THE MUDDY waves of American self-reproach beat upon the European shores again. Nothing seems to have happened in thirty years. The postwar generation of young Americans is back in Europe, but it has skipped the last war and everything goes on reassuringly as before, the needle is stuck in a conversation from The Sun Also Rises. Comfortable with government funds or savings, there is nevertheless often a shy and wistful glance beneath the crew-cut—these new expatriates seek after all a place in time, the consolations of history. Conservative, like a reluctant old Victorian gentleman they cling to their past, the bad old times, an original stew of the 1920s and ‘30s. Sighing, they find themselves and their ideas among the dear, remembered deprivations of their parents’ lives: starving, disenfranchised workers, the outlawed artist, apple-sellers on the street, fascism just around the corner, the shamefully rich owners of production insisting upon a new war. It is touching—so history is preserved in character.
But there is too much of it and in the historical attitude there are always footnote disagreements. It is easier to take simply one unchallenged notion—our own and the consequent European horror of the American girl, who is also away from home by the thousands, dog-paddling in the European waters, gasping and calling out helplessly, “Me, I’m different. Don’t think I’m like the others, please!”
In a French café an alarmed and somewhat shabby French girl accompanies an American “painter” in blue-jean battledress. “She looks after him. She’s not spoiled like American women.” The other Americans yearningly approve his luck. A Frenchman with a stunning companion arouses envy. No one knows quite what they may be talking about—the depths of this dialogue are not to be plumbed with hotel and restaurant French—but no matter. Who could fail to note that shot of stimulating benzedrine that must be in the French woman’s conversation, her “active” listening, her artistic prodding here and there, her smile of comprehension and fascination? “What animation!” the American boys say, their eyes popping. And then there is the more earthbound type of young American—oh, the Italian girl’s exquisite, rumpled, and plump submission to fate!
“But your women are so cold!” the French say and we nod bleakly. The Italians shudder. “I’m afraid of them, they want so many things all the time. Our girls are not like that.” Only the Turks, with their scarecrows in colored rags doing all the work in the fields, seem to feel a disgust with the native product equal to ours; and there it is not so much a comparison with foreign brands that arouses their scorn as the comparison with their male selves snoozing in the cafés.
No one could cast doubt on the obvious and tremendous charms of European women, but the licentious familiarity with the subject of American women that is commonly undertaken, the repetitive exchanges, fill one with gloom, this eternal dining on stale cake. Perhaps verbal liberties are the only conceivable ones, since the woman in reality is held to be so fleshless, bleak, and buried that other intimacies are unthinkable—the violation of a corpse. She appears as a creature of legend, the snow queen—tall, beautiful, appallingly splendid, all cleanliness and whiteness, living in her empty, silent, frigid palace. Her kisses freeze the heart, her wintry smiles hide a depreciation, her glittering, spotless, squeamish magnificence lulls one to the soft slumber that kills. Criticism and horror of her are the cries of the root and bud, the crackling of the frozen earth longing for a Latin sun; nature screams, but she does not listen. Unapproachable, self-isolated, she is nevertheless as restless and rapacious as a terrible cold wind, and, as in the fairy tale, the little boy can only be released from this glacial death by the hot tears of love—a foreign love.
This threatening apparition has the persistence of a folk belief, a native wonder of the world, exported along with the cowboys and gangsters to other countries. The foreign traveler to America is no doubt fascinated. Skyscrapers, energy, wealth, automobiles—these at least can be seen; their weight, undeniability, even their moral content (the obvious is also sometimes true) may reasonably chagrin the stranger who prefers in well-known places to refute common observation, even his own at times, in favor of a fresh judgment. At first glance the American woman he has heard about—and she is our own creation —is not on view. Something fantastically contrary meets the eye: the informal, independent, lively American girl whose manner recalls the old evangelists swinging over the Sunday circuit. Far from realizing the wicked somnambulist, she must seem self-confidently forward and as incurably folksy as a peasant. But her very contrariness to expectation only serves to make the legend more profoundly appealing; it becomes not a mere fact of experience but a serious, subtle observation hidden to superficial knowledge. This naive, friendly surface is a disguise, we are told, a marvelous baroque invention masking a soul shriveled by Puritanism and vanity swollen by leisure and power. Bold and generous in appearance, it was a difficult act of the imagination for the American intellectuals, both men and women, to discover that this ordinary woman was in truth as greedy and anarchic as an infant. It is nearly impossible to think of her as a mother, but even that has been made so painless in her belief that a new conscience-stricken generation takes lessons from the doctor in how to have a baby without modern aids, like a pioneer woman in a lonely cabin.
Mrs. Trollope describes the life of a rich Philadelphia lady in the 1820s. The lady has a handsome house with elegant furnishings, servants, and abundant leisure, but her existence is as cheerless and repetitive as a squaw’s. She does her needlework, goes to the missionary society in the afternoon, where she has bare bland conversations with other privileged Philadelphia ladies, and no conversation at all with her Husband, who returns from his work in the evenings, “shakes hands with her, spits, and dines.” Mrs. Trollope regrets the lack of social drama in this destiny, yet even this unbroken, dreary life, calm and endless as the prairie, must seem one of excellent serenity to the young American man of the present—at least it spares him the frustrated expectation and consequent peevishness he professes to find in every American woman now.
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The contemporary woman supposedly lives in a solar emptiness warmed occasionally by the dim sounds of the soap opera, and of this fearful nothingness she, and not her husband, is the complete master. Bored and idle, she may play bridge in the afternoon, but even the card game is only a pantomime, a wordless ballet simulating sociability, for she has no true friendship or communication with other women. Her evenings are more interesting because they suggest the rudiments of social intercourse, although always an exchange of remarkable hardness and intimidation. Silence often prevails because she cannot discuss business, politics, or art, but the silence is poisonous; it demands, defies, and dominates with the power of some querulous, bitter, festering law of her own spirit. The evenings end with a triumph, which means she has easily found a way to attack her husband’s self-esteem before she retires to the twin beds. It would not be believed if it were suggested that this creature, in between barks and bites, does three times as much housework as the European woman of the same class and purse, who gloriously does none at all, enjoying placidly the comforts of a $12-a-week full-time French slave or the $12-a-month nunlike, dawn-to-midnight, devotions of the Italian domestic.
But this is only the Vogue model, captured like an Ivory Soap carving as the American Wife. There are other images of the American woman that haunt and belittle the American man and chill the Europeans—one is that absurd busybody knocking at the door of culture, or only killing time in the drowsy afternoon lecture hall, a sour figure with a roll of concert tickets in her over-the-shoulder bag. Even to see her toiling up the steps of foreign museums makes us wince—we have seen her before, so many times, in travel books and English novels, mispronouncing the names, grabbing it all with that overwhelming denseness and energy. Americans laugh shrilly at this yearning mind because of the closeness of the young men, particularly the articulate ones, to the sensibilities of the mother. Dancing lessons, piano exercises, the drawing box, illustrated classics, and children’s encyclopedias—these things embarrass us sorely. The effort, the effort! we remember shamefully, seeing it all as rather priggish and unreal; in Europe, however, Americans begin to think learning and art are breathed in, unconsciously, from the atmosphere, and even though the grossly unmoving modern pink and blue Virgin on the most beautiful, ancient altar is a slap in the face, we soon, by a miracle of hospitality, forget it and only our own contemporary bad taste remains.
But what is so much to be scorned after all in this culture-eager woman? Women are always, according to Schopenhauer, the guardians of the spirit; this hunger for art and excitement is a “natural” role, the very opposite of a humiliating compensation for sexual denials. We sympathize with the peasant woman in fiction who saves her egg money so that her son may become a gentleman in the city, or treasures some little book or picture or gift that will stimulate her children to a less laborious and more intellectual life. Yet the moonstruck wife of a prosperous businessman who clings to her pure and “inspiring” friendship with a weak but gifted young man, reads novels, and likes to discuss the theater is condemned as unbalanced. Her eager and, of course, too freely given appreciation of “fine things” in no way preempts the male prerogative, which is still the grand one of the highest creator of art, philosophy, and science. (That this should still be true for women, after the vote, freedom, wider experience, is one of the jokes of history.)
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A recent European testimony, Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Amérique au jour le jour, comes upon the subject of American women with a bald and instructive directness. A busy observer in her own right, this author’s impressions are not confined to sight, but modified by her knowledge of prevailing intellectual opinion in America and particularly by American self-criticism. This criticism is a spectacular cultural achievement and to try to disavow it in the formation of one’s own mind and opinion is altogether fruitless and stunting. Disagreement with a specific point of the acid verdict is not likely with us to be a wholesale endorsement of the national character so much as a criticism of a criticism, a yearly revision that seldom disturbs the basic text.
Mlle de Beauvoir’s firsthand impressions of American women are so cordial that they have, in this way, a kind of originality. She notes the women’s clean hair, amazing health, the good humor of the college girls, their spontaneity, courtesy, goodwill, and their conversational freedom without impudence. With more than a hint of irony, de Tocqueville, a century back, declared himself “frequently surprised and almost frightened at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to manage their thoughts and their language amid all the difficulties of free conversation. . . .”
The amiable details in Simone de Beauvoir’s picture have considerable weight, but in terms of the whole they are merely flashes of bright color that make an abandoned landscape seem more desolate. It would, perhaps, be impertinent for a stranger to ignore the attitude of the Americans to whom she talked and whom she had read, and so, against the uncertain evidence of the senses, the venerated, hostile opinion asserts itself. She notes the rancorous accent in which American men talk about women and remembers that it is a commonplace for them to say the women are frigid; she talks of the battle of the sexes, the frustration of the women, the absence of purpose in their lives, the fact that American men don’t like them. And the most overwhelming statement is this: “The tragedy of those who have discovered passionate love in Europe and can no longer live with their cold husbands or wives is a stereotype.”
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The buzz of this theme song is certainly very loud among American intellectuals, but, at its best, it is a miserly way of expressing the American character even in its Puritan aspect and omits the fact that the Puritan heritage is complex, varied, culturally expressive. True, to the American, the voluptuary suggests the pathological—with us love is not an “art,” nakedness not without its embarrassments, the body often an uneasy and improbable partner of the soul. We do not have the instinct or the habit of the rich and elaborate European flirtation, the gift for relaxed psychosexual drama. The American finds many things outrageously comical that are at the very heart of the European romance. Seeing this, not in fact, but in a parody comparable to the parody we present of ourselves for Europe, we cannot quite take comfortably the heavy-lidded coquetry of the middle-aged French couple (one of Europe’s advantages being the recognition that ardent feelings do not disappear at twenty-five), the dark wisdom of the experienced matron with her opportune flatteries one moment and her tolerant smiles another, the luxurious, smothering drapery of the rendezvous, the hardworking charm and artifice that perfume the air. The scene seems to us all ludicrous movement, quickness, dramatic posturing, like one of those speedy silent films of the boudoir—heaves and sighs, black-eyed winks, muscular avowals. Our only equivalent is an imaginary and tired comedienne: the Southern belle with her ruffles, sky-blue costumes, flirtatious physiognomy—the decorations of a romantic pose which the “plain man” loathes because it is calculated and therefore, in his view, spotted and unappetizing like an overripe peach. Love can never be an art with us or even exceptionally artful, because we think it real only when it appears without human aid; it is rain from heaven, not the work of a clever imagination.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that elaborate concern for “holding a man” or making a woman “feel desirable” are attitudes that would seriously wound the pride of Americans and can be, without humiliation, invoked only during a crisis, when a loss is threatened. In spite of the advertisers’ effort to stimulate these activities, we are still not able to practice them with enough seriousness or fundamental belief to please the Europeans. Inclination is the only motive acknowledged as honestly relevant to relations between the sexes, and inclination is mysterious. It is not a drama or something earned or deserved; it is a gift, a sort of election. To marry for the most honorable human needs—loneliness, insecurity, desire for a family, faute de mieux—these are not quite enough and it may even be said that we feel, superstitiously, that the presence of these needs is hostile to true love. They inject a worldly and universal factor into a personal mystery—and to marry for money or physical comfort is almost a sin and certain to bring misery and repentance! Inclination is of course exclusive in its object, which is why Americans are so sentimental about love and so clumsy in the casual love affair. When a married person finds himself attracted to an outsider he is in agony and must make a choice immediately; without the choice, representing the exclusiveness of love, he cannot be certain he loves either one.
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This intensely romantic conception, exclusive, mysterious, self-questioning, unworldly, and impractical, is not a rude and coarse hatred of pleasure, a narrowing of experience out of fear and shame, but a kind of idealism which seems to exhilarate and heighten the existence of most Americans. It closes its eyes to man’s animal nature, is too pious and extreme, and carries its own doubt and despair with it, but it is just this that makes it the normal expression of a progressive, democratic culture. Love is not pure sensation or need or understanding; like the Bill of Rights, it is a noble possibility that both inspires and constantly accuses. That people are often able to believe they can live by this romantic idealism, contrary to “nature” as it is, reinvigorates it apparently. The picture of the old couple married fifty years gets a prominent spot in the small-town newspapers, and even our high divorce rate, offering the fallen another chance for the ideal, is an expression of it.
Tenderness and the permission of equality between men and women are the surest signs of love in America, but it is just this aim, which is not of course always our practice, that has come to be considered an insidious degradation of both men and women. It is felt that tenderness has degenerated into providing luxuries for the women and that the man who cannot do so suffers intense guilt. There is no doubt that success is highly valued in America, but American women also have a particular fondness for ne’er-do-wells and failures, of which there are always enough to satisfy the demand. I should imagine most European women would think this impossibly crude and unreal. The pride taken by well-brought-up, pampered American girls in the impoverished intellectual—anyone who can put a sentence together, read books, or listen to decent music—frequently amounts to slavishness. To love such a man, without hope of what is ordinarily meant by success, is evidence of having kept faith with the ideal, of having accepted a passion which is simply itself, unalloyed by worldly motive.
There is a dismal sadism and regression in the contempt for American women one finds nowadays in novels and hears in conversation. Their health, outspokenness, and much-exaggerated leisure are scorned; the ravaging labor of a peasant woman is raised to a high moral principle and with fantastic disingenuousness the poor, defeated European prostitute is sometimes believed to be humanly and aesthetically superior. What most startles one in these notions is the absence of a certain kind of painful emotion supposed to be typical of Americans—our feelings that the daughter who becomes a prostitute, the village without doctors, the hours spent beating the laundry on the riverbank, are the very heart of tragedy. We are often accused of triviality in this respect and perhaps we are the only country that wants to send the leukemia victim a present so that he may have his Christmas in November—a gruesome notion of the last pleasures of life, even a child’s life. And yet our squeamishness about physical suffering and deprivation are a large part of what is most free and just in our character.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the chronic, soggy indignation about the “freedom” of American women. Strangely enough, only Henry James, an expatriate, considered a snob and an aristocrat, seems to have truly enjoyed the independence, luck, and “un-European” charms of this New World creature. To him her virtues and inadequacies were an invigorating and romantically honorable expression of the American spirit. He would have thought it cruel to expect her to deviate from the moral and psychological inhibitions of the whole culture, unimaginative to despise her aspirations and candor, and inconceivable that American men, born in the same culture, do not really like or understand her—all of which it clearly is.
1951