L’Age équivoque: Marivaux and the Middle-Aged Woman

JANET WHATLEY LfAge equivoque: Marivaux and the Middle-Aged Woman In Le Cabinet du philosophe (1734), Marivaux tells the story of a rich and handsome widow of forty-five or fifty who goes tovisit a magician to find out why her suitor, a man of forty, is neglecting her. The magician shows her a mirror in which appears the image of a lovely girl of twenty - her rival, he says. Nonsense, says the widow, how could he prefer that skinnyI insipid dwarf? The magician excuses himself and produces an image of another beautiful young girl, whom the widow denounces as a rude, hard-eyed giantess. But now she is caught: for the first image was indeed that of the actual rival, and the second image is that of the widow herself as a young woman. The self-protective mechanism of illusion has cut her off from the recognition of her loss. Before showing her the images the magician had asked her age. She nervously brushed aside his question as useless. 'Pas si inutile: he replied, and continued with a remark that is perpetually obvious and perpetually troubling: 'II y a un certain milieu de la vie oil un peu plus, et un peu moins d'age font une grande difference; et ce milieu de la vie n'est pas ie meme pour les femmes que pour les hommes.'i This anecdote is not particularly remarkable in itself; but it is illuminating for that very reason - it is typical, a standard and culturally central representation of the middle-aged woman in European literature. The anecdote, obviously, has to do with illusion, with the difficulty of self-knowledge. The aging woman who considers herself still sexually eligible is the subject of the anecdote because she stands for illusion, and can therefore be a sort of model of general human illusion. Her complementary attribute, also apparent in this little story, is her vulnerability to humiliation. She is the last to know the most important truths about her situation.2 At least until very recently, there has been a proper scenario for a woman's life: she gives herself to a man when she is young; somewhere between forty and fifty, she is finished with sex. Variations from this norm are traditionally presented in an unfavourable light. To judge from the wealth of virulent satiric literature which goes back at least as far as Horace and doubtless to Hellenistic prototypes, aging female sexuality seems to carry a terrible threat.3 In contrast to the sexual charm of a young girl, a strong sexual presence in a woman no longer YQung is erotic - i.e., UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number 1 , Fa111976 MARIVAUX AND THE MIDDLE- AGED WOMAN 69 sexually complicated, problematic, vaguely disruptive. Various stereotypes have evolved to provide formulas for dealing with the anxieties associated with this presence. Baroque satirists such as Sigogne and Sorel, admittedly the extreme rather than the average in inventive hostility , portray with ghoulish exuberance the decaying or skeleton-like bodies of bawds or society ladies;" although the satire of Marivaux's time is less violent, the aging woman is still fair game.s The middle-aged virgin is a hypocrite who has withheld herself from men and allowed her desires to be perverted into malignant forms (she may, for instance, try to make a young girl follow her example): she is the duenna or the devote. Her complement, the bawd (and the one is frequently revealed to be the other), fosters disruption by helping young men seduce married women. A more refined and profound threat is that of the seductive aging beauty who, by the very complexity and evanescence of her charm, can spoil a young man for the tasks and the mate suitable to his own age - Danceny of Les Liaisons dangereuses, Meilcour of Les Egarements du ClEur et de ['esprit, Adolphe, Colette's Cheri are only a few of the many victims. (This type belongs less to stylized satire than to the novel, and is taking shape as is the genre itself in Marivaux's own time.) Versions of these various types appear with unusual frequency in the novels and journals of Marivaux. What makes them particularly...