SOURCE: Léon, Céline. “(A) Woman's Place within the Ethical.” In Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, edited by Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, pp. 103-30. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997

[In the following essay, Léon discusses Judge William's paradoxically negative views on women and women's liberation.]

Unlike an aesthete who oscillates between envy and commiseration, Judge William (B), in the second volume of Either/Or (1843) and in Stages on Life's Way (1845), praises women and declares himself against altering them for self-enjoyment or self-aggrandizement. In effect, not only does Kierkegaard's paradigmatic ethicist and married man invest women with new strengths, he finds them just as capable as men of realizing the universal human: “My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly just as good as man—period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors” (SLW, 124). Having probed elsewhere the favorable aspect of William's attitude regarding woman, I concentrate here on the negative sentiments he concomitantly and paradoxically expresses on this issue and on that of liberation (Léon 1997). It is indeed surprising—albeit not atypical of his century—that William should compliment woman for her ability to help man achieve ethical self-realization and for being less than she can be—less than he is—and also embrace the delineation of the “other sex” as relational, dependent, and oriented toward finitude and immediacy. Once coupled with the immediate religiosity also assumed to be characteristic of woman, such claims made regarding her essential nature are bound to have significant repercussions for her inscription—even the possibility of that inscription—within the sphere which the Judge epitomizes. Only emancipation would free woman of some of these fetters, yet no one is more opposed to its enactment than the Judge.

Critics, whether they agree or disagree regarding the congruence of Judge William's ethical position and Kierkegaard's own on the issue of marriage, have tended to agree that, even when he does so by negative prodding, the philosopher is favorable to women. Yet, on the two issues considered here—that of woman's essence and that of her emancipation—the thoughts of pseudonym and author are in remarkable consonance. After more than a half-century of man's asking: “What is it that (a) woman wants?” the time has come for us to ask: “What is it that (a) man fears,” when he forbids woman to move from nature to culture?

ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEXES

Judge William's claim that a woman is a composite being, whose essence (Vaesen) is “that she is simultaneously more perfect and more imperfect than the man,” shows his belief in the existence of sexual differences and his unquestioned acceptance of the notion that woman, with her admixture of frailties and special characteristics, represents “the different”:

If we wish to characterize the most pure and perfect, we say “a woman”; if we wish to characterize the weakest and most fragile, we say “a woman”; if we want to convey a conception of the spirituality elevated above the sensuous, we say “a woman”; if we want to convey a conception of the sensuous, we say “a woman”; if we want to characterize innocence in all its uplifting greatness, we say “a woman”; if we wish to characterize the depressing feeling of guilt, we say “a woman.” Thus in a certain sense woman is more perfect than man, and Scripture expresses this by saying she has more guilt.

(EO, 2:92, 1 Tim. 2:14).

What this passage reveals is that, whether it is perceived as special orientation toward the finite and the temporal, or as relationality and dependency, or as immediate religiosity, woman's difference has potential ramifications in all three spheres.

THE AESTHETIC DIFFERENCE

Let us, to begin with, (re-)consider the extraordinary manner in which woman is allegedly able to explain (through her work) the inexplicable (time). Resorting to an extended bird metaphor to express the insipid character of a woman's life, Judge William contends that a wife is “always busy” with graceful “minutiae” because she lacks the capacity for “vigorous and sustained work that a man has” (EO, 2:307). Their pedagogical import notwithstanding, her occupations remain a game, an idle way to while away the time, a “riddle,” whose significance eludes a husband's mighty powers of intellection (EO, 2:307). Like the moth, which flutters about the flame, oblivious of its former existence as a caterpillar, a wife counters by a senseless activity remembrance of the time that has preceded her metamorphosis through the agency of man. Not unlike the busybody of a tale he tells in the second volume of Either/Or, the passive vessel the Judge is married to “buzzes about” the living room, sanctimoniously spreading the “matrimonial music” (EO, 2:308). “Created to deal with little matters,” she trains others in consequence (EO, 2:68). Thus, in Stages on Life's Way, this enemy of silence is shown spending most of her time discussing trivial issues, such as the settling of accounts, the cook's sweetheart, or the maid's legroom (SLW, 134). Thanks to daily contacts with his wife, the Judge has developed a remarkable sense of humor and learned how to expatiate on chatty, domestic themes, such as the propriety of bringing the subject of a young girl's corns to the attention of her prospective lover (SLW, 129). An actress's success—such as Mme Nielsen's—depends on her ability adequately to express the eternal feminine, to be Everywoman, to wit, to portray woman in her vapid and inessential essence (SLW, 131).¹ Not even motherly love is exempt from this glorification of the trivial; what makes it “essentially beautiful” is its residing “precisely in what is insignificant” (SLW, 140). Either way—either as point of origin, or as destination—the stereotype of the “other sex”'s incidental essence is emphasized and women's subordinate status reinforced.

A wife and her husband relate to time in different—not to say opposite—ways. Whereas continuity and historicity (ethical determinations) characterize a husband's temporal existence, busyness, repetition (aesthetic determinations) best describe a wife's daily intercourse. Were she actively engaged in life, as her husband is, she would soon forget the trivia that weave the tapestry of her life, but, seeing little change about her, compelled by the vacuity of her humdrum tasks, she concentrates on petty cares. Over against the phallic principle by virtue of which one remembers one's experiences, the axiom that guides a woman's life is that of accumulation and reserve, with memory a mere receptacle for time. In the passage from Stages where he underscores, for the man, woman's regenerative role in later years, William remarks on the simplicity, the sweet (com)pliancy of woman quod matrem: “A man never finishes his life in this way, ordinarily his accounts are more complicated; but a housewife has only elementary events, the everyday distresses and the everyday joys” (SLW, 134). Undergirding the irony with which the laud of woman's humdrum tasks is sung is the dichotomy that favors the qualitative aspect of creation over the quantitative feature of reproduction (a woman can give birth more than once). For, as William contends at the beginning of the second volume of Either/Or: “The greater the probability that something can be repeated, the less meaning the first has” (EO, 2:40). Furthermore, unlike a man, who always has something of significance to do with his time, a woman, “assigned the least significant tasks,” cannot wait to get rid of hers, in other words, to get rid of herself (SLW, 144). Even though it is true that time can also stand still for a husband, it is for the opposite reason: he thinks best when he is least occupied. A truly ethical man, in the manner of William, draws from silence and stillness increased awareness and continual maturation. His indifference to questions of detail, his obliviousness to his surroundings at once testify to his virile strength and to the inherent superiority of his aspirations.

Are we to believe William divested of irony when he contends that woman “is more perfect than man, for surely the one who explains something is more perfect than the one who is hunting for an explanation” (EO, 2:311; SV II, 279)? Do not his wife's facile solutions demonstrate her inability—rather than uncanny insight—to see further than the tip of her nose? Did not Kierkegaard himself acknowledge Mrs. B's ineffectuality: “But on the other hand she does not explain anything” (JP, 4:5006)? Would A, William's aesthetic counterpart, not be entitled to a good laugh at the expense of the Judge? After having heard B protest ad nauseam the ethical invalidity of chance and accident, could he not force the inconsistent assessor to swallow his words and berate him for praising Mrs. B's collusion with chance and irrationality?

Nor is there any significant difference between William's views and those of the aesthetic personalities regarding the matter of woman's intellectual inferiority: “A woman in understanding is not a man in understanding” (SLW, 166). Yet, that this is as it should be is confirmed by the Judge, for whom women are “not supposed to know the anxiety of doubt and the agony of despair … not supposed to stand outside the idea” and must remain nonreflective and unaware of their situation in that respect (EO, 2:311)² In other words, the inferiority of the “other sex” is not merely descriptive, but also prescriptive: “A feminine soul does not have and should not have reflection the way a man does” (SLW, 166; my emphasis).³ Here indeed is a perfect example of the double bind whereby woman is commended for at once cultivating lesser qualities and repressing traits that would enhance her status (intelligence, independence, creativity, and so forth). Sanctimoniously, patronizingly, lip service is paid to the artlessness of the immediately lived existence, but truly, deeply, and earnestly all praises go to the tormenting complexities of the life of mind and spirit. Therefore the valuational opposites that traditionally have split humanity not only remain, but acquire greater impact within Kierkegaard's second existence-sphere. In a more trivial—albeit not altogether insignificant—way, Judge William's awareness of how little his wife's nose is shows that, despite his many protestations of indifference to her aesthetic difference(s) from others of her sex, he is not adverse to subsuming her under merely aesthetic categories (EO, 2:9). In fact, not only does he commend woman for providing man with aesthetic enjoyment, he paradoxically tends to ground most of the tributes he pays to her on purely aesthetic qualifications. Even more disturbingly, although, unlike the aesthetic, the ethical standpoint does not depict woman as coming into being/becoming visible through the interposition of man, the emphasis the second existence-sphere places upon the relational characteristics of her being suggests that the “Or” of her aesthetico-ethical disjunction may be problematic.

THE ETHICAL DIFFERENCE

Over against an aesthete who wishes to alter (a) woman, an ethicist will take her as she is; yet, in either instance, as Leslie A. Howe (1994) perceptively shows in “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self,” she is “first and foremost a ‘helpmeet’ to man's existence—she enhances his life in one way or another, but thus she is always seen as an instrument, an addendum, whether aesthetically, or as the occasion for an ethical decision on his part” (142). Thus both spheres, although they do so differently, equally accentuate feminine characteristics of being-for-other and the confinement of woman to what is deemed to be her natural condition. Nonetheless, rather than showing (a) man transformed by the presence of (a) woman by his side, the ethical standpoint depicts woman as becoming elevated from her position of inferiority by virtue of her association with man. What William's paternalistic promotion of his wife's derived status succeeds in conveying is little more than (its discreet charm notwithstanding) the dependency of this bourgeoise's existence (EO, 2:67; for another example, see Prefaces, xxvi).

Ironically, the dubious compliment a husband publicly pays his wife for the enhancement—ethical or even aesthetic—of his own life resembles the deferential and condescending gesture of the victor to the vanquished. As with gallantry—this sin for which he so vehemently berates the Aesthete—William is willing to let his wife believe that she is more than he is because of his conviction that at bottom she is infinitely less (cf. SLW, 145-46). In fact, insofar as it is directed from a higher perspective, the encomium is more insidious and more damaging to women than the contempt that undergirds the aesthetes' attention (EO, 2:209). At any rate, because a wife is not supposed to display the strength she has acquired through her husband's interposition, Judge William, not unlike many men of his generation—and later—insists that she adopt a meek and supportive stance in public. He congratulates a wife on her willingness to protect her spouse's self-esteem and on her ability to disguise her strength, or more accurately, the strength she has acquired at his hands: “She loves her husband so much that she always wants him to be dominant, and this is why he appears to be so strong and she so weak, for she uses her strength to support him, uses it as devotedness and submission” (SLW, 144). Mrs. B, he expects, will continue subordinating her freedom to his own and bending to his heart's desire (EO, 2:81). Why, after all, should a married man deprive himself of the self-serving belief that marriage—that his marriage—is “formed from the strength of the man and the frailty of the woman” (SLW, 118)? It is therefore clear that William fills and empties this vessel at will, letting either weakness or strength predominate according to the strategic need of the moment (SLW, 144). Either woman is envied for raising no expectations, or she is commended for hiding her strength: Conveniently the Judge equates the former with necessity and chance, and the latter with virtue and choice. In sum, whether he declares woman's weakness an essential, or an existential, truth of her being, William makes sure that all revolves around him and that, either way, there occurs no transgression of his power to believe in himself.⁴

More disturbingly, beyond William's commendation of a wife's ability to conceal her strength, beyond his lauding her supporting role, lies an even greater mystification: his claiming that “She chooses her task, chooses it gladly, and also the joy of continually equipping man with the conspicuous strength” and thus “freely” embraces her instrumentality (SLW, 144; my emphasis). Will woman truly appreciate the tribute paid to her being like the “silk cord,” which, over against the iron chain, chooses to remain invisible, chooses “to be deceived,” in the knowledge—as indicated by the motto which the Judge uses as epigraph for his “Reflections on Marriage”—that “the deceived is wiser than the not deceived” (SLW, 142)? It is doubtful—although the facile and immediate gratifications concomitant with such praises can often constitute an enticing, well-nigh irresistible, snare. Thus, ethically speaking, (a) woman's options lie between the Scylla of enforced femininity and the Charybdis of denied humanity: Either she chooses the former (“chooses her task, chooses it gladly”), or she ventures another way. Yet, as we soon shall see, she only does the latter at the price of her femininity equated with her self-identity (SLW, 144). In brief, her options are either not to exist, or to exist for the sake of another—which is another way of not existing. Louis Mackey (1971) aptly sums up her schizophrenic plight: “[A woman is] all freedom qua human, and all nature qua woman and wife” (85-86).

Even more striking is the realization that, if the Bs have but one like fashion of seeing things, the felicitous conjunction is owing to the fact that Mr. B's views are unquestioningly accepted by Mrs. B—this being whose essential right is that of approval (EO, 2:218, 91). It is little wonder then that his love for her should keep on increasing. With a chauvinism typical of his century (and which is indeed far from having died out), William expresses the conviction that, since “she loves him in this she has her life,” and that since he is “everything to her,” Mrs. B, wholly immersed in her devotion to him, will remain by his side (EO, 2:55, 81). The underlying assumption is that, without a man, a woman would never come to herself and that, once she has tied herself, she, who cannot give herself without putting her whole self into the endeavor, has nothing left for higher considerations. Not only is a wife at her husband's service, but, unable to rise higher than her devotion, she gives herself absolutely to this relative end. Although the same thing could be said of some males, it is not true of the whole masculine gender; as a rule, a male lives for the idea, that is, for something that transcends woman's purely immediate category and does not give himself absolutely to anything finite (SLW, 373).⁵

Some critics have further remarked on the inner contradiction of saying, on the one hand, that one's wife is free, that she has chosen herself in her eternal validity (Gyldighed), that is, in the concerned responsibility of an eternal commitment and, on the other, that her freedom is consonant with her husband's choices, that her “‘absolute’ self is identical with her relationship to her man” (Mackey 1971, 84). Awareness of the difficulty has prompted Christine Garside to answer in the negative the question she poses in a 1971 article: “Can a Woman be Good in the Same Way as a Man?” In Garside's view, Mrs. B's “choice” of the ethical life is a nonchoice and therefore unethical: “Since reflection is demanded before the resolution of marriage, and before becoming ethical, a woman cannot enter into marriage from the same motive. It is not a real choice for her in the sense that it is a real choice for a man” (534-44, 539-40). This raises the important question of the place the ethical can allocate to a being whose dependent and relational status it ubiquitously proclaims.

No pseudonym senses the precariousness of the Judge's position more than Johannes Climacus, for whom feminine devotion is flawed to the extent to which it depends on others for its fulfillment. Whereas man's necessity, Climacus argues in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is an inner necessity, whereas his relation is a relation to self, woman's is always a “relation with” or “to.” Therefore, although inwardness is said to be present in all, men and women, it is always so in different degrees and expresses itself differently for each sex: “A feminine inwardness as devotedness is lesser inwardness [than that of man—Quidam, in this instance], because the direction is obviously outward, toward” (CUP, 1:291; my emphasis). Incidentally, the discrepancy seems to justify Birgit Bertung's contention that, for Kierkegaard: “If a woman misinterprets her situation in that she confuses her body-soul relationship to her husband with her existential relationship, her relationship to God, thus becoming nothing for her husband's sake, then she errs” (Bertung 1989, 15). What is left open, however, is the question of deciding whether or not woman's tendency to self-obliteration is acquired and rectifiable, or innate and inalterable. Because, however, any attempt at an answer would be premature until the highest sphere of the religious is reached, what can only be re-marked at this juncture is that from the standpoint of the ethical, woman is once again caught in a double bind: Even when she “has deliberated with her conscience about having this man”—an issue raised in Works of Love—she has no better option than that of having him “for a master” (WL, 139).

To what extent does the new picture of woman, it must be asked, actually differ from Piloty's aesthetic representation that William means to counter? Portray to yourself the Judge's version—a version touched up by the brush of the ethical:

She is, then, not kneeling adoringly, for the difference that is fixed in the immediacy of erotic love, the man's strength that gives him the advantage, is sensed to be raised into a higher unity, into the divine equality of the religious. She is only sinking down; she wants to kneel in the admiration of love, but his strong arm holds her upright. She is drooping, yet not before the visible but before the invisible, before the excessiveness of the impression; then she grasps him, who is already holding her supportively.

(SLW, 168; my emphasis)

Should the Judge not be reprimanded for indirectly (through his wife's reliance on him) relying on despair, namely, “a condition that either lies outside the individual or is within the individual in such a way that it is not there by virtue of the individual himself”? (EO, 2:180; author's emphasis; see also, EO, 2:182; 235-36). Should the contradiction not puzzle critics who, like Gregor Malantschuk, affirm total consonance between Kierkegaard's position and that of his paradigmatic ethicist (1980, 47-48; JP, 4:4987-5008)? Should the conclusion that a woman cannot be good/ethical in the same way as a man not complicate the stance of the male ready for union within that sphere? Or will such difficulties be obviated by means of her religious “difference”?

THE RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE

By an interesting nemesis, the “less” in autonomy and intellect with which woman has been invested is considered by Judge William a “plus” that will serve her well both to reach the religious and to exist within that sphere. Concerning existence within the highest sphere, a first advantage identified by William in the letter with which he opens the second volume of Either/Or is that, inasmuch as she is nonreflective, abstract (in the sense that this can be said of nature), woman has God's ear and is much closer to Him than man is (EO, 2:53). This closeness to the divinity is also evident in a second gift—a point made by William in the letter that follows—by virtue of which woman's prayer is superior to man's: “It is a woman's nature to pray for others … as a rule you will find her praying for others, for her parents, for her beloved, for her husband, for her children, always for others. Man by nature prays for himself” (EO, 2:315). The superiority of (a) woman's prayer lies in its inherent faith and unselfishness: “In this respect man and woman form, so to speak, two ranks. First comes woman with her intercessory prayer; she moves, as it were, the deity with her tears. … Intercessory prayer is so essentially her nature that even in that case her intercessory prayer for man will be different from his own prayer” (EO, 2:315). A third disparity that, according to William, gives woman the advantage from the point of view of the religious is that which distinguishes her from man on the matter of trust: While a male believes that “for God something is impossible,” woman tends to “give up on herself,” but remains confident that “for God all things are possible” (For Gud er Alt muligt), from which it appears that she has more faith (EO, 2:315). A fourth talent of woman lies in her intrinsic devotion—a devotion that makes her more God-fearing, hence more pious than man, whose superior powers of intellect tend to act as a screen between him and his commitment to the divinity (SLW, 166-67).

As far as women's transition to the religious is concerned, the conviction that she develops toward faith immediately, without reflection, is more boldly and more explicitly stated in Stages than in Either/Or,Part II; it is not until the later text that Judge William argues that “swiftly as a bird [a woman] comes from esthetic immediacy to the religious” and that “feminine romanticism is in the next moment the religious” (SLW, 166-67). In the Judge's opinion, woman's faith has a directness, a trusting simplicity, a moving force—well-nigh impossible for (a) man, whose thoughts are complex and whose nature is torn by contradictions and conflicts. Insofar as a female does not involve herself in the ethical questions by which a male is plagued, hers is the childlike candor required by the Gospel:

[In (a) woman] the transition to the religious occurs without reflection. That is, when an intimation of the thought, the content of which the man's reflection ideally exhausts, passes through her consciousness, she faints, while her husband hurries off and, equally moved but also through reflection, is not overwhelmed; he stands firm, the beloved leaning on him until she opens her eyes again. In this swooning, she has transferred from the immediacy of erotic love into that of the religious, and here they meet again.

(SLW, 166, 167)

But here, as elsewhere, the advantages ascribed to woman reveal themselves to be egregious marks of inferiority. It is immediately apparent that, precisely because of her being naturally more religious than man, woman is always less religious than he is. First of all, women's lesser degree of (self-)consciousness renders them far more uncomfortable with questions of a theological nature, such as the thought of God, than their masculine counterparts, whose natural inclination is to embrace infinitude and complexity.⁶ Second, women's tendency to resort to prayers and miracles not only shows their inability to confront a reality that eludes their grasp, but also reveals their magical collusion with the lower forms of existence. Or worse even: Mrs. B's being is in thrall to a strange witchcraft; her “arts” are “genuine magic” (EO, 2:308).⁷ In other words, women glide into faith as they do into superstition: In either instance, they frivolously depend on forces that lie beyond their control, forfeit interiority, and reproduce the inarticulate interjections of blind fate. With, behind them, a long practice of unquestioningly embracing all they are told, they are more likely than men to “believe against the understanding,” to believe that the impossible is always possible and to effect with greater ease and levity the transition to the religious (CUP, 1:232-33; see EO, 2:315).⁸ Third, although the Judge declares woman to be better than man at addressing prayers to God for the benefit of someone else, he recognizes the infinite superiority of man's prayer—self-directed, resigned to God's will, and absolute: “Then comes man with his prayer; he halts the first rank [woman] when in fear it wants to run away; he has another kind of tactic that always brings victory. This, again, is because the man pursues the infinite. If woman loses the battle, then from man she must learn to pray” (EO, 2:315). Moreover, in the Judge's view, the same thoughts that cause a wife to faint and emphasize her helplessness, do not “overwhelm” her husband (SLW, 167). Therefore, despite the promise of an eventual cancellation of differences in the religious, woman's faith, which “occurs without reflection,” is only a first immediacy that lacks the solidity and maturity of that of the male, whose immediacy is a second immediacy, a new spontaneity grounded in an ethical development (SLW, 166). As Christine Garside (1971) perceptively remarks: “A man must pass through the ethical stage before becoming religious, while a woman passes directly from the aesthetic to the religious” (540).

From this we can see that, from the vantage point of William's ethical sphere, not only are the sexes differently religious, not only do they reach the religious differently, but man does so better—which plainly shows that in effect only he is truly religious. Therefore, notwithstanding its postulate of existential equality for all, the second existence-sphere has the gap, not diminishing, but actually widening between the sexes, as it superimposes substantive ethico-religious discrepancies upon the dissimilarities already deplored within the psycho-biological sphere. Also quite perplexing is the realization that, both more aesthetic and more religious than man, woman tends to exist beneath, and beyond, the category of the ethico-universal.⁹ It is little wonder then that “a married man, a genuine husband,” who has to face not only the “turtle” of marriage, but also a being both higher and lower than himself, must himself be “a wonder” (SLW, 166). What miracle will enable two partners so disharmonious, so unequally bound by love to achieve a temporally anchored relationship? More bafflingly perhaps, when the religious immediacy of the “other sex”—clearly of a lower order than the religiousness of man—is coupled with its unquestioning acceptance and its intrinsic relationality, it becomes difficult to envision what can truly be meant by the proclamation of the sexes' ultimate equality.

Hence there resurfaces with(in) the ethical—with, as can already be sensed, powerful consequences for the religious—that which the need to seduce proclaimed within the aesthetic realm, to wit, the desire to assert masculine hegemony by underscoring the differences alleged to lie between the sexes. Thus, patriarchy, typically eager to maintain a hierarchy that works to the advantage of the more favored, insists on depicting women as immediate, dependent, and gullible, while jealously converting reason and broadness of scope into exclusively male preserves. In a paradox of which the ethical makes no mention, the reasonable woman is she who uses her reason to maintain herself within the natural sphere. What is shown here is that, even when ethically inscribed, masculine praise continues to enfold woman within representation: By reiterating cultural myths that negate her autonomy and deprive her of intellect, it sustains and remakes patriarchy which, retroactively, satisfies itself that it did not err in the choice of predicates it initially attributed to her. As with all stereotypes, circularity obtains insofar as, if representation confirms reality, it is because reality has already been preordered by (masculine) representation.

In sum, if man's disjunction consists of the Either of aesthetic existence and the Or of the ethical choice, woman's is more accurately expressed by/in the opposition: femininity/emancipation. This difference between the masculine-universal alternative and the feminine one urges us to inquire into the fate which the ethical—unexempt from the biases of a culture traditionally ambivalent to women—has in store for the women who have managed to escape the roles traditionally ascribed to their sex. How does Kierkegaard's second existence-sphere look upon these creatures who, by being either unable/unwilling to hide their personal talents, or loath to behave as dutiful wives and mothers, or merely disinclined to exhibit worshipful compliancy and unconditional devotion to the males, have to a certain extent appropriated masculine prerogatives?

WOMAN'S EMANCIPATION

The cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and for evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.

—Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, chap. 20.

And she who scorns a man must die a maid

—Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto 5, line 28

In his first letter to the Aesthete, in the second volume of Either/Or, Judge William declares himself against female emancipation, in his view, “one of the many unbeautiful phenomena of which the men are guilty” and for which he holds responsible certain male Romantics—Byron among others—with their advocacy of free love (EO, 2:22). The antagonism persists in the book's second letter, where the Judge proclaims his hatred of “all that detestable rhetoric about the emancipation of women” and even prays to God that its advent be prevented, asking that “the serpent” never “tempt her [woman] with seemingly delightful fruit” (EO, 2:311, 311-12). Although woman's liberation covers a variety of evils, the anomalous figures by/for whom it has become a reality are accused of being unfaithful to their nature, of falling short of “femininity”; they are scorned with just as much intensity as their more “feminine” counterparts (the mother, the woman of years, and so forth; SLW, 134-40 and 133-34) are praised, in a dichotomy that brings to mind the angel-and-monster imagery identified by recent feminist criticism.¹⁰ These creatures, whom either defiance, or ignorance, of the masculine script have emboldened to forget their place, comprise either inappropriately desirous types depicted as sources of distrust and opprobrium, or reflective figures with minds of their own ridiculed as the instigators of the most unsightly confusion. But the categories do overlap, with the consequence that it is not always possible to extract/abstract in their purity the paradigms by which each one is epitomized.

For Judge William, two embodiments of the highly sensual type are the creature bold enough to resist marriage and the one brazen enough to marry a much younger individual. As far as free love is concerned, the Judge's feeling is that, although the conceit of a relationship outside marriage would betray a like “light-mindedness bordering on depravity” in the man and the woman, it would be “especially [so] on the part of the female participant in the association” (EO, 2:23; also 53). A seducer flees matrimony; he seeks to free himself by multiplying either his conquests or his variations on a theme. Conversely, a woman, whose essence has been universally/masculinely defined as lying neither in such a proliferation of objects of desire nor in such chromatic explorations, can only be seductress by virile identification. As for the age discrepancy, in a fashion that was to outlive his own century, William perceives it to be an anomaly, an excusable foible or weakness in the male, but the unacceptable mark of deviant behavior in the female. Thus, he comments in Stages:

It is bad enough for a man who is tried and experienced in the erotic—indeed, is a burned-out case—brazenly to take a young girl for a wife in order to be rejuvenated a little and to have the best nursing care now that he is beginning to become old; but it is revolting for an elderly woman, an experienced spinster, to marry a young man in order to assure herself of a safe shelter and a sophisticated stimulation.

(SLW, 155; my emphasis)

In his second epistle, the Judge equates woman's emancipation with the adoption of shorter hairstyles. By such unseemliness, a woman dooms herself to ostracism and alienation—dooms herself to “run like a crazy person, a criminal, to the terror of the people” (EO, 2:313). Faithful to the letter of Scriptures, William sees long hair as a reminder that, whereas man is “an-thropos,” or “he who looks up,” heavenward, woman is, and should remain, earth-bound; alleging that “within the definition of man “she would [never] become more perfect than man,” he enjoins her to abide by the “perfection of her imperfections” (EO, 2:312; see 1 Cor. 11:5ff.). Incidentally, in not even so trite a matter can woman escape the series of double binds in which she is imprisoned: Whether she (abiding by the New Testament) wears her hair long as a sign of her imperfection and allows her subservience to man to be proclaimed, or (ignoring biblical injunctions) cuts these “heavy chains” and publicizes the shamelessness of her impertinence; either way, her inadequacy is equally divulged (EO, 2:312-13).

More generally, sameness worries the Judge, who is bent on maintaining difference, complementarity, and symmetry between the sexes: Will both sexes merge into one? Will they wear the same clothes? When it comes to expressing antipathy for the idea of unisex clothing, William's rhetoric reaches hyperbolic heights, yet not even on so trivial an issue does he think of consulting his wife, or imagine, in his passionate indignation, that she might speak for herself (EO, 2:311-13). He dwells on the unseemliness of liberation, depicting it alternately as either an improper mixing of categories, or a deplorable attack upon women perpetrated by hybrid individuals—who belong neither to one sex nor to the other. A firm believer that men should be men and women women, William worries about the men “not much good at being men,” the “half-men” who, indifferent to their own sexual identity and to the Other('s) sex, strive in effect to corrupt women by transforming them into homologues (EO, 2:311-12; also 22, 53). According to the Judge, these no-men, emblematic of all that is bankrupt in the society of his day, both suffer from feminization and are true misogynists whose self-hatred—a self-hatred that longs to annihilate the masculine aspect of their nature—is compounded by hatred for the other sex.

Two years later, in Stages, Judge William, now echoing Constantin, no more approves of the indecent attempts to emancipate women than he did in Either/Or (SLW, 56, 124). The “away with emancipation” that resonates throughout William's writings implies that either a woman remains submissive, worshipful, and unconditionally devoted to man, or that, doffing the feminine role, she becomes a madwoman with characteristics of both sexes, a hermaphroditic monster, a parody of Plato's glorious androgyne. Although they are often obsfucated by hyperbole, a few truths emerge nonetheless from the contrast the emancipated woman provides with the usual characterization of the “other sex” as a bland sea of benign compliance. On the one hand, it is clear that, insofar as they take on illusory strength from the dichotomous presentation, these alarming prototypes, these grotesquely exaggerated negative exceptions not only sustain, but also strengthen, the dominant ideology by hideously exacerbating what could happen in the eventuality that it should become subverted (SLW, 78). The exception in fact lapses precisely to the extent to which it reinforces the rule. Here indeed is a case when exception should be taken to exceptions that only camouflage themselves as such the better to justify unjust decrees and to legitimate unfair rationalizations. On the other hand, seeing in some women (the mother, the venerable woman, and so forth) a higher type of humanity confirms, rather than invalidates, the assumption that woman belongs to an inferior caste. Either a woman remains unchanged, true to herself in being true to man, or she risks losing everything in renouncing man for the uncertain compensations of liberation. Either way, the assessment made of her person is function of her faithfulness—or unfaithfulness—to the comportments expected of her sex. When they consider this wager of liberation versus adherence to the status quo, the males fail to understand why anyone would wish to pay a high price for a solution to a problem that, as far as they are concerned, does not exist. Why should a woman want to acquire qualities whose very absence enhances her status?

Significantly, Judge William's position reflects that embraced by the Aesthete in Kierkegaard's very first publication: “Another Defense of Woman's Great Abilities,” a very short piece issued in 1834 in Kjøbenhavns Flyvende Post (see EPW, 3-52).¹¹ Making his first appearance in this grotesquely ironical essay, A sneers at bluestockings and paints exaggerated pictures of the transformations that, in his opinion, are likely to occur in the wake of female liberation. He resorts to ridicule (to what Marguerite Duras, aiming to denounce precisely such a condescending attitude, would in our century call “the defense of the weak”) and pokes fun at the woman presumptuous enough to cross the boundaries naturally allotted to her sex (Duras 1980, 113). Dramatizing through derision the scene of her transgressive behavior, he shows her busily brooding over abstract concepts, judging philosophical disputations, and so forth, while, like a medieval knight, the male thinker of her choice wears her colors (SV, XIII, 8). In the revulsion with which thoughts of the self-asserting woman and of woman's emancipation fill each one of them, neither A (the Aesthete), nor B (Judge William), nor C (Constantin) hesitates to sacrifice logic to the strength of prejudice. Nor do these male pseudonyms object to resorting to fantasies far more delirious than those they patronizingly deplore in the “fair sex” (det smukke Kjøn). Ironically, on the evidence of such portrayals, foolhardy would be the attempt to praise the powers of abstraction, or the coolheadedness of these male personae!

Kierkegaard, speaking in his own name in Works of Love, echoes on this point the sentiment of his aesthetic and ethical pseudonyms. Overwhelmed by “what battles there have been to establish women on equal terms with men in the secular world,” the philosopher declares himself proud to have fought for no emancipation whatsoever—be it (in a derisive association recurrent throughout the production) that of the Jews, or that of women (WL, 48; AN, 50; CUP, 1:430). In the same work, he expresses his disapproval of well-meaning Christians who, extending their enthusiasm for humanity to all, seek to influence women and to modify their status: “Foolish men have foolishly busied themselves in the name of Christianity to make it obvious to the world that women have equal rights with men—Christianity has never demanded or desired this” (WL, 80, 139-140; my emphasis). In keeping with a tradition in whose name the masculine has arrogated to itself rights from which it has been careful to exclude women, Kierkegaard, for whom the emancipation of women is the “invention of the devil,” mercilessly propounds that she, whose flesh is at fault, be mortified in the flesh (JP, 4:4992)!

But, it must be asked, what are the dangers, in the eyes of author and pseudonyms, likely to ensue in the wake of woman's liberation? One of the negative aspects of this eventuality is explicitly identified by Kierkegaard; it appears to stem from a generous impulse: the “sympathetic anxiety” that animates him at the thought that woman's upbringing would make her feel compelled (just like man) to realize herself in the noise and bustle of outward existence and to launch upon the struggle for life on the model of men.

There is really something to it that in the last resort women are a bit more self-sacrificing. It is probably because they live more quietly and withdrawn and thus a bit closer to ideality. They are not as likely to acquire the market-price standard the way a man does, who from the outset is on the go in life. The saving factor for women (which is why one still sees in them the traces and expressions of individuality, the boldness to grasp a single thought and to dare hold on to it) is the distance from life which is granted her for a period. This quieter life has the result that she becomes somewhat more herself than does a man, who already even as a lad is demoralized by having to be like the others, and as a youth, to say nothing of the adult, is completely demoralized by learning how things go in practical life, in actuality. This very knowledge is the ruination of him. If girls were brought up the same way—then good night to the whole human race.

(JP, 4:4992)

Judge William, on whom equally weighs the nineteenth-century bourgeois dichotomy between domestic or private female space and economic-political or public male space, also opposes the notion that women should become the emulators of men. Yet—more offensively patronizing than his maker—he argues that, by doing so, a woman would expose herself to “irreparable” loss and place herself “completely in his [a man's] power, abandoned to his conditions … a prey to his whims” (EO, 2:312). If the aesthetes pitied woman's overall condition, William sanctimoniously deplores the plight of the overreaching female—a further instance of (a) man relishing the luxury of expressing compassion for a creature who can only lose when she tries to improve her lot.

Another stereotypical rationale adduced by the Judge is that female emancipation would weaken the whole structure of society. Biblical considerations are also invoked; namely, the fear that, once freed from masculine domination, woman would be condemned to work, “man's sour sweat” (SLW, 166; Genesis 3, 17-19). In Genesis, God's punishment of Adam and Eve, and beyond them, of every man and woman in every generation, has the sexual division of labor resting on divine authority. Adam's toil is to produce the goods of society by the “sweat of his brow,” an expression that, in man, allies muscular and mental work. Eve's labor, meanwhile, consists of reproducing the species in pain and subservience to Adam. But the woman daring enough to seek emancipation from universally/masculinely defined conditions would be working by the sweat of her brow—thus confusing everything. Likewise, Kierkegaard, struck by the spreading of the work ethic to women in Protestant countries, was puzzled by the “observation” that such callous “pedestrianism” tends to proliferate in northern countries. This, in his opinion, “warps the feminine nature” by advancing that “a woman is a person who is useful and profitable,” whereas, “originally it was not so; originally woman was designed to be a luxury: a companion, an adornment, a decoration. Only in the North does she have to prove herself to be useful, and therefore it is only in the North that the question of her emancipation has to arise” (JP, 6:6904).

Another negative correlative of liberation—adduced sometimes as effect, sometimes as cause—is the masculine indifference that, bound to follow in its wake, will entail the marginalization of the woman involved. By her unwillingness to conform to masculine expectations, a woman dooms herself to incurring sexual and social depreciation: Having barred herself from her “true” destiny, she will never experience the ordinary satisfactions of female life. When she becomes a bluestocking with an itch for scribbling, a woman chooses to forsake man, hence, his respect and his attentions. Contrasting with the traditional definition of woman as passive and “feminine,” the intellectually assertive woman not only condemns herself to remaining an untalented scribbler, she is excoriated as anomalous, unnatural, monstrous, and so forth; in other words, as threatening to the surrounding culture. In brief, she is, if not a man, at least not a “real” woman.

To understand that such is the fate that, not only in the ethicist's view but also in Kierkegaard's, awaits the independent, intelligent female, all the reader has to do is consult the letters that Kierkegaard addressed to some well-known female contemporaries. In an 1849 missive, he accuses Frederika Bremer, the Finnish-Swedish journalist, of being a “smug spinster” and a “silly tramp” unable to find a husband (JP, 6:6493). There is also the case of Clara Raphael, the pseudonymous author of Twelve Letters (Tolv Breve), a book written by Mathilde Fibiger, the first Danish feminist. As an intellectual, Clara has, in his opinion at least, crossed over into realms foreign to her natural habitat where, left gasping with the ineffectuality of a fish out of water, she is bound eventually to succumb to personal asphyxia. Desperate for something to do, it occurred to her, still according to Kierkegaard, to latch onto an idea, namely, that of the emancipation of women. Yet she did not do so, he comments in an unpublished review of her book, because of delight in the exercise of her mental powers; no, she did so only because of her lack of interest in marriage (JP, 6:6709). Of Clara's grotesque transgression of Nature's boundaries he sees further evidence in her desire for a brother-sister relationship with her husband. Unmistakable are the implications: If a woman uses her intellect, she does so, not by choice, but merely because she has missed her particular calling, or because Nature has made her neither fish nor fowl, neither man nor woman; literary or philosophical potentiation in the “other sex” is systematically equated with sexual frustration.

Given the presumption that woman neither is, nor should be, active or reflective, the exception to the rule is perceived as altogether alien to the category “woman” and as therefore unfit for romance. Underlying the pernicious imagery of ugly bluestockings and dried-up spinsters is the familiar dualism of mind and body, a key component of Western patriarchal ideology. Once incompatibility has been assumed to exist between feminine/bodily fulfillment (through another) and masculine/intellectual achievement (through oneself), a female will offend the males' sense of decency precisely to the extent to which she appears to realize herself independently. In “their” books, as Hélène Cixous would write more than a century later, “either woman is passive or she does not exist” (Cixous and Clément 1986, 64).¹² The harder a woman works at autonomy and intellectual independence, the more she is made to feel freakish (both in the acceptations of “unsexed” and of “fallen”), anomalous, alien, alienated, and likely to lose everything.

That Kierkegaard had a tendency to show little patience for his female critics, that, in their case, he was not beyond arguing ad feminam is further exemplified by his answer to a fairly sober letter from feminist author Lodovica de Breteville. Even though Lodovica was perhaps one of his most articulate and systematically minded correspondents, the philosopher inveighs against her with a testiness reminiscent of that manifested by Judge William each time the issue of women's liberation is broached. Undercutting Lodovica's innocuous remarks, Kierkegaard quips as one personally offended: “It is typically feminine, whenever one has ventured too far in self-reflection, then to cry out to another person, ‘Restore me to myself!’” (LD, 372). Not just content with putting her back in her place, he finds shocking that she could voice opinions different from his own and concludes hence that she must be hysterical to do so.

So superfetatory are the rationales, so interlocked the motivations—conscious and unconscious—that what these males hope to accomplish by barring women from work and by scaring them with the abomination of the single life can only be tentatively assessed. Whether liberation is blamed on the northern mentality, on Protestantism, on sexual appetite, or conversely on sexual frustration, the difficulty begins when (a) woman does not stay in the place (allegedly) befitting her sex, within the limits (allegedly) assigned to her by Nature.¹³ What happens, of course, is that, by preventing women from decking themselves out as a bastard gender and from denying their “natural” destiny (as companions for men, as mothers, and so forth), a male perpetuates, or ensures, his own dominance and the Other's submission. The impression everywhere given is that woman cannot do without man. More realistically, however, when a male “explains” that a woman cannot assert herself as an autonomous individual without threatening and betraying the feminine ideal, when he pharisaically claims to be defending her, he is only betraying his fear—the fear of an emancipated damsel who might refuse to worship at his altars!¹⁴ What in effect annoys him is the thought that a woman could become deficient in qualities he holds to be supremely desirable in a subordinate: What of the poor man—think!—left to fend for himself? The hope is that woman, seduced by the assumed ease of her condition, will not seek to modify a status quo that has hitherto served the “first sex” rather well: By being protected from man, she is in fact protected for him. Because a man's pleasure manifestly lies in the receiving, hers, it is “naturally” assumed, lies in the bestowing. Woe then to the female exception who does not abide by certain standards of obedience and unquestioning dumbness! No one has perhaps expressed the feeling with greater accuracy than Bernick when, in Ibsen's Pillars of Society (1877), he exclaims: “People ought not to think of themselves first; women least of all” (Ibsen 1911, 5:368). Self-servingly, (a) man—an ethicist to boot—keeps on maintaining that this secondary being remains preponderant, that she has the upper hand, while denying her the right to exist as an individual and taking care that she does not enter the domain he regards as his own.

Furthermore, inasmuch as a woman is supposed to think and write about certain things in a certain way, a male is bound to deem improper or indecent her expressing something—anything at all—about a subject that might involve discussion of the sexual relation.¹⁵ That this was one of Kierkegaard's fears can be seen in his blind acceptance of the traditional argument about feminine loquacity: “Everything revolves around woman. Charming, but then one can also be sure that everything revolves around chatter, trivialities, and in a refined way, around sexual relations” (JP, 4:4998). Two corollaries of the fear are the interdict that, weighing upon women's upbringing, forbids their concerning themselves with sexual problems; from a more general point of view, any curiosity in these matters is considered unwomanly and the sign of a sinful disposition. But there is more, as Victor Eremita makes plain at the end of his speech in “In Vino Veritas”: there is a certain lack in woman's nature that “makes it impossible for woman to state man's nature” (SLW, 65). This discovery of a lack is no accident; it is clear that any discussion of sexuality would entail a concomitant glance at man and his role in the whole business. Since a woman's “nature so obviously is as it is,” and since man's consists in the denial of all that makes up her life, she could not understand a man without eliminating her femininity, without denying herself as a woman, with the consequence that “an erotic relationship with her would be unthinkable” (SLW, 65)! Similarly bent upon emphasizing the necessity for woman to remain in her place, the green, but strangely cocksure, Young Man of Stages, in yet another classical example of the double bind, hands his fellow symposiasts a vatic looking-glass that shows how unsettling such (un)feminine exceptions would be. To make his point, he adduces the examples of two women whose knowledge on the subject of love would match his own. One would find erotic love (Elskov) comic, as he does, while the other would have discovered its tragic nature, as he apparently also has. Knowing too much, the first woman could not possibly understand him; as for the second one, not only would she not understand him, but—more tragically—she would in addition lose her powers of seduction and “be destroyed” in the process (SLW, 46-47).

In sum, the fear of feminine achievement and self-affirmation is no less than the fear of feminism, namely, the fear of women (putatively) daring enough not to hold themselves in contempt and bold enough to stand up defiantly to the men. What the portrayal of female overreachers as alienated through the embracing of virile values and as doomed in their sexuality underscores is the males' inability to dissociate sexuality from power and authority—prerogatives they were and are certainly intent on preserving. Thus, whether they spurn woman for being what she is, or deny her access to anything else, the males—through their endorsement of traditional sex roles—discourage her access to authority, with the consequence that, in this instance as well, the assessment they have initially made of her inferiority finds itself retroactively justified. Whether they deny her advantages that, they maintain, do not count, or beg her to leave all the tedium vitae to them, the men ensure that their own interests continue to be served and that their sex, identified with the universal, be allowed to go on exploiting the Other('s) in good conscience.

Espied in fear and trembling is the possibility that feminism—traditionally equated with the masculinization of women and women's appropriation of the masculine realm—may educe not only a change in the men, but also a change in their conception of themselves as men. If rivalry between husband and wife, between men and women is to be prevented at all costs, it is because it primarily concerns men among themselves. Although the causal link manifestly established by Judge William and Kierkegaard is that between female genius/autonomy and sterility, it is not difficult to surmise that it may after all be a lie by which a fear disguises itself as its opposite. Behind Johannes the Seducer's predilection for young girls over women lay, we recall, the fear of a woman whose powers would equal or surpass his own, of a woman in whom sexuality and autonomy would be identified—an assimilation that, in the Seducer's opinion, is only legitimate when applied to his own gender (EO, 1:324). A lustful, oversensual creature would represent a dark—both contaminating and threatening—side of sexuality insofar as, free from shame and inhibition, she would have bartered her femininity for pleasure; more threateningly for the Seducer, she would have created for herself a situation analogous to his own.¹⁶ The direction of the vector is irrelevant; what is significant is that both Johannes and William betray the terror inspired by a being whose self-assertiveness threatens man in his essence as well as in his sexuality. The perception of sexual activity as manifesting itself in inverse ratio to mental activity betrays the fear that too active a mind would trouble the sexual order, would lead woman, not to sterility and isolation, but to adultery or corruption. What this linking of the two poles of intellectual independence and sexuality (asserted or repressed) reveals is the likelihood that the fear is not for the woman, but of the woman.

But there lurks perhaps something else behind the alarm. As we have just seen, Judge William's opinion is that the autonomous woman, who has renounced the feminine side of her nature by being too much of a person, merely succeeds in appealing to effeminate types, namely, to men who, he suspects, have sunk into a state of emotional dependency upon women—to men who, he thinks, physiologically and psychologically have been made, or have made themselves, “womanish.” Does not the depth of the homophobic panic induced in William by these mixed categories, made of the pseudovirile women and of the pseudofeminine males by whom they are encouraged, identify his fundamental fear as that of a general effeminization or of a contamination of the masculine by the feminine? Indeed, as Freud has well shown in “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918 [1917]): What man fears is “being weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and … then showing himself incapable” (Freud 1955-74, 11:198-99). If it is degrading to be a woman, it is even more degrading to be like one! Or could it be that—even more shockingly—the source of the fright is other than the one explicitly described? Could it be that the alarm a male experiences at the thought of woman's emancipation has in fact very little to do with woman herself—that it comes from elsewhere? Could it be that the ambivalence, whereby Judge William deems himself confronted upon imagining these ill-defined borders, comes in fact from within?

Although Kierkegaard definitely appears to be in agreement with his Judge both on the antagonism manifested toward women's liberation and on the assumption of the existence of essential differences between the sexes, further assessment of his “true” feelings on these questions would certainly be presumptuous until the place assigned to woman by the highest existence-sphere is thoroughly examined. In defending marriage, Judge William, for whom men and women (their differences notwithstanding) are internally, transcendentally alike, means to defend women; yet, it is clear from the above that his success with respect to the latter is far from evident. But, since other pseudonyms are yet to come—pseudonyms higher than the Judge—by whom the universal obligation to marry will be contested, it is necessary to exercise caution and to refrain from assuming total congruence between author and pseudonym regarding these matters. As some feminists have suggested, Kierkegaard's unwillingness to grant women liberation may after all be a temporary roadblock, a sign both of the ambivalence he discerns in the ethical treatment of the “other sex” and of his conviction that women's equality and autonomy are only conceivable beyond the sphere of the ethico-universal—in which case his misogamy would have its source in a gynophilia bent on defending women both from men and from themselves.¹⁷ Conversely, it could be that professing belief in the virtual/abstract equality of both sexes will only place women at a vertiginous distance from the acquisition of rights without which their actual lives will never be enhanced.

But, uncertain at this point of the conclusions of the religious, let us turn to our profit the lessons of the ethical. When, guided by the pen of his author, Victor Eremita, the general editor of Either/Or, decides to conclude his own preface with a “word to the reader,” he lets Judge William speak in his stead:

Go out into the world. … Visit an individual reader in a favorably disposed hour, and if you should encounter a reader of the fair sex, then I would say: My charming reader, in this book you will find something that you perhaps should not know, something else which you will probably benefit by coming to know it. Read, then, the something in such a way that, having read it, you may be as one who has not read it; read the something else in such a way that, having read it, you may be as one who has not forgotten what has been read.

(EO, 1:14-15)

Although the serial ventriloquism has been interpreted in ways so varied that their examination would mandate a study unto itself, “the something” that, according to Judge William, “the charming reader” ought not to know has usually been understood as pointing to the aesthetical writings of the first volume of Either/Or—particularly “The Seducer's Diary.” As for “the something else” that she should not forget, it has been commonly identified with the ethical writings of the second volume, namely, the Judge's letters. Could it be that William has something else in mind? Could it be that “the something” that woman “should not know” is that which would empower her to contest the place assigned to her by patriarchy and “the something else” she should remember that which would enable his sex to retain its hegemony? Even if compliance is assumed, there remain, however, a possibility and a hope for “the reader of the fair sex”: the possibility and the hope that, having read “the something,” she neither will, nor can, be ever again “as one who has not read it.”

Notes

1. Anna Nielsen (1807-50), a favorite of critics, became a member of the Royal Theater company in 1821. She was famous for portraying the Danish woman from her early youth to her later years. She was married to N. P. Nielsen, an actor and director. See Letter 170 (LD) and JP, 1:152.

   Let us bear in mind that, even though the actress makes a project of herself, she essentially acts to nourish her narcissism, namely, her self as seen by others, her self as Other. Her triumph lies precisely in her alienation. Therefore, whether women identify with the image of themselves reflected in the eyes of an adoring public (all actresses are women), or in those of an admiring lover (all women are actresses), it is all the same to the masculine gaze, whose presumptions find themselves validated either way. If actresses are so convincing on stage, is it not because throughout history women have tended to be perceived first of all as narcissistic, that is, as existing in re-presentation? Conversely, if women have succeeded as actresses as they have in no other professions, is it not because masculine strictures do not mind seeing their hysterics indulge a bit of public, hence publicly condoned, histrionics?

2. In the very same breath in which Kierkegaard—like William—addresses to woman the problematic praise of being a beneficial “corrective” for man, he adds: “And for the sake of the cause, a woman may lift the burden just as well as a man precisely because she has fewer ideas, and also fewer half-ideas, than the man, and thus more feeling, imagination, and passion (JP, 6:6531; cf. “The Woman Who Was a Sinner,” with Training in Christianity, 261-62; my emphasis). The philosopher also feels that, in sharp contrast with a man who thinks first and then acts when he opts for a lifestyle, a woman, unable to summon the help of rational powers before coming to a decision, acts first and then attempts to justify the randomness of her behavior (JP, 6:6709).

3. Prompted by an analogous conviction, the preacher of Thoughts on Crucial Situations is careful not to stir complex thoughts in the female members of his congregation, lest the ensuing strain should upset their precarious emotional and intellectual balance (TDIO, 44).

4. That weakness presented as strength is nothing but weakness is evident from Climacus's remark that, because of his having “only a woman's strength, which is in frailty,” Jacobi (compared here to Lessing) was “not the stronger but the weaker” (CUP, 1:101).

5. In the same vein, Constantin emphasizes in Stages the distinction that makes woman have her being in relationships—that is, be “relational,” or relative to another's existence—whereas man acts absolutely, expresses the absolute, is the absolute. The dichotomy explains why Kierkegaard's experimental psychologist subsumes woman under the category of “jest,” a category that by his own definition, is only “embryonic[ally] ethical” (SLW, 48).

6. In parallel fashion, Quidam, not just content with declaring in “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” that “the religious movement of infinity may not be natural to her individuality,” adds that in fact “it is not essential for a woman” (SLW, 302, 306; my emphasis). The sentiment already occurs in Fear and Trembling, 36.

7. Similarly in Prefaces, N. N., the mock eponymous Dane, equates his wife's “reasoning” with an “incantation” so irresistible in fact that it can be resisted by none—least of all by him who shares her life (P, 24).

8. Anti-Climacus, who stresses, in The Sickness unto Death, the need for the Christian to believe that “for God everything is possible,” will no doubt find it easier for woman—this selfless and confident creature who “in a decisive sense (does not possess) intellectuality”—to effect the transition from the lowest to the highest sphere (SUD, 38-39, 49 n).

9. In her compelling study, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?,” anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1974) observes that “the psychic mode associated with women seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating” (86).

10. Although Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979a) investigate the dichotomy throughout their trilogy, see most particularly the first volume, The Madwoman in the Attic, 17-31, 34, 44, 46, 48, 68, 78-79, 194, 196, 203, 219, 240, 244, 314, 321-23, 345-46.

11. The 17 December 1834 article was in response to “Defense of the Superior Origin of Woman,” the satiric picture of women drawn only a few days earlier (4 December) by P. E. Lund in the same newspaper (SV, XIII, 5-8). See Watkin (1996).

12. See also Jacques Lacan's remark concerning woman's complaint of having been excluded from the nature of things/words, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne: “Only they don't know what they are saying, which is all the difference between them and me” (Mitchell and Rose 1985, 144).

13. Far from us, however, to suggest that Kierkegaard was alone to make such claims in the nineteenth century. Our intent is not to incriminate a particular writer with respect to the woman question, but to show how his stance is typical of patriarchal strictures, how he is a product, albeit perhaps a paroxystic one, of his time, culture, and gender. As in the case quoted by Wendy Martin and retold by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar: “In the nineteenth-century this fear of the intellectual woman became so intense that the phenomenon … was recorded in medical annals. A thinking woman was considered such a breach of nature that a Harvard doctor reported during his autopsy on a Radcliffe graduate he discovered that her uterus had shrivelled to the size of a pea” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979a, 56. See Wendy Martin, “Anne Bardstreet's Poetry: A Study of Subversive Piety,” in Gilbert and Gubar 1979b, 13-31).

    Not uncharacteristically, some male Kierkegardian critics, in complicity with the fantasy which they (occasionally) try to expose, betray their vestigial sexism by glossing over this unfair treatment of women. Thus Gregor Malantschuk could, as late as 1976, congratulate Kierkegaard for having “resist[ed] the attempts to establish sexual equality in the external, secular sense” (Malantschuk, 61; my emphasis).

14. As Virginia Woolf (1929) points out in A Room of One's Own: “The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself” (57).

15. Cf. Les Voleuses de langue (The tongue snatchers), where Claudine Herrmann (1976) remarks: “With the beginning of her teen years, the female adolescent experiences limitations in her ability to acquire vocabulary. This comes not only from her being excluded from terms that have something to do with sexuality, but even from those that present an analogy—were it only a sound analogy—with such terms” (11; my translation).

16. In his November 1939-March 1940 Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Sartre (1983) expresses much the same thought, to wit, that a frankly sensuous woman “would have disconcerted and shocked me, imparting a kind of necessity to some contingent preferences manifested by the masculine structure” (345).

17. Such is, for instance, Birgit Bertung's interpretation. According to the Danish critic, over against Judge William and Hegel who defend marriage, Kierkegaard's attacks on this institution, along with his vituperations against women, represent the best [indirect] way the philosopher had at his disposal to communicate a message of equality at a time “when the official marriage ritual said that the wife should be submissive to her husband” (Bertung 1989, 16). See also Bertung 1987.

References

Bertung, Birgit. 1987. Om Kierkegaard Kvinder og Kaerlighed—en Studie i Søren Kierkegaards Kvindesyn. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel.

———, ed. 1989. Kierkegaard—Poet of Existence. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel.

Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. First issue of this edition, 1908; reprint, 1911, 1914. London: Dent and Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton.

Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Duras, Marguerite. 1980. “Smothered Creativity.” Translated by Virginia Hules. In New French Feminisms: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Fibiger, Mathilde. 1851. Tolv Breve. Edited by J. L. Heiberg. Copenhagen.

Freud, Sigmund. 1955-74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Stratchey. London: Hogarth.

Garside, Christine. 1971. “Can a Woman Be Good in the Same Way as a Man?” Dialogue 10:534-44.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979a. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.

———, eds. 1979b. Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Herrmann, Claudine. 1976. Les Voleuses de langue. Paris: Des femmes.

Howe, Leslie A. 1994. “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self.” Hypatia 9, no. 4:131-57.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1911. The Works of Henrik Ibsen, 6 vols. Edited and translated by William Archer. Boston: Scribner.

Léon, Céline, 1977. “The Validity of Judge William's Defense of Marriage.” In The Ethical Aesthetic: Essays and Perspectives on Kierkegaard's Either/Or. Edited by David Humbert. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

Mackey, Louis. 1971. Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Malantschuk, Gregor. 1980. The Controversial Kierkegaard. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, eds. 1985. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Translated by Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67-87. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Pope, Alexander. 1979. The Rape of the Lock. In The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 4th ed., 2 vols., general editor, Maynard Mack. New York: Norton.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1983. Carnets de la drôle de guerre. Paris: Gallimard.

Watkin, Julia. 1998. “Serious Jest? Kierkegaard as Young Polemicist in ‘Defense’ of Women.” In International Kierkegaard Commentary: Early Polemical Writings, edited by Robert L. Perkins. Macon: Mercer University Press.

Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Abbreviations

AN: Armed Neutrality and An Open Letter. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. (Den bevæbnede Neutralitet, written 1848-49, published 1965; “Foranledigt ved en Yttring af Dr. Rudelbach mig betræffende,” Fædrelandet, no. 26, 31 January 1851.)

CUP: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, by Johannes Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard, 1846.)

EO: Either/Or, 2 vols. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. (Enten/Eller I-II, edited by Victor Eremita, 1843.)

EPW: Early Polemical Writings. Edited and translated by Julia Watkin. Princeton University Press, 1990. (Af en endnu Levendes Papirer, 1838, and early writings from before the “authorship.”)

JP: Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 7 vols. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2, 1970; vols. 3 and 4, 1975; vols. 5-7, 1978. (From Papirer I-XIII; and Breve og Akstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, 2 vols., edited by Niels Thulstrup [København: Munksgaard], 1953-54.)

LD: Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents. Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. (Breve og Aktstykker vedrøende Søren Kierkegaard, vol. 1, edited by Niels Thulstrup.)

P: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require. Translated by William McDonald. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989. (Forord. Morskabslæsning for Enkelte Stænder efter Tid og Leilighed, by Nicolaus Notabene, 1844.)

SLW: Stages on Life's Way. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (Stadier paa Livets Vej, edited by Hilarius Bogbinder, 1845.)

SUD: The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (Sygdommen til Døden, by Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard, 1849.)

SV: Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker. 1st ed. 14 vols. Edited by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1901-6.

TDIO: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder, 1845.)

WL: Works of Love. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, 1847.)