Further Quotes from "Secrets of the Flesh"


Regarding the era of the "end of the century" - "It was still in principle, a woman's duty to be virtuous and submissive, but never before had she felt an obligation to be alluring. It is the very complexity of woman that enchants man. Here he has a marvelous domestic servant who can dazzle him without great expense. Is she an angel or a demon? The uncertainty makes her into a sphnix. That was the symbol over the door of one of the most famous brothels in Paris" (112).

"Convention presses against the character of an outsider like the weight of the ocean pressing against a diving bell. It takes an equal inner pressure, a kind of single-mindedness, to resist it. Perhaps that is one reason so many literary women were attracted to Lesbos, and chose never to have children: the temptations of marriage and motherhood were too regressive" (113).

"For the young woman...there is a contradiction between her status as a real human being and her vocation as a female. And just here is to be found the reason why adolescence is for a woman so difficult and decisive a moment. Up to this time, she has been an autonomous individual: now she must renounce her sovereignty. Not only is she torn, like her brothers, though more painfully between the past and the future, but in addition a conflict breaks out between her original claim to be subject, active, free, and, on the other hand, her erotic urges and the social pressure to accept herself as passive object...Oscillating between desire and disgust, between hope and fear, declining what she calls for, she lingers in suspense between the time of childish independence and that of womanly submission" (113).