It’s meant to be a refreshing proposal, not a priesthood or a sermon. “How do you go from a life obsessed with love to a life that pays little attention to it? asks Marie Kock in Old girl. Her very current essay-story, despite the decrepit (and ironic) title, invites us to see the single woman by choice, without a boyfriend and without children, as the true figurehead of a freedom always to be defended, reconquered or explain. A space in which to curl up one’s own identity rather than devote one’s life to the service of others, at the risk of dying out, becoming a frustrated Germaine or a Line-la-pas-fine.
A whole social conjuncture is emerging at this moment which precipitates this not so new posture, but judged as the state “out of spite” rather than “by default”. There is only to see again Caleb’s Daughters — I enjoy a third time noting the discourse of the women among themselves — to see that some, like Berthe, Emilie Bordeleau’s best friend, chose the convent to escape a life of slavery with a man, -il Roy Dupuis. “As if the grand prize of the game of love was to convert the savage into domestic peace”, writes Marie Kock. She quotes Duras: “You have to love men a lot. A lot a lot. Many love them for the sake of loving them. Without that it is not possible, we cannot bear them. ” In effect…
For Marie Kock, the towel was thrown in at the age of 37 (she is in her mid-forties today), the decision taken to withdraw her marbles from the game, without bitterness. She’s not the only one. The #MeToo movement, the conservative turn of which the family is one of the solid pillars, the rise of the right in the West, the backsliding of women’s right to their own body (abortion), education and social networks provide women the opportunity to question themselves about their role, the one imposed on them, unconsciously or not, the one they wish to assume and the expected sacrifices. We always underestimate these, in the name of Love. Sacrifice is less enviable since Christ was taken down from his cross.
The old maid can say pretty much what she wants (because no one listens to her)
We can also be damaged by an episode ofOD, plunging into the most abyssal void of seduction, before thinking of the sterilization of the species. Me, it makes me want to cloister myself like the beguines in the Middle Ages, these communities of women who wanted to escape marriage and motherhood and who devoted themselves instead to the sick and the poor. Some were executed, to finally be banned in the XIVe century, says the essayist. This shows how disturbing chastity is when it is not placed under the authority of the Church.
Alone, but not alone
Moreover, Marie Kock did not choose to stop dating men, “but not the ring on her finger, just a silk thread”, as Jeanne Moreau sang. Simply, to graze them further and no longer be part of a marital process after a voluntary sobering up where the search for the Other is no longer central.
The men observed her decision with circumspection, because, according to her, “less emotionally, physically and psychologically exhausted”. But the married women, mothers, in the course of the confidences, began to tell him of their regrets, their alienation, their disenchantments, as if this “old-young girl” had become a witness out of the game.
“There is no organization, network, movement of spinsters. They cannot therefore exist as a political force and their speeches cannot access any form of power. Marie Kock hopes that her singular words “will be able to find an echo among those who feel cramped in the life that has always been presented to them as normal”.
We must not underestimate our atavistic conditioning. Being in a couple also means receiving social validation, “a form of physical meritocracy”. Exhausting yourself to keep a great silhouette with a cardio-stroller and torn between the “career”, the family, the couple and the social life, without forgetting yoga on Wednesdays and, why not, the chalet, it’s is a one-way ticket to many disappointments. Just watch a few episodes of the hilarious TV series working mothers to be convinced. Trying to do everything at once is a passport to neurosis, burnout or alcoholism.
Anarchy within love
“We have learned to love men as we love children. To expend so much energy and mental and emotional know-how to cajole them, to encourage them, to love them, no matter how harsh the regime we accept to submit to in order to live with them, writes Kock. To find beauty and joy in enslavement, pride in the fulfillment of someone other than ourselves. »
It is in anarchism that Marie Kock finds her models, who resemble Voltairine de Cleyre or the adventurer Alexandra David-Néel and the writer Virginia Woolf.
Not to mention sexuality in a marital setting, dedicated to perpetuating a conservative thought “since the goal is not to ransack everything we are trying to build”.
Balzac, this early feminist that I reread this summer, wrote The old girl in 1836. He also warned marriage candidates in The thirty-year-old woman to expect many disappointments that lead to infidelity. “Well, marriage, as it is practiced today, seems to me legal prostitution,” he has his disenchanted marquise say.
Marie Kock believes for her part that marriage (or any form of couple) is work.
To whom could she say: I suffer! Her tears would have offended her husband, the root cause of the disaster. Laws and mores forbade his complaints.
“Rather than questioning the model, we are looking at all costs for arrangements, compromises, to maintain it. In this, the couple and the family follow the model of liberalism and capitalism and adopt the same vocabulary of meritocracy, consumption, growth and prosperity. »
Let’s stay with the extended warranty: if you were sold a car that has a 50% chance of falling apart within five years and an 80% chance of chugging even if it’s still moving forward, would you buy it? And would you close your eyes while driving?