Flaubert on women

 

To ERNEST FEYDEAU Croisset, Tuesday evening, January II 1859 

... No, my friend! I do not admit that women are competent to judge the human heart. Their understanding of it is always personal and relative. They are the hardest, the crudest of creatures. “Woman is the desolation of the righteous,” said Proudhon. I have little admiration for that gentleman, but his aphorism is nothing less than a stroke of genius. 

As far as literature goes, women are capable only of a certain delicacy and sensitivity. What is truly lofty, truly great, escapes them. Our indulgence toward them is one of the reasons for our moral debasement. All of us display an inconceivable cowardice toward our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our wives, and our mistresses. In no other age have women’s breasts been the cause of more vile actions! And the Church (Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman) has given proof of the greatest good sense in promulgating the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—it sums up the emotional life of the nineteenth century. Poor, scrofulous, fainting century, with its horror of anything strong, of solid food, its fondness for lying in its mother’s lap like a sick child! 

“Woman, what have I to do with thee?” is a saying that I find finer than all the vaunted words of history. It is the cry of pure reason, the protest of the brain against the womb. And it has the virtue of having always aroused the indignation of idiots. 

Our “cult of the mother” is one of the things that will arouse the laughter of future generations. So too our respect for “love”: this will be thrown on the same refuse-heap with the “sensi¬ bility” and “nature” of a hundred years ago. 

Only one poet, in my opinion, understood those charming animals—namely, the master of masters, Shakespeare the omniscient. In his works women are worse or better than men. He portrays them as extra-exalted beings, never as reasonable ones. That is why his feminine characters are at once so ideal and so true. 

In short, never place any faith in their opinion of a book. For them, temperament is everything; they are only for the occasion, the place, the author. As for knowing whether a detail (exquisite or even sublime in itself) strikes a false note in relation to the whole—no! A thousand times no!

I note with pleasure that printers’ ink is beginning to stink in your nostrils. In my opinion it is one of the filthiest inventions of mankind. I resisted it until I was thirty-five, even though I began scribbling at eleven. A book is something essentially organic, a part of ourselves. We tear out a length of gut from our bellies and serve it up to the bourgeois. Drops of our hearts’ blood are visible in every letter we trace. But once our work is printed—farewell! It belongs to everyone. The crowd tramples on us. It is the height of prostitution, and the vilest kind. But the convention is that it’s all very noble, whereas to rent out one’s ass for ten francs is an infamy. So be it! . . .

from the book Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert