The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  On September 23, 1862, Sophia gets married and leaves her family in the evening:

  A difficult and painful feeling gripped my throat and held me tight. I then felt that the time had come to leave forever my family and all those I loved deeply and with whom I had always lived … The farewells began and were ghastly … Now the last minutes. I had intentionally reserved the farewells to my mother till the end … When I pulled myself from her embrace and without turning around I went to take my place in the car, she uttered a heart-rending cry I have never forgotten all my life. Autumn rain did not cease to fall … Huddled in my corner, overwhelmed with fatigue and sorrow, I let my tears flow. Leon Nikolaivitch seemed very surprised, even discontent … When we left the city, I felt in the depths a sentiment of fear … The darkness oppressed me. We barely said anything to each other until the first stop, Birioulev, if I am not mistaken. I remember that Leon Nikolaivitch was very tender and attentive to my every need. At Birioulev, we were given the rooms said to be for the tsar, big rooms with furniture upholstered in red rep that was not very welcoming. We were brought the samovar. Cuddled up in a corner of the couch, I kept silent as a condemned person. “Well!” said Leon Nikolaivitch to me, “if you did the honors.” I obeyed and served the tea. I was upset and could not free myself from a kind of fear. I did not dare address Leon Nikolaivitch in the familiar form and avoided calling him by his name. For a long time I continued to use the formal form.

  Twenty-four hours later, they arrive at Yasnaya Polyana. She resumes her diary again on October 8. She feels anxious. She suffers from the fact that her husband has a past:

  I always dreamt of the man I would love as a completely whole, new pure, person … in these childish dreams, which I still find hard to give up … When he kisses me I am always thinking, “I am not the first woman he has loved.”

  The following day she notes:

  I feel downcast all the same. I had such a depressing dream last night, and it is weighing on me, although I do not remember it in detail. I thought of Maman today and grew dreadfully sad … I seem to be asleep all the time and unable to wake up … Something is weighing on me. I keep thinking that at any moment I might die. It is so strange to be thinking such things now that I have a husband. I can hear him in there sleeping. I am frightened of being on my own. He will not let me go into his room, which makes me very sad. All physical things disgust him.

  October 11: I am terribly, terribly sad, and withdrawing further and further into myself. My husband is ill and out of sorts and doesn’t love me. I expected this, yet I could never have imagined it would be so terrible. Why do people always think I am so happy? What no one seems to realize is that I cannot create happiness, either for him or for myself. Before when I was feeling miserable I would ask myself, “What is the use of living when you make others unhappy and yourself wretched?” This thought keeps recurring to me now, and I am terrified. He grows colder and colder every day, while I, on the contrary, love him more and more … I keep thinking of my own family and how happy my life was with them; now, my God, it breaks my heart to think that nobody loves me. Darling Mother, Tanya—what wonderful people they were, why did I ever leave them?… it gnaws at my conscience … Lyovochka is a wonderful man … Now I have lost everything I once possessed, all my energy for work, life, and household tasks has been wasted. Now I want only to sit in silence all day, doing nothing but think bitter thoughts. I wanted to do some work, but could not; … I long to play the piano but it is so awkward in this place … He suggested today that I stay at home while he went off to Nikolskoe. I should have agreed and set him free from my presence, but I simply could not … Poor man, he is always looking for something to divert him and take him away from me. What is the point of living?

  November 13: It is true, I cannot find anything to occupy me. He is fortunate because he is talented and clever. I am neither … It is not difficult to find work, there is plenty to do, but first you have to enjoy such petty household tasks as breeding hens, tinkling on the piano, reading a lot of fourth-rate books and precious good ones, and pickling cucumbers. I am asleep now, since nothing brings me any excitement or joy—neither the trip to Moscow nor the thought of the baby. I wish I could take some remedy to refresh me and wake me up …

  It is terrible to be alone. I am not used to it. There was so much life and love at home, and it’s so lifeless here without him. He is almost always on his own … He … finds pleasure not in the company of those close to him, as I do, but in his work … he never had a family.

  November 23: … Of course I am idle at present, but I am not so by nature; I simply have not discovered anything I could do … Sometimes I long to break free of his rather oppressive influence and stop worrying about him, but I cannot. I find his influence oppressive because I have begun thinking his thoughts and seeing with his eyes, trying to become like him, and losing myself. And I have changed too, which makes it even harder for me.

  April 1: I have a very great misfortune: I have no inner resources to draw on … Lyova has his work and the estate to think about while I have nothing … What am I good for? I would like to do more, something real. At this wonderful time of year, I always used to long for things, aspire to things, dream about God knows what. But I no longer need anything, no longer have those foolish aspirations, for I know instinctively that I have all I need now and there is nothing left to strive for … Everything seems stupid now and I get irritable.

  April 20:* … Lyova ignores me more and more. The physical side of love is very important for him. This is terrible, for me it is quite the opposite.

  It is clear, during these first six months, that the young woman is suffering from her separation from her family, from solitude, and from the definitive turn her destiny has taken; she detests her physical relations with her husband, and she is bored. This is the same ennui Colette’s mother feels to the point of tears after the first marriage her brothers imposed on her:

  So she left the cosy Belgian house, the cellar-kitchen that smelled of gas, warm bread and coffee; she left her piano, her violin, the big Salvator Rosa she had inherited from her father, the tobacco jar and the fine long-stemmed clay pipes, the coke braziers, the books that lay open and the crumpled newspapers, and as a new bride entered the house with its flight of steps, isolated by the harsh winter of the forest lands all around … Here she found, to her surprise, a white and gold living room on the ground floor, but a first floor with barely even rough-cast walls, as abandoned as a loft … the bedrooms were icy-cold and prompted no thoughts of either love or sweet sleep … Sido, who longed for friends and an innocent and cheerful social life, found on her estate only servants, cunning farmers … She filled the big house with flowers, had the dark kitchen whitewashed, oversaw in person the preparation of the Flemish dishes, kneaded cakes with raisins and looked forward to having her first child. The savage would smile at her between two outings and then set off once more … When she had exhausted her tasty recipes, her patience and her furniture polish, Sido—who had grown thin with loneliness—started to cry.34

  In Lettres à Françoise mariée (Letters to Françoise, Married), Marcel Prévost describes the young woman’s dismay upon her return from her honeymoon:

  She thinks of her mother’s apartment with its Napoleon III and MacMahon furniture, its plush velvet, its wardrobes in black plum wood, everything she judged so old-fashioned, so ridiculous … In one instant all of that is evoked in her memory as a real haven, a true nest, the nest where she was watched over with disinterested tenderness, sheltered from all storms and danger. This apartment with its new-carpet smell, its unadorned windows, the chairs in disarray, its whole air of improvisation and haste, no; it is not a nest. It is only the place of the nest that has to be built … she suddenly felt horribly sad, as if she had been abandoned in a desert.

  This distress is what often causes long depressions and various psychoses in the young woman. In particular, in the guise of different psychasthenic obsessions, she fe
els the giddiness of her empty freedom; she develops, for example, fantasies of prostitution we have already seen in young girls. Pierre Janet cites the case of a young bride who could not stand being alone in her apartment because she was tempted to go to the window and wink at passersby.35

  Others remain abulic faced with a universe that “no longer seems real,” peopled only with ghosts and painted cardboard sets. There are those who try to refuse their adulthood, who will obstinately persist in refusing it their whole lives, like another patient whom Janet designates with the initials Qi:

  Qi, a thirty-six-year-old woman, is obsessed by the idea that she is a little ten- to twelve-year-old girl; especially when she is alone, she lets herself jump, laugh, dance; she lets her hair down, lets it loose on her shoulders, sometimes cuts it in places. She would like to lose herself completely in this dream of being a child: It is so unfortunate that she cannot play hide-and-seek, play tricks … in front of everyone … “I would like people to think I am nice, I am afraid of being the ugly duckling, I would like to be liked, talked to, petted, to be constantly told that I am loved as one loves little children … A child is loved for his mischievousness, for his good little heart, for his kindness, and what is asked of him in return? To love you, nothing more. That is what is good, but I cannot say that to my husband, he would not understand me. Look, I would so much like to be a little girl, have a father or a mother who would take me on their lap, caress my hair … but no, I am Madame, a mother; I have to keep the home, be serious, think on my own, oh, what a life!”36

  Marriage is often a crisis for man as well: the proof is that many masculine psychoses develop during the engagement period or the early period of conjugal life. Less attached to his family than his sisters are, the young man belongs to some group: a special school, a university, a guild, a team, something that protects him from loneliness; he leaves it behind to begin his real existence as an adult; he is apprehensive of his future solitude, and it is often to exorcise it that he gets married. But he is fooled by the illusion maintained by the whole community that depicts the couple as a “conjugal society.” Except in the brief fire of a passionate affair, two individuals cannot form a world that protects each of them against the world: this is what they both feel the day after the wedding. The wife, soon familiar, subjugated, does not obstruct her husband’s freedom: she is a burden, not an alibi; she does not free him from the weight of his responsibilities, but on the contrary she exacerbates them. The difference of the sexes often means differences in age, education, and situation that do not bring about any real understanding: familiar, the spouses are still strangers. Previously, there was often a real chasm between them: the young girl, raised in a state of ignorance and innocence, had no “past,” while her fiancé had “lived”; it was up to him to initiate her into the reality of life. Some males feel flattered by this delicate role; more lucid, they warily measure the distance that separates them from their future companion. In her novel The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton describes the scruples of a young American of 1870 concerning the woman destined for him:

  With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger … What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?… The young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called “the facts of life” … But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product … so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

  Today, the gap is not as wide because the young girl is a less artificial being; she is better informed, better armed for life. But she is often much younger than her husband. The importance of this point has not been emphasized enough; the consequences of an unequal maturity are often taken as differences of sex; in many cases the wife is a child not because she is a woman but because she is in fact very young. The seriousness of her husband and his friends overwhelms her. Sophia Tolstoy wrote about one year after her wedding day:

  He is old and self-absorbed, whereas I feel young and long to do something wild. I’d like to turn somersaults instead of going to bed. But with whom?

  Old age hovers over me; everything here is old. I try to suppress all youthful feelings, for they would seem odd and out of place in this somber environment.*

  As for the husband, he sees a “baby” in his wife; for him she is not the companion he expected, and he makes her feel it; she is humiliated by it. No doubt she likes finding a guide when she leaves her father’s home, but she also wants to be seen as a “grown-up”; she wants to remain a child, she wants to become a woman; her older spouse can never treat her in a way that totally satisfies her.

  Even if their age difference is slight, the fact remains that the young woman and young man have generally been brought up very differently; she is the product of a feminine universe where she was inculcated with feminine sagacity and respect for feminine values, whereas he is imbued with the male ethic. It is often very difficult for them to understand each other, and conflicts soon arise.

  Because marriage usually subordinates the wife to the husband, the intensity of the problem of conjugal relations rests mainly on her. The paradox of marriage is that it brings into play an erotic function as well as a social one: this ambivalence is reflected in the figure the husband presents to the young wife. He is a demigod endowed with virile prestige and destined to replace her father: protector, overseer, tutor, guide; the wife has to thrive in his shadow; he is the holder of values, the guarantor of truth, the ethical justification of the couple. But he is also a male with whom she must share an experience often shameful, bizarre, disgusting, or upsetting, and, in any case, contingent; he invites his wife to wallow with him in bestiality while directing her with a strong hand toward the ideal.

  One night in Paris—where they had come on their return journey—Bernard made a show of walking out of a nightclub, shocked at the revue: “To think that foreign visitors will see that! What shame! And that’s how they’ll judge us …” Thérèse could only marvel that this so chaste man was the same one who would be making her submit, in less than an hour, to his patient inventions in the dark.37