Woman Part 1

Woman.

by Magdeleine Marx.

INTRODUCTION

A splendid book in which a soul lives so profoundly human and so purely feminine that any words of introduction seem leaden and intrusive. You feel as though you were violating the essential delicacy and powerful life of this soul to comment upon the remarkable revelation of it between the very covers that contain the revelation.

Yet, as a modest friend of letters, I should like to express an opinion here--the author did not ask me for it--and pay homage to the brilliant originality of this work. I want to give myself the pleasure of saying how important I think it is.

It expresses--and this is a fact of considerable literary and moral import--what has never been exactly expressed before. It expresses Woman.

The more woman has been spoken about, you might say, the less she has been revealed. She has been hidden under a plethora of words. The supreme vision rising up out of these pages is as luminous as a heavenly revelation. From the author's tone, so simple and penetrating, you perceive that women feel differently about the things that we men see and proudly proclaim.

The thought and spirit of _Woman_ will be a surprise and a shock to the old masculine traditions, in which women also acquiesce, probably because of their old traditions of slavery. But we know that always and everywhere the opposition such thought arouses is sublimely lacking in truth.

Here is a woman who cries out with magnificent impressive sincerity against the fallacy of the maternal instinct--the "call of the blood"--against the exclusiveness of love; who knows and a.s.serts that death kills only the dead, and not those who are left behind; who recreates in new forms the law and the creed of the relations between man and woman, motherhood, and suffering. And this new expression of woman--a new expression, therefore, of the whole of life--this striking gospel, young and strong, which overcomes artificial, unnatural ideas, resounds at the very time when woman is at last entering humanity and is preparing to change her role of breeder of children and handmaid in common.

The book is strictly, religiously objective. Everything is perceived only through the eyes, the mind, the heart of the "heroine"--the word usage thrusts upon us for this woman who has no name, who is just truly herself. Through the commanding will of the author the creative richness of the book springs altogether from the magnificent oneness of a human being. No outside approach mars this unity. In no other book perhaps so markedly as in this has the integrity of an individual been more respected, and never has an imaginary character so consistently warded off whatever is not of itself. You don't even seem to feel that this "Woman" talks or tells a story. You simply know what she knows.

And because of this very fact, this intimate a.s.sociation which unites us jealously with this one being of all others, the book is poignant and moving. A world is born beneath our eyes. In some scenes, short or long but always important and vital, a tragedy shudders, and the entire succession of the events of life, ordinary and on a big scale, pa.s.ses in the book in clear outline, in essential poetry.

To say this is to say that the author is a master, that her technique is subtle, that the action concentrates all the dramas of the world in one spiritual drama, and the book reveals a prodigious gift for presenting a whole of vast impressions which creates unity.

_Woman_ does not belong to any cla.s.s of writing; it is not tied down by any formula; it does not lower itself by imitating. It is a powerful, a rebel, a virgin work, and it ranks Magdeleine Marx among the loftiest poets of our age.

_HENRI BARBUSSE._

BOOK I

_BEING BORN_

I

The sun was beginning to s.h.i.+ne.

I had been walking and walking....

I had just left the brambly path which cuts a bed of sand through the forest, laying bare its rusty bowels.

I felt full-fed by the subtle nourishment that s.p.a.ce distils, crammed with air, and my forehead seemed drawn taut. Was it the motes dancing in the sunbeams? I don't know. I was spent. The fancy throbbed beneath my temples, did its work, and I let it go.

You must have been sincere at least once in your life to know what an hour is face to face with yourself, a whole hour, step by step, minute by minute. And I never had been sincere. Now I escaped from my clogging limbs, from the clay of myself. Until now I had done nothing but breathe and sleep. All of a sudden I was alive. It was intoxicating....

Dizzy though I was I felt an exhausting need to keep on going.

I penetrated deep into the woods walking at random, my mind almost a blank. When the leafy undergrowth enclosed me, I let myself slide to the ground on to the dried-up gra.s.s, the fallen twigs, and the crackling russet pine-needles.

All about in a dense circle, the rugged plant life. A moving splendor in the play of the varying greens. Damp, aromatic smells. And a sense of invisible swarming life everywhere....

The silence, so fresh and penetrating, was like a living thing, and I turned round several times thinking I heard some one behind me panting.

No one. The uneven trunks of the great trees; lower down, behind their serrated green, a slate-colored screen of mist; here, the shadow-broidered ground; above, the patches of blue sky--and I.

I....

I was a little ashamed to link my Self to myself in this way, to give my Self its value. The old att.i.tude of humility, of attaching no importance to Self--was that going to begin again? Now I felt more profoundly alone than in the harmonious exaltation I had experienced while walking. In a mixture of alarm and idleness I tried not to remain motionless, but to plant my elbows on the ground and lie flat on the gra.s.s with my head between my hands, so as to divert myself with living noise.... I could not.

Then I stretched out on my back, my eyes fixed on the sky, my body relaxed; and the full-blooded tide of my thoughts flowed over me.

They flowed on, of themselves, no longer halting, as they had on the walk, on the edge of each discovery; I no longer kept saying to myself as when I hammered out my pitiless steps: "I have lied, I have always lied, I have lived only on the outskirts of my life...." The air was still, the soul alone sounded, and the soul also was at peace. I went down into the depths--to find the soul's sweet beginnings, I suppose.

There were no beginnings. Though my early memories came back obediently, they were not illuminating. The catechism.... With outstretched hands and rounded voice, the Abbe Daudret was telling of the wicked, those whom the Almighty was waiting to punish in the hereafter. Crushed by the word wicked, stifled by the heavy solemnity of the church, withdrawn into my littleness, I comprehended, with dull, recurring pangs, that I was among the d.a.m.ned, I, the model little girl. We went home again; I was calm, unruffled, obedient, but if any one used the word sinful in my hearing, if I came across it threatening in black and white, I felt as if a brutal fist had struck my shoulder; I blushed, a swift remorse flamed in my bowels; that word was meant for me, _I_ was the guilty one.

At last one day I found out why I was guilty. I had not known before.

I had been summoned to the small drawing-room; the shutters were closed; my mother, a dim figure in the twilight, was saying good-bye to a lady in deep mourning whose veil framed a face of alabaster. How beautiful she was! The quivering shadows made a halo around her. I scarcely dared to approach her because I remembered the whispers that buzzed about her name and the envy that glittered in the eyes of the women. How beautiful she was!... Her heavy lashes weighed down her lids.... I wanted to say something to her, just one word. I could not, could not even repeat what my mother, leaning towards me, told me to say.... As the lady was leaving she turned in the doorway, fixed her great wide eyes on me and said with an even sadder note in her velvety voice: "The child is going to be beautiful."

I heard myself exclaim with joy. As soon as the door closed, I ran to the gla.s.s, which seemed to be waiting for me. My whole being was aflame as I raised myself on tiptoe to receive the first echo of her words from the mirror.... But my mother was already coming back and saying severely: "You know it isn't true...." I was still on tiptoe. "You are ugly!" My spirits dropped and instantly were bottled up in me.

Everything was clear, I understood, I understood....

It was an epitome of my life. The seasons pa.s.sed; I maintained silence, always, hiding my good qualities, hiding my bad qualities, encountering only remorse between the two extremes; for it is by remorse that they are joined together.

Consequently my mind stored up no happening, no deeper or fainter impression, only remorse. Remorse never left me.

But yes, it did leave me, just now, suddenly, at the bend of the road, where the bank slopes gently down to the ditch, when I bowed my head to the thought, "They think me gentle, simple, just like the others; they say I am cleverer. It is only because I dissemble more than the others."

At that I raised my eyes.

"What after all does my lying matter to them? Do they want the truth?

No. They spurn it, scourge it, hunt it down. They are not worth trying to find out the truth for. Enough."

The suns.h.i.+ne seemed to tighten its clutch on the earth and whitewashed the pathway.

"But it is not this matter of lying that one must bewail; the point is, there is an essential _something else_. There is--I feel there is--the true life, my life, and it is this true life that I have betrayed. My true life is now pus.h.i.+ng on, bravely, along the gray stony path.... I don't know where it is going, nor what it is, since I have never seen it in anything that I have done, but it must live. If I die for it, what does it matter? It will live on. It was hidden in my body, it stayed there ashamed of itself, then came at night to beset me with its sadness and put me to sleep with the taste of dust and ashes on my lips; and in the morning, as soon as my eyes opened, was it the light that flooded over me, painted the walls of my room with flame, and instantly died away?"

The blue density of the forest, the corrugated, soaring columns of the trees, high and distinct in their parallel lives, the clear quivering azure are all around me. Where is their obscure will?

I have come to these things, I have lain down in their midst, I have watched them. Before these things one no longer lies. And behold, I find myself.