Chapter 37 -2

This is the reason why women are so dazedly self-important, and so proudly flaunt the most insignificant accomplishments.They are forever looking back and wondering how far they have come, and it interrupts their journey.Following this procedure, they may find respectable careers, but not great achievements.It must also be said that many men have achieved nothing but modest occupations.It is only when we compare the best of both sexes that we feel women lag behind (with a few exceptions).The reasons I have given are fully stated, and in no way are the original pledged.What a woman lacks today, so far as great achievement is concerned, is forgetting himself; but to do that a man must first be convinced that he can find himself now and in the future.Since she has just stepped into the world of men and is pitifully placed in the second sex by men, women are still very busy looking for themselves.

There is a class of women to whom the above remarks do not apply, because their occupation, far from preventing in the slightest the affirmation of their femininity, enhances it.These women transcend their established characteristics through artistic performance; They are actors, dancers and singers. For three centuries they were almost the only women who could assert a concrete independence in society, and they still have a privileged position in society today.Previously, actresses had been excommunicated, but this extremely severe practice always recognized their great freedom of action.They are almost flirtatious, and spend as much time in the company of men as high-class courtesans; but they make a living by their work, find meaning in life in their work, and thus escape the shackles of men.They have a great advantage, that is, their professional success—as well as men's professional success—contributes to their sexual worth; For women: they are not torn between conflicting ambitions.Instead, they justify their narcissism through their careers; grooming, care for beauty, and attractiveness are part of their professional responsibilities.For a woman obsessed with her self-image, there is a great deal of satisfaction in being able to do things just by showing who she is.As Georgette LeBlanc puts it, it takes enough research and skill for such revealing to appear to be a substitute for action.The great actress will also aim higher: she will go beyond what is given by representing it; she will be a veritable artist and creator, because she gives meaning to the world as well as to the world. ruined her life.

These are rare advantages, but therein lie their pitfalls: as soon as an actress ceases to combine her unbridled narcissism and her sexual freedom with her artistic life, she will very often fall into self-worship or flirtatiousness. and I have already said that what the phony artist seeks, whether through the film or the stage, is to make himself known as capital to be exploited in the arms of men.Compared with the risks involved in occupation and the constraints involved in real work of all kinds, the conveniences of male patronage are very attractive.The desire for a woman's destiny—husband, family, children, and longing for love—is not always easily reconciled with the will to succeed.But above all, her sense of self-admiration often limits her acting achievements; she can have so many illusions of her pure acting value that serious work is useless.Her main concern is to expose herself, sacrificing the role, turning it into a melodramatic blowjob.She also lacks the broad mind to forget herself, which makes her lose the possibility of surpassing herself; artists like Yanrui and Douce are rare, they avoid such hidden reefs, and use their bodies as artistic tools instead of art. Consider them servants of themselves.

And, in the private life of the bad actress, she will amplify all narcissistic faults: she will present herself as vain, tantrum, affectation; she will see the whole world as a stage . Today, the performing arts are not the only arts open to women; many women also participate in a variety of creative activities. Woman's situation makes it easy for her to seek salvation through literature and art.Living on the fringes of the masculine world, she sees it not in terms of its general form, but from her particular point of view.For her, it is not the accumulation of tools and concepts, but the source of feelings and emotions; the hidden factors that exist for no reason in things make her interested in the quality of things.

Unable to focus on reality because of her negativity and denial, she protests it verbally.She seeks through nature the image of her soul, she wishes to gain her being—but she is doomed to be thwarted; she can recover it only in the realm of the imagination.To prevent the emptiness of a spiritual life devoid of any practical purpose, to assert her rights in the face of her unbearable given circumstances, to create a world in which she can claim her own being, she must resort to self-expression.She was also known to be a chatty and crude writer; she confides in conversations, letters and private diaries.If she was a little negative, she would be found writing memoirs, turning her biography into fiction, expressing her feelings in poetry.She has a lot of free time, which is great for this type of activity.

But the circumstances that turn a woman toward creative work are also an obstacle that she often cannot overcome.When she decides to paint or write simply to fill the emptiness of her time, painting and writing will be treated as figments of the imagination; value.Often a woman at menopause decides to pick up a paintbrush or a pen, to make up for the lack of existence; but by then it is rather late, and for want of serious training she is an amateur at best.Even if she had started early, she would not have regarded art as serious business; she had been accustomed to idleness, and had never felt the necessity of strict restraint in her way of life, so that she could not persevere, without It is possible to master a real technology.She had to make a solitary quest in vain for something that would never come out, and must have failed a hundred times and started from scratch a hundred times; when she learned to please people, she had learned from an early age In order to play tricks, she now hopes to use some means to achieve "barely passing".Marie Bashkirchev clearly admitted: "Yes, I really didn't work hard when I painted. I didn't realize until today that I was cheating." A woman is very willing to pretend to be working, but she does not Nothing worked; she believed in the uncanny efficacy of passivity, so she conflated incantations with actions, symbolic gestures with effective deeds.She calls herself a researcher of fine arts, and armed herself with a set of paintbrushes; as she sat in front of her easel, her eyes drifted from the white canvas to the mirror; on canvas.It is easy for a woman to be a writer when she sits at a table and turns vague plots in her head; but she must also actually write black words on white paper, It also makes sense to come.So the diorama was debunked.Mirages can be made for fun, but the work of art is not a mirage but a real object; and in order to shape it one must know one's own business.

Colette was not a great writer simply because of her talent and temperament; her pen was often the instrument by which she made a living, and she could only use it to write as well as the artist hoped to produce with his instrument.In writing "Claudine" and "Birthday," she turns from amateur to professional, a transition that most eloquently demonstrates the benefits of a period of rigorous training.However, most women fail to recognize the problems posed by their communicated desires; this largely explains their laziness.They always see themselves as a given, thinking that their merit comes from inner beauty, rather than that value is acquired through conquest.For the sake of seduction, they know only the means of self-expression; so whether their charms work or not, they do not interfere with its success or failure.They assume, and so on, that showing what a person is is enough for expression and communication; they develop their work not by effort but by spontaneity;

Writing or smiling doesn't matter to them; success either comes or it doesn't.If they are confident, they take it for granted that the book or picture will succeed easily; if they are timid, the slightest criticism will bring them down.Instead of realizing that mistakes can open the way forward, they see mistakes as irremediable disasters, like monstrosities.This is why they are often very irritable: they are exasperated and frustrated when they admit mistakes, without learning useful lessons from them. Unfortunately, spontaneity is not as easy to come by as it seems: the absurdity of this commonplace spontaneity (as Paulan says in "Fleur de Tabor") is that it is often associated with the directness of subjective impressions. The descriptions are mixed up.So, at the moment when she calls herself a writer and thinks she's describing the image she's formed in her own head, literally and without regard for others, all she's really doing is making up the most pedantic cliché again.If anyone told her this she would be surprised; lovely memories?

To be able to search out these recollections in one's own mind, and to express them in language that gives the most vivid impression, is a rare gift.We envy Colette's spontaneity, a spontaneity not found in any male writer; but it is her deliberate spontaneity that concerns us—though the two words together seem contradictory.She kept some of her material, always deliberately discarding the rest.The amateur woman writer sees language not as a means of interpersonal communication, as a means of infecting others, but as a way of directly revealing her own emotions; in her view, to select and delete is to abandon her a part of herself; she did not wish to sacrifice any of the words she had written, because the kind of person she was was pleasing to her, and because she did not wish to be any other kind.Her fruitless vanity arose from the fact that she liked herself too much to dissect herself.

Therefore, only a few of these women who play with art and literature can persevere to the end; some people will often continue to be torn between narcissism and inferiority complex even if they have crossed the first obstacle.The inability to forget oneself is a shortcoming that weighs more heavily on them than on other working women.If their chief object is self-affirmation in the abstract, if they are satisfied with superficial success, they will not be absorbed in the world, and therefore they will not be able to transform the world through art.Marie Bashkirchev decided to paint because she wanted to be famous, and her obsession with becoming famous shut her off from reality.She doesn't really like painting: art is only a means; her revenge and empty dreams don't reveal to her the meaning of colors or pictures.Instead of giving generously to the work she does, a woman too often sees it as no more than an adornment of her life; painting and calligraphy are merely some secondary means by which she publicly reveals her primary reality—her own self.And, only her own self, is her most important (and sometimes only) concern: Madame Viger-Le Brun tirelessly brings her sweet motherhood to the canvas.A woman writer is constantly talking about herself, even on general matters, so that one cannot know what she thinks about her hair color, her character traits, without reading about the author's size and fatness. made dramatic comments.

Of course, this ego is not always a pity.Few books are more touching than some confessional writings, but they must be sincere, and the author must have something to confess.Woman's narcissism impoverishes her instead of enriching her; she annihilates herself by doing nothing but self-interest; even her self-love is fixed: what she reveals in her work is not her A real experience, but an imaginary idol set up with clichés.One would not blame her for projecting herself into her novels, as Constanta or Stendhal did; but the trouble is that she too often sees her history as a boring fairy tale.With the help of imagination, the maiden conceals from herself a reality whose cruelty terrifies her, but sadly, as she gradually becomes a woman, she still shrouds the world, her identity, and herself in a poetic fog.When the truth emerges from under a serious veil, the effect is sometimes exceedingly pleasing; but how many such boring escapist novels as Dust and The Eternal Nymphs are! It is natural for a woman to want to escape a world that often makes her feel slighted and misunderstood; it is just a pity that she dare not be like Gérard de Neval or Edgar Allan Bo run away so boldly.There are many valid reasons for her timidity.Pleasing was her first concern; she was also often worried that she would be an unpleasant woman simply by the fact that she wrote;day, but still with hateful undertones; Besides, she didn't have the guts to be an unpleasant writer.An original writer is always astounding, always maligned, unless he is dead; the new is always disturbing and repulsive.Women are also amazed and delighted at being recognized by the world of thought, art, that is, the world of men.She behaved with the utmost care lest she should lose her footing, lest she be investigated, lest she be found out; and she felt that she ought to be excused for her literary pretensions by means of her modesty and elegance.She guarantees a solid value in consistency; she gives literature exactly the personal touch one would expect of her, and reminds us, in a selection of beautiful, artificial, polished words, that she is a woman.All of this led her to excel at writing best-selling novels; But we should not expect her to venture on unfamiliar roads. It's not that these independent women are not unique in their behavior or feelings; on the contrary, some are so unique that they should be locked up; Abnormal; But they use their strange genius in their way of life, in their phrasing, in their correspondence; and if they write, they are at a loss for the world of culture, for it is a man's The world, so they can only stammer.On the other hand, if a woman is willing to reason and express herself in a masculine way, she will be bent on stifling the uniqueness which she has reason to disbelieve; she is as prone to caution and pedantry as the schoolgirl; So she will imitate the rigor and boldness of men.She can become an excellent theorist, and can acquire veritable abilities; But she's going to have to let go of anything "different" about her.Some women are mad, some women have sound reason, but no one has both that madness and that reason which we call genius. Above all, this tempered rationality still limits women's talents to this day.Many women have been escaping, and are now increasingly escaping, the traps of narcissism and the magic of falsehood; but no one has ever fully flouted prudence and tried to appear outside the established world.First of all, of course there are many who just accept society as it is; they are the great poetesses of the bourgeoisie because they are the most conservative elements of this threatened class.They refine the civilization of the so-called "upper class" with selected words; they praise the happy ideals of the middle class, and use poetic colorful colors to cover up the interests of their own class; It's about persuading women to "remain femininity."Old houses, sheepfolds and vegetable gardens.Old people with outstanding personalities, naughty children, washing, pickling, family gatherings. Cosmetics, the drawing room, the ball, the wretched but typical wife, the virtues of devotion and sacrifice, a slightly disaffected but very happy married love, girlhood dreams, maternal resignation—these are England, France, America , Canadian and Scandinavian novelists have long exhausted themes; that is how they earned fame and fortune, but certainly not enriched our view of the world. What's more interesting is that rebellious women have already challenged this unjust society; the literature of protest can breed sincere and powerful works; based on the psychology of rebellion, George Eliot described Victorian England in detail and dramatically. scene; nevertheless, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot, as Virginia Woolf lets us see, had to expend so much energy passively in order to escape the shackles of appearances so much so that they are a little out of breath when they reach the beginnings of visionary male writers; they have no strength left to exploit their victories, nor to break all the rules that prevent their progress.For example, we find neither Stendhal's sarcasm and lightheartedness nor his poise and sincerity in them.Besides, they don't have the experience of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and the like: that's why "On the March", brilliant as it is, cannot be compared with Wuthering Heights. As grand as it is, it doesn't have the expansive vision of The Brothers Karamazov. Today, it is not difficult for women to assert their rights; but they have not yet fully overcome the age-old gender constraints that insulate them from femininity.For example, having a clear head is a triumph they should be proud of, but they are too quick to settle for that.In fact, the traditional woman is a deceiver and a deceiver; she tries to hide her dependence from herself, and this is one way in which she approves of it.Exposure of this attachment is liberating in itself; sharp-eyed cynicism is a defense against humiliation and shame, so it is the accretion of the initial manifestation.By pursuing a sharp eye, women writers are doing an important service to the cause of women; often without realizing it, they are too interested in serving the cause to be disinterested in the vast world .They think they have done enough when they strip the veil of illusion and deceit; but this passive boldness still confronts us with a mystery, because truth itself is ambiguous, inscrutable, mysterious. What: Once stated, it must be completely rethought, reshaped.It's all about not being fooled, but then it starts all over again.The woman's courage to expel fantasy has failed, and she remains terrified on the threshold of reality. It is for this reason that there exist, for example, sincerely charming autobiographies of women; but none can compare with Rousseau's and Stendhal's Memoirs of the Adoration of Self.We are still too keen to see the truth to look through the darkness and go beyond descriptions. "Women are never more than appearances," one writer told me.That's very true.They're still amazed by the phenomena it's possible to explore in this world, so they take inventory of them instead of trying to discover their meaning.Sometimes they are good at observing facts - known things.They can make high-profile journalists; no male reporter, for example, can top André Violise's coverage of Indochina and India.Women can describe atmospheres and characters, can point out the subtle relationships between characters, and can make us feel their inner turmoil as well.Vera Cather, Edith Wharton, and Dorothy Parker all describe characters and places with clarity and sensitivity.Their heroes are seldom as convincing as Heathcliff: their knowledge of a man is limited to the fact that he is a man.But they are often good at describing their own inner life, their experience, and their own world; although they pay attention to the hidden nature of things and are obsessed with their own strange feelings, they still enthusiastically use intriguing words and mundane image metaphors to describe express their own experiences.Their vocabulary is often more striking than their syntax, for they are interested in things, not in their relations; they fail in elegant abstractions, but they compensate by hitting the point at once . Nature is one of their favorite areas to explore.Nature means to the girl, to the woman who has not fully surrendered, what woman herself means to man, namely, herself and her negation, a kingdom and a place of exile; everything that pretends to be other .It is when speaking of moors and gardens that the novelist reveals to us her experiences and dreams with the utmost tenderness.Many of them sealed miraculous life and seasons in basins, vases, and gardens; Others, though not shutting up plants and animals, still strive to make them their own, through the loving close observation of Colette or Catherine Mansfield.In fact, only a very few people can face up to the dehumanized freedom in nature, try to decipher its foreign meaning, and are keen to combine with the existence of this other: except Emily Bronte. Virginia Woolf and Mary Weber did it occasionally, and few ventured along the path blazed by Rousseau. We have even more reason to believe that there are only a handful of women who straddle the established existence and explore its mystery: only Emily challenged death, only Virginia Woolf questioned life, and only Catherine Mansfield (not very often) in doubting the chances and pains of everyday life.No woman has ever written quite like The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Women don't fight for the human condition because they haven't accepted it.This also explains why their work is largely devoid of both supernatural resonance and outrage; they don't make sense of the world in passing, they don't ask it questions, they don't expose its contradictions: they take it as if they were taking it too seriously.It should be said that most men share this limitation; when we compare an accomplished woman with the very few men who should be called "great", she appears mediocre.It is not a special fate that limits her: we can easily understand why she has not reached (for the time being it is impossible to reach) the highest pinnacle. Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to recreate the world with the freedom of man, with the individual freedom of the Creator; and to do this a man must, from the very beginning, accept unequivocally that he is a free man. the status of the person.The constraints imposed upon woman by education and custom are limiting her grasp of the world; and when the struggle to find one's place in it is too great, no doubt one turns away from it.Now, if anyone wants to try to recapture this struggle, one must first pass from it into a sovereign solitude: woman must first begin, painfully and proudly, in her indulgence and transcendence—that is, in Internships on the free side. What I long for, [Mary Bashkirchev writes], is to be free to go for solitary walks, to be free to walk about, to be free to sit on a bench in Tillerier's garden.Without this freedom, you cannot be a true artist.When you are with someone, when you have to wait for your partner, your family, do you think you can take advantage of what you see? ! ... This is the minimum freedom without which you cannot do something important seriously and successfully.With that stupid constant repression, the mind is put in chains... that's enough to make your wings droop.This is the main reason why there are no female artists. In fact, to be a creative artist, cultivation alone is not enough—that is, it is not enough to make exhibitions and materials a part of his life.Culture can only be understood through free and transcendent action; That is, the free spirit, however rich it may be, must throw itself into the heaven of nothingness, and dwell there; but if a thousand fetters keep it in the earth, its strong impulses are thwarted.Today, the girl can go out alone and wander in the gardens of Tillerier, but as I said, the streets are full of hostility to her, and there are glances and movements trying to make something; If she wandered carelessly and thoughtlessly, if she lit a cigarette in front of a café, if she went to the movies alone, something unpleasant might happen right away.She can only command respect through clothes and manners, but this prejudice also firmly anchors her to the ground and herself, "making your wings droop." T.E. Lawrence cycled solo across France at the age of 18; no teenage girl would be allowed to take part in any of these escapades, let alone a treacherous trek through a semi-desert country, as Lawrence later did up.Yet such experiences are invaluable: through them, a man, while intoxicated with freedom and discovery, learns to regard the whole earth as his domain. Because of her nature, woman is at all times deprived of the right to learn violence: I have pointed out how her weak muscles tended her to passivity.When a boy settles a dispute with his fists, he feels capable of taking care of himself; as a compensation, at least a girl should be allowed to know what it is like to take the initiative in sports and adventure, when she tastes the pride of overcoming adversity. a feeling of.But she doesn't quite know now.She may feel that she is alone in the world, but it is impossible for her to stand upright before the world as the sole and sovereign.Everything affects her, traps her in herself, makes her subject to beings outside her own being—especially in love, she gives up her rights instead of claiming them.In this sense, being unlucky or unattractive is often a blessing in disguise.It was isolation that enabled Emily Brown to write wild and powerful writing; she had no support but her own resources in her struggle against nature, death, and fate.Rosa Luxemburg is ugly, so she has no desire to indulge in a cult of self-image, to turn herself into an object, a pig, a trap; she has been completely spiritual and free since her youth.Even so, it is still very rare for a woman to fully bear the pain of facing the given world directly.All the repressions she felt everywhere, the whole tradition that overwhelmed her, made her unable to feel responsible for the world, and this was the root cause of her mediocrity. Those men we call great men, who in one way or another have carried the world on their shoulders; they may have done it well or they may have done it badly, they may have succeeded in rebuilding the world or they may have been overthrown; but first they This enormous burden has been borne.This is something no woman has ever done, and it is something no woman can do.A man who considers the world his own, responsible for its ills, and proud of its progress, must belong to a class of privilege; the world; only they can know themselves through it and try to make their stamp on it.Hitherto, the possible incarnation of Man has been man rather than woman.For those men whom we regard as supremely illustrious, those who have been conferred the title of genius, are already intending to determine the fate of all mankind by their individual existence, and at the same time no woman considers herself entitled to do so. How could Van Gogh be born a woman?A woman would not be sent to perform a mission in the Belgian Coal Mine in Bergnej, would not feel that the miserable life of the coal miners was her own sin, and would not think of atonement; therefore, she would never paint Come out of Van Gogh's "Sunflower".Not to mention that she was not allowed to live the painter's way of life—the solitude at Allers, the frequent visits to cafés and brothels, all of which nurtured Van Gogh's sensibility and at the same time his the art of. Nor can woman ever be Kafka: she never experiences, through doubt and anxiety, the anguish felt by Man who is expelled from Paradise.With the exception of St. Teresa, few women could have completely indulged themselves in the human situation: we have seen why.When set her footing outside the earthly ranks, she feels, like St. John of the Cross, that there is no ceiling above her head.Both have the same darkness, the same light, the same emptiness of self, the same fullness of God.If everyone can finally not take the difference between the sexes as an honor and disgrace, but take pride in the glory of the freedom of existence that he has fought so hard for, then a woman will only be able to share her personal history, her problems, her doubts, her hopes, identified with human history, problems, doubts and hopes; then she will only seek to reveal the whole of reality in her life and work, not just her personal self.She cannot be a creator as long as she still has to struggle to be a human being. The problem, again, is that to explain woman's limitations one must refer to her situation, not to some mystical essence; the future thus remains largely open.On this issue, writers have scrambled to insist that women have no "creative genius"; this argument was defended by the formerly notorious anti-feminist Mrs. Becoming living proof of the illogicality and stupidity of women, so her book is paradoxical. And, like the notion of "eternal femininity," the notion of a creative "instinct" must be crossed off the list of entities considered.Some misogynists hold somewhat concretely that women are incapable of creating anything worth creating by being neurotic; but they also tend to declare that geniuses are neurotic.In any case, Proust's example makes it abundantly clear that psychophysiological imbalance implies neither lack of strength nor mediocrity. As for the argument from history, we have just discussed what aspects of it should be taken into account; historical facts cannot be supposed to have established eternal truths; just because these facts change, it can only indicate that the situation is in fact historical.How can there be genius among women when it is impossible for women to do the work of genius (or only a kind of work)?Old Europe held great contempt for the American savages, thinking that they could boast neither of being an artist nor of being a writer. "Before we plead for our own existence, let us begin to exist!" Jefferson replied emphatically.Negroes in America responded in the same way to the racists who accused them of never being able to produce a Whitman or a Melville.It is also impossible for the French proletariat to come up with a name on par with Racine or Mallarme. The free woman is being born; once she has won ownership of herself, perhaps Rambo's prophecy will be fulfilled: "Among them poets will appear! To live for and through herself, and she too will be a poet when men (they are still hateful) let her go! Women will discover the unknown!Is there any difference between her conceptual world and ours?She will encounter the strange, the esoteric, the repelling.愉快的事物：我们将占有它们，我们将认识它们。 ”她的“观念世界”未必就和男人的不一样，因为她只有获得和他们一样的处境，才会得到解放；说她在何种程度上仍然是有差别的，说这些差别在何种程度上仍有其重要性——这其实是在碰碰大胆推断的运气。可以肯定的是，迄今为止，女人的发展前景一直在受着压制并且丧失了人性，现在是时候了，让她为了她自己的利益，为了全人类的利益去冒险吧！