Trapped wives channel unfulfilled life into symbolic escapes that can turn criminal

Evidence

There are some escapes available to the wife; but in practice they are not available to all. The chains of marriage are heavy, particularly in the provinces; a wife has to find a way of coming to grips with a situation she cannot escape. Some, as we have seen, are puffed up with importance and become tyrannical matrons and shrews. Others take refuge in the role of the victim, they make themselves their husbands’ and children’s pathetic slaves and find a masochistic joy in it. Others perpetuate the narcissistic behavior we have described in relation to the young girl: they also suffer from not realizing themselves in any undertaking, and, being able to do nothing, they are nothing; undefined, they feel undetermined and consider themselves misunderstood; they worship melancholy; they take refuge in dreams, playacting, illnesses, fads, scenes; they create problems around them or close themselves up in an imaginary world; the “smiling Mme Beudet” that Amiel depicted is one of these. Shut up in provincial monotony with a boorish husband, with no chance to act or to love, she is devoured by the feeling of her life’s emptiness and uselessness; she tries to find compensation in romantic musings, in the flowers she surrounds herself with, in her clothes, her person: her husband interferes even with these games. She ends up trying to kill him. The symbolic behavior into which the wife escapes can bring about perversions, and these obsessions can lead to crime. There are conjugal crimes dictated less by interest than by pure hatred. Thus, Mauriac shows us Thérèse Desqueyroux trying to poison her husband as Mme Lafarge did previously. A forty-year-old woman who had endured an odious husband for twenty years was recently acquitted for having coldly strangled her husband with the help of her elder son. There had been no other way for her to free herself from an intolerable situation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1354

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior chapter on the young girl and her narcissistic behavior as described earlier in the book — Beauvoir explicitly builds on that account here. — connects to: Married women resort to imaginary passion to avoid risking real affairs — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1612
• ADDENDUM: The conjugal crime as the only exit from an intolerable situation parallels the reader’s article on sacrifice — here institutional bondage rather than ritual sacrifice drives lethal freeings.

Broader Connections

• Married women resort to imaginary passion to avoid risking real affairs #exemplifies (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1612