacrifice their future in which she will not be present: what she loves are the little flesh-and-blood beings who are there today in their contingency and their gratuitousness; she is not an educator; she does not represent abstract justice or law. This is where the conflicts that at times set her in opposition to the parents will sometimes arise.

It may be that the woman has no descendants or is not interested in posterity; lacking natural bonds with children or grandchildren, she sometimes tries to create them artificially with counterparts. She offers maternal tenderness to young people; whether or not her affection remains platonic, it is not necessarily hypocrisy that makes her declare that she loves her young protégé “like a son”: the mother’s feelings, inversely, are love feelings. It is true that Mme de Warens’s competitors take pleasure in generously satisfying, helping, and shaping a man: they want to be the source, the necessary condition, and the foundation of an existence that has passed them by; they become mothers and find their identity in their lovers far more in this role than in the role of mistress. Very often also the maternal woman adopts girls: here again their relations take more or less sexual forms; but whether platonic or carnal, what she seeks in her protégées is her own double, miraculously rejuvenated. The actress, the dancer, the singer, become teachers—they form pupils—and the intellectual woman—such as Mme de Charrière, alone in Colombier—indoctrinates disciples; the devotee gathers spiritual daughters around her; the seductress becomes a madam. It is never pure self-interest that brings such ardent zeal to their proselytizing: they are passionately seeking to reincarnate themselves. Their tyrannical generosity gives rise to more or less the same conflicts as between mothers and daughters united by blood. It is also possible to adopt grandchildren: great-aunts and godmothers gladly play a role similar to that of grandmothers. But in any case, it is rare for a woman to find in posterity—natural or selected—a justification of her declining life: she fails to make the enterprise of these young existences her own. Either she persists in the effort to appropriate it, consumed in the struggles and dramas that leave her disappointed and broken; or she resigns herself to a modest participation. This is the most common case. The aged mother and grandmother repress their dominating desires, they conceal their resentments; they are satisfied with whatever their children choose to give them. But then they get little help from them. They remain available facing the desert of the future, prey to solitude, regret, and ennui.

Here we touch upon the older woman’s tragedy: she realizes she is useless; all through her life, the bourgeois woman often has to resolve the derisory problem: How to kill time? For once the children are raised and the husband has become successful, or at least settled, days drag on.
“Women’s handiwork” was invented to mask this horrible idleness; hands embroider, knit, they are busy hands, and they move; it is not a question here of real work, because the object produced is not the goal; it has little importance, and it is often a problem to know what to do with it: one gets rid of it by giving it to a friend or a charitable organization or by cluttering mantelpieces or coffee tables; neither is it a game that reveals the pure joy of existence in its gratuitousness; and it is hardly a diversion because the mind is vacant: it is an absurd distraction, as Pascal described it; with needle or hook, woman sadly weaves the very nothingness of her days. Water-colors, music, or reading have the very same role; the unoccupied woman does not try to extend her grasp on the world in giving herself over to such activities, but only to relieve boredom; an activity that does not open up the future slides into the vanity of immanence; the idle woman begins a book, then puts it down, opens the piano, closes it, returns to her embroidery, yawns, and ends up on the telephone. In fact, she is more likely to seek relief in social life; she goes out, makes visits, and—like Mrs. Dalloway—attaches enormous importance to her parties; she goes to every wedding, every funeral; no longer having any existence of her own, she feeds on the company of others; she goes from being a coquette to a gossip: she watches, she comments; she compensates for her inaction by dispensing criticism and advice to those around her. She gives her experienced advice even to those around her who do not seek it. If she has the means, she holds a salon; in this way she hopes to appropriate undertakings and successes that are not hers; Mme du Deffand’s and Mme Verdurin’s despotism over their subjects is well-known. To be a center of attraction, a crossroads, an inspiration, or to create an “atmosphere” is in itself an ersatz activity. There are other, more direct ways to intervene in the course of the world; in France, there are “charities” and a few “clubs,” but it is particularly true in America that women group together in clubs where they play bridge, hand out literary prizes, or reflect on social improvement. What characterizes most of these organizations on the two continents is that they are in themselves their own reason for existence: the aims they claim to pursue serve only as a pretext. Things happen exactly as in Kafka’s fable: no one is concerned about building the Tower of Babel; a vast city is built around its ideal place, consuming all its resources for administration, growth, and resolving internal dissensions.
³
So charity women spend most of their time organizing their organization; they elect a board, discuss its statutes, dispute
among themselves, and struggle to keep their prestige over rival associations: no one must steal
their
poor,
their
sick,
their
wounded,
their
orphans; they would rather leave them to die than yield them to their neighbors. And they are far from wanting a regime that, in doing away with injustice and abuse, would make their dedication useless; they bless the wars and famines that transform them into benefactresses of humanity. It is clear that in their eyes the knit hats and parcels are not intended for soldiers and the hungry: instead, the soldiers and the hungry are made expressly to receive knit goods and parcels.

In spite of everything, some of these groups attain positive results. In the United States, the influence of venerated “Moms” is strong; this is explained by the leisure time their parasitic existence leaves them: and this is why it is harmful. “Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion, law, sanitation,” says Philip Wylie, speaking of the American Mom, “she seldom has any especial interest in
what
, exactly, she is doing as a member of any of these endless organizations, so long as it is
something
.”
⁴
Their effort is not integrated into a coherent and constructive plan, it does not aim at objective ends: imperiously, it tends only to show their tastes and prejudices or to serve their interests. They play a considerable role in the domain of culture, for example: it is they who buy the most books; but they read as one plays the game of solitaire; literature takes its meaning and dignity when it is addressed to individuals committed to projects, when it helps them surpass themselves toward greater horizons; it must be integrated into the movement of human transcendence; instead, woman devalues books and works of art by swallowing them into her immanence; a painting becomes a knickknack, music an old song, a novel a reverie as useless as crocheted antimacassars. It is American women who are responsible for the degradation of best sellers: these books are only intended to please, and worse to please idle women who need escape. As for their activities in general, Philip Wylie defines them like this: