The Second Sex (40 page)

Montherlant never wanted to assume the human condition; what he calls his pride is, from the beginning, a panicked flight from the risks contained in a freedom engaged in the world through flesh; he claims to affirm freedom but to refuse engagement; without ties, without roots, he dreams he is a subjectivity majestically withdrawn upon itself; the memory of his carnal origins disturbs this dream, and he resorts to a familiar process: instead of prevailing over it, he repudiates it.

For Montherlant, the woman lover is just as harmful as the mother; she prevents man from resurrecting the god in himself; woman’s lot, he says, is life in its most immediate form, woman lives on feelings, she wallows in immanence; she has a mania for happiness: she wants to trap man in it; she does not experience the élan of her transcendence, she does not have the sense of grandeur; she loves her lover in his weakness and not in his strength, in his troubles and not in his joys; she would like him defenseless, so unhappy as to try to convince him of his misery regardless of any proof to the contrary. He surpasses and thus escapes her: she means to reduce him to her size to take him over. Because she needs him, she is not self-sufficient; she is a parasite. Through Dominique’s eyes, Montherlant portrayed the promenading women of Ranelagh, women “hanging on their lovers’ arms like beings without backbones, like big disguised slugs”;
³
except for sportswomen, women are incomplete beings, doomed to slavery; soft and lacking muscle, they have no grasp on the world; thus they fiercely work to annex a lover or, even better, a husband. Montherlant, to
my knowledge, did not use the praying mantis myth, but the content is there: for woman, to love is to devour; she pretends to give of herself, and she takes. He quotes Mme Tolstoy’s cry: “I live through him, for him; I demand the same thing for myself,” and he denounces the dangers of such a furious love; he finds a terrible truth in Ecclesiastes: A man who wants to hurt you is better than a woman who wants to help you. He invokes Lyautey’s experience: “A man of mine who marries is reduced to half a man.” He deems marriage to be even worse for a “superior man”; it is a ridiculous conformism to bourgeois values; could you imagine saying: “Mrs. Aeschylus,” or “I’m having dinner at the Dantes’ ”? A great man’s prestige is weakened; and even more, marriage shatters the hero’s magnificent solitude; he “needs not to be distracted from his own self.”
⁴

I have already said that Montherlant has chosen a freedom
without object;
that is, he prefers an illusion of autonomy to an authentic freedom engaged in the world; it is this availability that he means to use against woman; she is heavy, she is a burden. “It was a harsh symbol that a man could not walk straight because the woman he loved was on his arm.”
⁵

“I was burning, she puts out the fire. I was walking on water, she takes my arm, I sink.”
⁶

How does she have so much power since she is only lack, poverty, and negativity and her magic is illusory? Montherlant does not explain it. He simply and proudly says that “the lion rightly fears the mosquito.”
⁷

But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden. Montherlant has chosen ease; he claims to worship difficult values: but he seeks to attain them easily. “The crowns we give ourselves are the only ones worth being worn,” says the king in
Pasiphaé
. How easy. Montherlant overloaded his brow, draping it with purple, but an outsider’s look was enough to show that his diadems were papier-mâché and that, like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, he was naked. Walking on water in a dream was far less tiring than moving forward on earthly land in reality. And this is why Montherlant the lion avoided the feminine mosquito with terror: he is afraid to be tested by the real.
⁸

If Montherlant had really deflated the Eternal Feminine myth, he would have to be congratulated: women can be helped to assume themselves as human beings by denying the Woman. But he did not smash the idol, as has been shown: he converted it into a monster. He too believed in this obscure and irreducible essence: femininity; like Aristotle and Saint Thomas, he believed it was defined negatively; woman was woman through a lack of virility; that is the destiny any female individual has to undergo without being able to modify it. Whoever claims to escape it places herself on the lowest rung of the human ladder: she does not manage to become man, she gives up being woman; she is merely a pathetic caricature, a sham; that she might be a body and a consciousness does not provide her with any reality: Platonist when it suited him, Montherlant seems to believe that only the Ideas of femininity and virility possessed being; the individual who partakes of neither has only an appearance of existence. He irrevocably condemns these “vampires” who dare to posit themselves as autonomous subjects, dare to think and act. And he intends to prove through his depiction of Andrée Hacquebaut that any woman endeavoring to make herself a person would be changed into a grimacing marionette. Andrée is, of course, ugly, ungainly, badly dressed, and even dirty, with dubious nails and forearms: the little culture she is granted is enough to kill all her femininity; Costals assures us she is intelligent, but with every page devoted to her, Montherlant convinces us of her stupidity; Costals claims he feels sympathy for her; Montherlant renders her obnoxious. Through this clever equivocation, the idiocy of feminine intelligence is proven, and an original fall perverting all the virile qualities to which women aspire is established.

Montherlant is willing to make an exception for sportswomen; they can acquire a spirit, a soul, thanks to the autonomous exercise of their body; yet it was easy to bring them down from these heights; he delicately moves away from the thousand-meter winner to whom he devoted an enthusiastic hymn; knowing he could easily seduce her, he wanted to spare her this disgrace. Alban calls her to the top, but Dominique does not remain there; she falls in love with him: “She who had been all spirit and all soul sweated, gave off body odours, and out of breath, she cleared her throat.”
⁹
Alban chases her away, indignant. If a woman kills the flesh in her through the discipline of sports, she can still be esteemed; but an autonomous existence molded in a woman’s flesh is a repulsive scandal; feminine flesh is abhorrent
the moment a consciousness inhabits it. What is suitable for woman is to be purely flesh. Montherlant approves the Oriental attitude: as an object of pleasure, the weak sex has a place—modest, of course, but worthwhile—on earth; the pleasure it gives man justifies it, and that pleasure alone. The ideal woman is totally stupid and totally subjugated; she is always willing to welcome the man and never ask anything of him. Such was Douce, and Alban likes her when it is convenient: “Douce, admirably silly and always lusted after the sillier she is … useless outside of love and thus firmly but sweetly avoided.”
¹⁰

Such is Rhadidja, the little Arab woman, a quiet beast of love who docilely accepts pleasure and money. This “feminine beast” met on a Spanish train can thus be imagined: “She looked so idiotic that I began to desire her.”
¹¹

The author explains: “What is irritating in women is their claim to reason; if they exaggerate their animality, they border on the superhuman.”
¹²

However, Montherlant is in no way an Oriental sultan; in the first place, he does not have the sensuality. He is far from delighting in “feminine beasts” without ulterior motives; they are “sick, nasty, never really clean”;
¹³

Costals admits that young boys’ hair smelled stronger and better than women’s; Solange sometimes makes him feel sick, her “cloying, almost disgusting, smell, and this body without muscles, without nerves, like a white slug.”
¹⁴

He dreams of more worthy embraces, between equals, where gentleness was born of vanquished strength … The Oriental relishes woman voluptuously, thereby bringing about carnal reciprocity between lovers: the ardent invocations of the Song of Songs, the tales of
The Thousand and One Nights
, and so much other Arab poetry attest to the glory of the beloved; naturally, there are bad women; but there are also delicious ones, and sensual man lets himself go into their arms confidently, without feeling humiliated. But Montherlant’s hero is always on the defensive: “Take without being taken, the only acceptable formula between superior man and woman.”
¹⁵
He speaks readily about the moment of desire, an aggressive moment, a virile one; he avoids the moment of pleasure; he might find that he risks discovering he also sweated, panted, “gave off body odours”; but no, who would dare breathe in his odor, feel his
dampness? His defenseless flesh exists for no one, because there is no one opposite him: his is the only consciousness, a pure transparent and sovereign presence; and if pleasure exists for his own consciousness, he does not take it into account: it would have power over him. He speaks complacently of the pleasure he gave, never what he receives: receiving means dependence. “What I want from a woman is to give her pleasure”;
¹⁶
the living warmth of voluptuousness would imply complicity: he accepts none whatsoever; he prefers the haughty solitude of domination. He seeks cerebral, not sensual, satisfactions in women.

And the first of these is an arrogance that aspires to express itself, but without running any risks. Facing the woman, “we have the same feeling as facing the horse or the bull: the same uncertainty and the same taste
for testing one’s strength
.”
¹⁷
Testing it against other men would be risky; they would be involved in the test; they would impose unpredictable rankings, they would return an outside verdict; with a bull or a horse, one remains one’s own judge, which is infinitely safer. A woman also, if she is well chosen, remains alone opposite the man. “I don’t love in equality, because I seek the child in the woman.” This truism does not explain anything: Why does he seek the child and not the equal? Montherlant would be more sincere if he declared that he, Montherlant, does not have any equal; and more precisely that he does not want to have one: his fellow man frightens him. He admires the rigors of the Olympic Games that create hierarchies in which cheating is not possible; but he has not himself learned the lesson; in the rest of his work and life, his heroes, like him, steer clear of all confrontation: they deal with animals, landscapes, children, women-children, and never with equals. In love with the hard clarity of sports, Montherlant accepts as mistresses only those women from whom his fearful pride risks no judgment. He chooses them “passive and vegetal,” infantile, stupid, and venal. He systematically avoids granting them a consciousness: if he finds traces of one, he balks, he leaves; there is never a question of setting up any intersubjective relationship with woman: she has to be a simple animated object in man’s kingdom; she can never be envisaged as subject; her point of view can never be taken into account. Montherlant’s hero has a supposedly arrogant morality, but it is merely convenient: he is only concerned with his relations with himself. He is attached to woman—or rather he attaches woman—not to take pleasure in her but to take pleasure in himself:
as she is absolutely inferior, woman’s existence shows up the substantial, the essential, and the indestructible superiority of the male; risk-free.

So Douce’s foolishness enables Alban to “reconstruct in some way the sensations of the
ancient demigod
marrying a fabulous Goose.”
¹⁸

At Solange’s first touch, Costals changes into a mighty lion: “They had barely sat down next to each other when he put his hand on the girl’s thigh (on top of her dress), then placed it in the middle of her body
as a lion
holds his paw spread out on the piece of meat he has won.”
¹⁹

This gesture made daily by so many men in the darkness of cinemas is for Costals the “primitive gesture of the
Lord
.”
²⁰

If, like him, they had the sense of grandeur, lovers and husbands who kiss their mistresses before taking them would experience these powerful metamorphoses at low cost. “He vaguely sniffed this woman’s face,
like a lion
who, tearing at the meat he held between his paws, stops to lick it.”
²¹

This carnivorous arrogance is not the only pleasure the male gets out of his female; she is his pretext for him to experience his heart freely, spuriously, and always without risk. One night, Costals takes such pleasure in suffering that, sated with the taste of his own pain, he joyfully attacks a chicken leg. Rarely can one indulge in such a whim. But there are other powerful or subtle joys. For example, condescension; Costals condescends to answer some women’s letters, and he even sometimes does it with care; to an unimportant, enthusiastic peasant, he writes at the end of a pedantic dissertation, “I doubt that you can understand me, but that is better than if I
abase
myself to you.”
²²

He likes sometimes to shape a woman to his image: “I want you to be like an Arab scarf for me … I did not
raise
you up to me for you to be anything else but me.”
²³
It amuses him to manufacture some happy memories for Solange. But it is above all when he sleeps with a woman that he drunkenly feels his prodigality. Giver of joy, peace, heat, strength, and pleasure: these riches he doles out fill him with satisfaction. He owes nothing to his mistresses; to be absolutely sure of that, he often pays them; but even when intercourse is an equal exchange, the woman is obliged to him without reciprocity: she gives nothing, he takes. He thinks nothing of sending Solange to the bathroom the day he deflowers her; even if a woman is dearly cherished, it would be out of the question for a man to go out of his way for her; he is male by divine right,
she by divine right is doomed to the douche and bidet. Costals’s pride is such a faithful copy of caddishness that it is hard to tell him apart from a boorish traveling salesman.